I remember when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League‘s reveal trailer dropped. I remember how excited my friends and I were to play a co-op game from Rocksteady, the legendary developers of the Arkham franchise. Over the coming months and years filled with delays and production problems, hype turned to skepticism. After the February 2023 State of Play showcase shared a first look at Suicide Squad’s gameplay, almost everyone was sure this would be Rocksteady’s fall from grace, myself included.
I couldn’t tell you if naive hope or morbid curiosity led me to buy Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Maybe my love for Rocksteady clouded my judgment. Maybe I wasn’t willing to accept reality.
Whatever the case may be, after over 40 hours with Suicide Squad, I can say without a doubt (though not without heartbreak) that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the most soulless live service game I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing. It is easily the worst title Rocksteady has ever released and a massive disappointment on all fronts.
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A Fate Worse Than Death
Suicide Squad starts out with a simple premise. Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang get recruited by Amanda Waller to kill the Justice League. The strongest heroes on Earth are now under the control of Brainiac. Thanks to Brainiac’s mind control, the team’s new goal is to destroy the world they swore to protect.
With the best heroes out of the running, the screwup supervillains are next in line to save the day or die trying. It’s an interesting premise that raises so many exciting prospects for storytelling. The first hour or so is a great time and does a great job setting up the story.
It’s just a shame that after you pick up the controller, all the enjoyment dissipates instantly. Suicide Squad wastes no time draining the fun from the experience. Nothing’s more telling when your game is only fun when you’re not playing.
What little enjoyment the story provides is short-lived. The narrative quality falls off a cliff when the team starts fighting the Justice League. Nothing makes sense from then on, like Rocksteady had to change their plans to fit the looter-shooter subgenre, and they only had a few days to do so.
How do you think this team of unique supervillains takes out such varied and powerful heroes? Whatever you thought up, strike that. It’s far less creative. The answer is guns.
The Fastest Man Alive, Barry Allen? They kill him with guns. A man so fast he can turn back time done in by an AK47. I call bullshit.
How about the Green Lantern? They shoot his constructs and then kill him with a pistol. The Man of Steel? He gets gunned down after uttering a total of five lines of dialogue the entire game.
The list goes on and on, with each death making less sense than the last. The game’s structure directly opposes the narrative in ways that can’t be overlooked.
Laziest Live Service Ever
What makes Suicide Squad: Killer the Justice League such a heartbreaking tale is that hopeful start. You can tell that Rocksteady had an exciting narrative vision here. The only issue is that Warner Bros. (WB) can’t make a live service game with a straightforward narrative title. So, instead of getting the creative game Rocksteady wanted to make, we get a looter-shooter that checks all of WB’s boxes to meet their money-grubbing demands.
All the worst trends of live services are here, like a dysfunctional and depressing family gathering. Half a dozen different currencies? Check. Dull and lifeless hub areas to pick up uninteresting daily missions? They’re here in spades. Boring and drawn-out missions that have you slaying hordes of samey enemies? They’re the icing on this shitcake catastrophe.
What types of missions can you expect in Kill the Justice League? You have Data Shard Deposit Missions, where you deliver items off dead enemies. There are everyone’s favorite escort missions that not only appear frequently in the main story, but also last about 20 minutes.
Next are civilian rescue missions, where you save and escort civilians to evac stations. Lastly, there’s the defend the objective missions, where you guard locations for about ten minutes.
The missions became so agonizing and tedious that I fell asleep, controller in hand, more times than I can remember. It felt like a unique and unusual torture method, the likes of which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
It’s not only the gameplay that gets crushed by this terrible business model. Every exciting story beat gets derailed thanks to unbearable level grinding or weapon farming for missions. You’ll spend hours wishing you could see what happens in the story instead of shooting stupid purple goo. And it’ll likely end up like my playthrough. All that work for an ugly sniper rifle that sucks ass.
The game is so blatantly bland and benign that even the characters make fun of the terrible level design, pointless grinds, and fetch quests between missions. It’s no doubt a jab at the WB heads who made Rocksteady bastardize their baby.
Another hint that the team didn’t care to feed the live service dumpster fire is the inclusion of some of the most uninspired paid skins and cosmetics I’ve ever seen in a live service. $10 for these skins? Are you out of your mind?
Thankfully, there are a few cosmetics you can unlock in-game for playing traversal challenges, and they’re all better than the paid options, so you won’t even feel tempted to buy these garbage skins.
That won’t stop WB from pushing their currency on you multiple times during the game, as I’ve been shown the breakdown of premium currency more than I care to remember.
Embarrassing Enemy Variety
With the world, tasks, and story all being trash, are the enemies at least enticing in Suicide Squad? Hell no. There are only half a dozen baddies to fight in Kill the Justice League. First up, we have humanoid enemies covered in purple goo with guns for hands.
There’s walking blobs of purple goop called Terminauts. These enemies don’t even attack, they just walk around on the ground.
