GUARDS!

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• Patch Notes·21 Jun 2025Official

  GUARDS! Update #4 - Combat Clarity

  Attention Recruits!As you may know from our previous update, we found ourselves in a situation where we couldn't actively work on GUARDS! as much as we'd like due to the ongoing console port. We are really happy that you all want more GUARDS!. We want more GUARDS! too, so over the last few months we have been hard at work trying to figure out a way we could make it happen. First, a little bit about what is in the update. One of the biggest bits of feedback we get from reviews and players is that the game is too hard. Punishingly hard. Hard games are ok, but when the players don't know what killed them or why the mission was failed, it can cause alot of frustration. With that in mind we consulted our friends over at UXIF who gave us some feedback on the game and even helped us with the implementation of the following improvements: UNBLOCKABLE ENEMYSome of the tougher enemies in the game cannot be blocked. Which always comes as a surprise to new guards the first time they get destroyed by a hammer wielding punk. Now unblockable enemies will glow red, to highlight the fact that they are more dangerous than a regular perp. ENEMY BEHIND SENSORNot the snappiest name, but it's pretty descriptive. When an enemy is behind you, a red chevron will draw on the screen to alert you to their presence. Think of it like your character hearing footsteps as someone rushes up from behind them. This feature was single-handedly responsible for saving my life multiple times in the first mission alone. It is particularly useful when a perp has managed to disguise themselves as a corpse and then tries to jump you when you've moved onto clear another room.OBJECTIVE GLOWWe now highlight import items in the world gold and icon in world space. This allows guards to spot them more easily amongst the chaos and makes it easier to make sure nothing kills / destroys them. It also solves the "last objective" issue, where you end up back tracking through the level to find the last hostage, or last cra...
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• Announcements·29 Apr 2025Official

  GUARDS! Future Updates

  Hello Recruits! People frequently ask if there will be future updates for GUARDS! and we're really happy that the game has found enough of an audience that there is demand for more medieval justice! The short answer is: "We don't know!" but read on for more info! First, some context: GUARDS! was our first project as a team, and early on in development we decided to launch as a full release as opposed to early access. The reason being we had no idea how well the game would perform, and put simply, we didn't want to make promises for future improvements that we couldn't keep! If the game didn't sell we wouldn't be able to support it longer-term and it would have persisted in early access as yet another dreaded "dead game". With that in mind we committed to releasing a version of the game we would feel comfortable calling feature complete and carry out any bug fixes and major improvements in the window immediately after launch. (I think we did about 9 or 10 updates in the month following release!) Shortly afterwards, we had the opportunity to work on a console version. This is obviously great news as it brings GUARDS! to an even larger audience, although it does mean there are a few other considerations that need to be taken into account. These being: 1) Adding new features essentially increases the amount of work required and extending how long it takes to complete the port. 2) We're obligated to keep parity between the PC and console versions (i.e. if we make something for PC it also has to be on console). Whilst this is possible, it does mean we need to be a bit more considered in how we release content. Pushing an update on steam is relatively quick and simple, but on console... not so much. Hindsight is 20:20 and if we'd have known how popular the game would be, we'd probably have done things a little differently. We have definitely learnt from the experience of launching GUARDS! and any future games we make will definitely launch into early access first! Once aga...
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• Patch Notes·15 Mar 2024Official

  UPDATE 8.2 - Removing Timers and more!

