Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League can't even be given away, what went wrong?

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League isn’t a bad game, it just didn’t make any sense. I remember being initially excited for the game when that first reveal trailer dropped, even more so when I realised it was Rocksteady Studios making it.

The Batman: Arkham trilogy was groundbreaking on several levels, and still treated as the gold-standard when it comes to adapting a superhero into a video game format.

Check out the first trailer for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League below

As time went on though I grew less enthusiastic, as the initial gameplay looked weird, the roster small, and the promise of live-service updates sounding like the same thing we’d heard time and time again.

That said, during the preview and my time reviewing it I did indeed have a decent time, but unfortunately I couldn’t fully click with what Rocksteady Studios was peddling this time around, and I certainly wasn’t alone on that either.

Now, the game is regularly on sale for less than £5, oof, and to add insult to injury it’s been free to download and keep forever via Amazon Prime Gaming and now PlayStation Plus Essential, yet no one actually wants it.

Do you have any idea how badly you’ve messed up when you can’t even give away copies of your game? With that in mind I’ve been racking my brain to think of what went wrong, and while that’s quite a worrying list I think I’ve narrowed it down to one, conclusive problem, fear.

Warner Bros Games

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League failed because it was too safe in its design, which stings even more when you remember it comes from a studio that gave us revolutionary games just years before.

Take the story for example. A rogue Justice League has been unleashed on the world, leaving villains the only ones capable of saving the day. Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, King Shark and Deadshot aren’t exactly on par with the Justice League, so it sets the stakes pretty high on how they could possibly defeat them. Rather than explore intuitive ways of exploiting the weaknesses of the heroes, or gathering other villains that could go toe-to-toe with them, the Suicide Squad merely find creative ways to shoot them instead. The Superman boss fight is about 10 minutes of shooting the Man Of Steel with gold kryptonite bullets.

Again this comes from the same studio that made Killer Croc into a distressing game of cat and mouse, and Mr Freeze into a boss that adapts to your playstyle, so I ask where was the creativity?

Warner Bros Games

Everything you do in the game is pretty much pointless anyway as it’s revealed in the DLC that they weren’t even the Justice League, just clones. This isn’t even a “huzzah, we have a chance!” moment either as most of the planet has been wiped out by this point, and Wonder Woman is a pile of ash so it’s hardly time for celebration.

Many would blame the looter-shooter genre the game is built around for this, and to an extent I agree but again it’s Rocksteady Studios behind it. Batman: Arkham Asylum took the simple beat-em-up genre and evolved it into something elegant. The freeflow combat was unprecedented and the predator encounters felt so dynamic and fun to experiment with.

Now I’m not saying a looter-shooter could achieve similar levels of creativity, but there could have been an attempt at least. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League could have probably worked with a new IP, but with familiar territory like the Arkhamverse it just felt jarring, and an overall waste of time.

Live-service games aren’t doomed to fail, Helldivers 2 is a great example of this, so it’s not the genre of the game, it’s how far the game was willing to go to tell its story and entertain. I was actually having fun during the Batman boss fight, as being on the receiving end of a predator encounter was a lovely twist on previous games. It was fun until the objective changed to “shoot the giant Nightmare Bat, like every other fight in the game. The Flash fight was “shoot the fast man when he stands still”, the Green Lantern fight was “shoot the green man with yellow paint”, and the Superman fight was “shoot a God with shiny bullets.”

Warner Bros Games

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League didn’t fail because it was a looter-shooter, or favoured a live-service format, it failed because it was creatively bankrupt. The DLC confirms this as the new characters do little to differentiate themselves from the core roster, and the additional missions and boss fights are the exact same ones we had in the base game.

For what will likely be the Arkhamverse’s last breath before a full-on reboot happens, it was a miserable disappointment, and I’m not surprised that nobody wants to play it even if it’s free.