Next up, there are machines taken over by purple goop. Tanks, helicopters, and railguns with giant glowing bubbles on their backs. Noticing a trend here? These enemy choices are the laziest, most uninteresting enemy types I have ever seen in a live service. Even life services I don’t care for, like Destiny, have a great list of distinct enemies and factions to battle against. There’s nothing like that here.
The closest you’ll get to the enemy variety in Kill the Justice is the Infused Enemies, which copy the powers of the Flash and Batman (considering Batman has no powers, these are a waste even to design).
The only other unique enemies are the bosses, which are laughable and disappointing in their design and execution. The final boss, for example, is a reskin of the Flash boss fight. You can’t make this shit up. The game is genuinely that lackluster.
Punishing Experimentation
One of the most frustrating aspects of Suicide Squad is its aversion to experimentation with its characters. With four distinct characters that all play so differently, you’d think the game would want its players to swap between them and give them a try. You’d be wrong.
Unless you want to grind bland side quests repeatedly, the character you use for the main missions will undoubtedly pass up others in the level, so you’ll get stuck with one about halfway through the game. I played as Deadshot, and while I wanted to swap to Boomerang and King Shark, I couldn’t be bothered with another three hours of grinding.
The game seems to know this would happen, as Psych Up missions offer boosts for certain characters, but it’s never enough to keep pace. Why the cast even has levels to begin with is a mystery to me.
Agonizing Endgame and Loot System
The game’s quality somehow continues to plummet as time goes on. Endgame content is even worse than in Marvel’s Avengers, with a total of six mission types to repeat endlessly in the pursuit of slightly different weapons.
Even though each member of the Suicide Squad uses guns exclusively, the game offers the worst selection of loot I’ve ever seen in a looter shooter. In my dozens of hours with the game, I only found a handful of exotic or, in this game’s case, “Infamy” weapons that had unique effects.
While some of these guns were interesting, like the Black Hand guns setting enemies on fire when three or more got hit, they weren’t worth the ten-hour grind I went through to get a total of three of them.
To earn more of these weapons, you must repeatedly tackle those awful escort and rescue missions at higher difficulty levels, with some weapons locked behind the highest tiers of this intolerable garbage. The same ones you did in the story, only in slightly different locations and with an orange tint.
Even after tackling dozens of these torturous missions, I can count the amount of Infamy and Legendary weapons I got during my playthrough on one hand. That is unacceptable for any looter-shooter, let alone a live service looter shooter.
Another strange design decision is that each character can use only three of the four weapon types. Why? Canonically, Deadshot is a master assassin that uses all manner of guns to kill, but can’t use miniguns here? Okay, then. King Shark can barrel through enemies with a minigun but a pistol is above his skillset? Sure, buddy.
Imagine if Borderlands didn’t let players use certain weapons depending on their class. Limiting players’ loot choices in a game centered around guns makes no sense. It worsens the experience no matter how you look at it.
It’ll Get Better (In 3-6 Months)
After all the awful and agonizing mechanics I saw in Suicide Squad, nothing made me as angry as the final cutscene. If you’re looking for a conclusion to the story after 30 hours, too fucking bad. Suicide Squad does a bait-and-switch where players won’t see the true ending unless they participate in the season pass content. Which isn’t free.
Fuck developers and studios that think they can get away with selling the true ending or basic functions as separate purchases. That will never be acceptable, and I condemn anyone who tries that shady shit.
Rocksteady says the fight will conclude later on in the year, but I doubt anyone will be around to care by the time new characters and story content are here. Not even a month after its launch, the number of activate players for Suicide Squad on Steam has already dipped down to the hundreds, a massive decrease from its all-time peak of 12.7k.
The Silver Linings
Though the game is terrible, Suicide Squad has some bright spots. The voice acting, music, and character animations are all strong, with several performances being laugh-out-loud funny. King Shark and Captain Boomerang, specifically were a riot with great line delivery and comedic timing. It’s just a shame that they’re surrounded by the shit pie that is this game.
The incredible facial animations are another positive sure to get buried in this monstrosity. My favorite was Deadshot walking through the open world, talking about his daughter, making a sly smile at her for those to see if you panned the camera on his face. It’s moments like this that break my heart because there are so many talented people on staff being choked out by moronic and clueless studio heads.
The Verdict
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a cookie-cutter live service that feels like a chore to play thanks to bloated and repetitive missions, half-baked objectives, and an uninspired story that stops trying halfway through. Outside of solid animations and voice acting, there’s little to enjoy in this forgettable title from WB. It’s a bland experience that’s mediocre at best and a grueling slog at its worst. With so little soul here, I doubt people will remember it well enough to put it on their ‘Worst Games of 2024’ lists.
Awful
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Unique, intuitive traversal system | A half-cooked and underwhelming story |
Four characters that feel distinct and have engaging toolkits | Uninspired and repetitive mission design |
Stellar voice acting | Disappointing boss battles |
Impressive graphics and animations | The few enemy types are boring and samey |
Lack of exciting loot and unique weapons. | |
Pathetic endgame content | |
Locking the true ending behind a season pass |
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