GUARDS!

Most co-op brawlers put you on the side of the heroes. GUARDS! puts you and up to fifteen friends in the "underfunded and over-zealous steel boots" of the City Watch instead, kicking down doors and dispensing rough justice — with barrels, planks, and whatever else is lying around — on the gang-controlled streets of New Alestead. It's a genuinely funny, distinctive angle on the co-op brawler formula, and reviewers consistently credit it as the game's strongest asset. It's also, according to a large and specific share of that same review sample, an angle badly let down by the technical foundation underneath it — most seriously, by multiplayer networking that reviewers describe in strikingly consistent, alarmed terms.

A premise that lands

The comedic framing does real work here. Three rival factions — the Fogtoof Boyz, an orc gang built around violence and property destruction; the Commission, a syndicate of rogue merchants; and the Corpse Cult, a religious group turning followers into zombies — give New Alestead more personality than a generic beat-em-up backdrop usually offers, and reviewers who enjoy the game tend to describe that personality specifically rather than talking around it. The physics-driven, improvised-weapon combat and the game's willingness to let a mission go sideways into chaos are cited as the fun core underneath everything else, and at least one player explicitly frames the whole experience as "would be more fun with friends, IF it got a good polishing" — a framing that turns up again and again across the sample: real affection for the idea, tempered hard by everything built around it.

The networking problem dominates the conversation

If there's one specific, technical complaint that defines this review sample, it's connection quality. "Net code is terrible," one reviewer writes bluntly; another, more detailed, describes four players "all on fiber internet" where "only the host had no issues" — a strong signal this isn't a case of individual players on bad connections, but a structural networking problem. Reports of players teleporting around the map, revives silently failing to register, and sessions becoming what one reviewer calls "unplayable" recur independently across reviewers with wildly different overall opinions of the game. One player who waited months hoping for a fix states directly: "unless you're a solo player looking for a challenge, I would avoid this game" — a striking thing to say about a game explicitly built around 16-player co-op as its headline feature.

Solo play is close to a different, harder game

That same reviewer's caveat points to a second, related problem: several reviewers describe the game as barely functional playing alone, independent of the networking issues. Certain enemies are reported to have one-shot or stunlock capability that ignores the player's equipped gear entirely — one reviewer states this happens "even after getting a full set of guard armor at full health," calling it a mechanic that "fully invalidates any grinding you've just did." Another proposes a specific, reasonable fix the game doesn't currently have: scaling enemy difficulty down when playing with fewer players, rather than applying the same enemy density and aggression regardless of party size. Steam's own achievement data supports how steep this gets in practice — while over 90% of players complete an early first-patrol milestone, achievements tied to clearing full districts or rescuing larger numbers of hostages sit at roughly 0.2% to 0.3% completion, an unusually severe cliff even for a genre that typically loses most of its audience before full completion.

A specific, serious accessibility miss

One complaint in the sample deserves attention on its own terms rather than folding into general polish criticism: multiple reviewers flag a full-screen red flash effect that triggers on every hit taken as a genuine photosensitivity hazard. "It is so damn flashy (I am epileptic)," one reviewer writes, going on to note the effect "caused headaches for my non-epileptic friends" as well. This is a specific, checkable, and serious complaint rather than a stylistic preference, and it's notable that it appears to have gone unaddressed through the review sample available at the time of this check — a straightforward fix (a toggle or reduced-flash option) that other games in this genre commonly ship as standard.

Real support, with a long, misleading silence in the middle

This review can settle one specific dispute in the sample directly using the developer's own public record. Several reviewers describe the game as effectively abandoned — "they only updated the game a single time and then left it," one writes — while at least one other reviewer pushes back, having checked the game's Discord and found the developer actively working on a console port, concluding "let 'em cook." Steam's partner-events feed supports a more precise, more interesting version of both claims: WYLDERZONE shipped daily patches for the first three days after the 1 March 2024 launch, plus a difficulty rework and a patch removing the mission timers several early reviewers specifically criticised — real, responsive early support. Then the feed goes quiet for roughly fourteen months, before renewed activity resumes in April and June 2025, including an update explicitly titled "Combat Clarity" that appears to respond directly to reviewer requests for better-telegraphed enemy attacks. The honest read is that both camps of reviewers were right about something true: there was a long, real silence, and it did eventually end with the developer returning to exactly the kind of fix players were asking for.

Mission design draws its own separate complaints

Beyond the headline technical issues, several reviewers describe the actual mission structure as more linear and repetitive than the store page's chaotic co-op pitch suggests — levels that amount to clearing a corridor of enemies, retrieving something, then walking the same corridor back to the start. One reviewer calls this "not bad at first" but notes it becomes a real drag once "half the mission is spent running back the way you came and then back again." This is a more conventional design complaint than the networking or balance issues, but it's specific enough, and repeated by enough different reviewers, to be worth a buyer's attention alongside the bigger structural problems.

Final verdict

GUARDS! has a joke worth telling — a whole squad of corrupt, trigger-happy City Watch guards smashing through a gang-controlled fantasy city with whatever's not nailed down — and the developer's own patch history shows real, if inconsistent, commitment to supporting it, both immediately at launch and again over a year later. But the review sample is remarkably consistent about where the game currently falls short: networking reliable enough to trust with sixteen players simply isn't there yet for a lot of its audience, solo play is punishing in ways that feel unbalanced rather than just difficult, and a flashing hit-effect is a real, fixable accessibility problem that shouldn't still be present. If the 2025 update cycle has meaningfully improved the netcode since the reviews sampled here, this could be a considerably better recommendation than its Mixed rating suggests — check the most recent reviews before buying, and only go in with a full group who can tolerate some real rough edges for a premise worth the trouble.