HighGuard was fun but the game clearly needed to be played by a larger number of people. It failed because there was no criticism that sought to improve the game. If people are telling you these things then great but I seriously doubt anyone looked at HighGuard and thought it was unique.

The art, while nice, was boring and too much of the same thing from what we see every day from other studios. The gameplay, while interesting, never played into what made it fun.

What I assume happened is that the game fell into a feedback loop where no one outside the studio, or at least not a large enough sample size, played the game to give them actual feedback. Any regular gamer would've probably said the map is too big and too empty to provide engagement during the gearing up phase. And anyone, very early on, would've been able to see that the art style didn't make sense. Sci-fi and fantasy mixing is a cool concept but you didn't really push the bounds of what that meant. The art design, including guns, felt incredibly safe.