  ATTENTION GUARDS! Version 8.2 is now live and with it we have addressed the most common issue you had with the game - timers! New Features Reinforcement Waves Timers are gone! Originally we added a time limit to force players to go fast and generate more chaos, but in retrospect, it meant players having a good time in missions were unceremoniously booted back to the hub. As mentioned in our previous update post this one caught us by surprise (it didn't come up at all during our demo!), however, as it was one of the most common complaints about the game we wanted to address it ASAP! In it's place is the Reinforcement System. You can now spend as long as you like in a mission, however, the longer you take the more criminals become alerted to your presence and join the battle. This actually solves another major issue players had - the huge influx of enemies at the end of the mission. Now, enemies will filter into the battle on a fixed reinforcement schedule maintaining the pressure on the player but removing the likelihood of an insta-fail scenario. If you're still finding the game too easy or too hard - don't worry! You can change the frequency with which enemies reinforce in the host options and mission select screen. Let us know what you think! Merged Shop and Weapon Wall Players love the collection aspect of the weapon wall, but could get confused by the "discover" criteria in the store and wanted to take acquired weapons on mission without having to paying for it. To address this, we have merged the weapon wall and the armoury. Now, when you bring a weapon back from a mission, you can store it in the armoury making it available to buy from then on. Every time you buy your favourite weapon it will reduce in price, reducing the sting of losing them and making it easier to deploy with them on a mission. Training Mode Many of the issues players were experiencing were simply due to a lack of proper tutorialisaiton for many of the games mechanics. We have created a more...
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• Announcements·7 Mar 2024Official

  ADDRESSING YOUR FEEDBACK

  ATTENTION GUARDS! It has now been a little under 6 days since we pushed the big green button and released GUARDS!. In that time we have had nearly 10'000 players and over 1.5 years worth of playtime generated in less than a week. To say that we were not ready for the level of attention that GUARDS! received would be an understatement! With that level of activity comes a huge amount of feedback. Now that we have left "New and Trending" and things have calmed down, we have been able to review hundreds of individual feedback items across the Steam forums, Discord and reviews and look for patterns. Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback. When we started making this game, we decided it was important to be as receptive and reactive to feedback as possible. Since launch we have read every piece of feedback, responded appropriately and released 6 updates to address some of the key issues we saw during launch. In this update, we are going to briefly cover the most common feedback items, the timeline for addressing it and answer some of your questions about the games development. Most Common Feedback https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/44617192/42a45d10cd8de1b3ae17683c68e896ebd75776a8.jpg Looking at the data, we can see 3 issues that account for over a third of all negative comments. Combat Feel When we started planning GUARDS! we knew we couldn't compete with Mordhau, Chivalry and Vermintide in terms of combat feel so we set out to try something a little bit different. We were inspired by the fast paced, punitive combat found in games like Hotline Miami and Angerfoot and wanted to make something in that vein. Obviously combat is a pretty integral part of the game, and we need to be really careful when making changes. We have started reviewing the game to understand what specifically is causing people to become frustrated and how to address it. This is probably the issue where we will spend the most time identifying and implementing improvements. T...
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• Patch Notes·5 Mar 2024Official

  DIFFICULTY UPDATE

  ATTENTION GUARDS! Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback on the forums, discord and in the reviews. Honestly, we were not prepared for the level of interest! Largely, the reception has been really positive but we did notice a few trends starting to appear that we have been working hard to address. First - a bit of context! Since our release on Friday we have had over 9000 players. Even if we assume each player has played for just 30 minutes, that still equates to over 2 years playtime for a single person playing 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. That is alot of playtesting in a short period of time! And, without a doubt, the most common trend so far has been difficulty. This was a bit of a surprise to us, as we didn't really hear that the game was too difficult during our demo phase. So to address that we have made the following changes: - You can now increase or decrease the time limit for a mission - You can now toggle friendly fire on / off - Tuned the number of required mission objectives based on player count (i.e. less players means less to do in the time limit) - Tuned the number of enemy reinforcements based on player count (fewer players means fewer enemies) Hopefully this should make the game experience much more manageable and less frustrating now that the time pressure is off. In addition to the difficulty improvements, we have also been making daily bug fixes and improvements. The 2 most critical being: - Fix for huge Gold rewards for clients in Extract missions - Fix for some players crashing on loading District 2: Outskirts (due to a lighting issue on the level) Along with the following: - Updated server messages - no longer just "connection lost". Will now articulate the reason ( kicked from session or host quit) - Fix Invert Y being default on first play - Fix an issue where users could not equip unlockable capes - Fix an issue with Kingpin achievement unlock - Fix for an issue with shields not guarding correctly - Added region t...
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