Summary
This article contains MAJOR spoilers forSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Looking back, the pre-release marketing forSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguewas a bit of a rollercoaster. WhenSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguewas first announced back in August 2020, there was disappointment thatRocksteady wasn’t working on a Superman or Justice League game, but also optimistic that Rocksteady could work wonders with co-opSuicide Squadgame. Then came the reveal thatSuicide Squadwas a looter-shooter, and then came last February’s announcement that the game was going to be live-service, a decision that essentially led to the nearly year-long delay that the game suffered.
Even now, withSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguefully out and playable, it remains one of the most controversial games in DC history. While some players are having fun withSuicide Squad’s gameplay and story, others are finding it difficult to enjoy the game’s repetitive mission structure and unpolished co-op experience. But while these are all currently valid praises and concerns, there’s one element ofSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguethat can’t be fully judged just yet, and that’s the game’s live-service integration, though its effect onSuicide Squad’s story already seems troublesome.
On the whole,Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leagueactually has a pretty compelling narrative that does a good job of encouraging players to stick around for the entirety of the game’s surprisingly short 10-hour runtime. Though it’s certainly been a controversial narrative, with many fans seemingly angry over Rocksteady’s decision tolet players kill the Justice League, that is the game’s titular promise, and it’s refreshing that a comic book video game leans into its grim premise.
Thanks to some good writing on Rocksteady’s part,Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s core hunt for the Justice League remains engaging throughout, with the Justice League being shown to pose a significant threat at all times, and many of the sequences involving them feeling suitably intense and climactic. It certainly isn’t perfect, and some ofSuicide Squad’s boss fightslet it down, but the overarching story is an enjoyable one.
But there’s one major issue that looms overSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s story, and that’s its live-service approach. By its very nature as a live-service game,Suicide Squad’s story isn’t finished by the time the credits roll. While there isn’t an inherent issue with this, it’s how Rocksteady endsSuicide Squadthat sets up a lasting problem for the game’s narrative.
At the end ofSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, players have killedThe Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, and Superman, and all that’s left is the big bad himself, Brainiac. However, before players even get to fight Brainiac, they’re told that 13 Brainiacs currently exist across the multiverse, a plot point that essentially makes the upcoming fight feel completely redundant, as players know they’re going to have to fight Brainiac another 12 times over the course of the game’s subsequent live-service seasons.
While this live-service integration cheapens the finalSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leagueboss fight massively, the issue runs far deeper. The introduction of the multiverse “Elseworlds” concept inherently gives the game’s story less meaning.
The concept of Elseworlds has a lot of potential for an ever-evolving live-service game, and yet it simultaneously implies that characters' deaths and the Squad’s actions during the main story mean very little, with multiverse versions of these dead characters presumably free to appear at any point.Suicide Squad’s first season of live-service contentdebuts another Joker, for instance, and Rocksteady could toss someone in from Lex’s parallel Earth-2 if it wanted to.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
WHERE TO PLAY
Play as the Suicide Squad to take down the World’s Greatest DC Super Heroes, The Justice League. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, is a genre-defying, action-adventure third-person shooter from Rocksteady Studios, creators of the critically acclaimed Batman: Arkham series.
