Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League had a rough launch. While the gorgeous looter shooter had a fun narrative with engaging story content and a strong gameplay framework, extremely repetitive mission design and a biblical flood of technical issues pushed it down into the mud.
While we were quite positive in our Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League review, it’s worth noting that reviews are one writer’s opinion. As someone who has stuck with Rocksteady’s game for the promise of strong post-launch content, I’ve been thoroughly let down by Kill the Justice League’s horrid Season One release.
Season One does come with the first new character for Rocksteady’s live service looter shooter: The Joker. A younger, multiverse incarnation of the iconic Batman villain (again, another Batman villain despite being a Justice League game), this new version is a fresh take on the character that’s suited to a younger crowd.
With this said, The Joker is an extremely fun character to play as with expressive animations and some rapid traversal mechanics featuring a rocket-propelled umbrella. A frenetic mix of King Shark and Deadshot’s movement abilities, The Joker is heaps of fun to control around the game’s wide-open maps as you drop bombs on hordes of foes.
However, unlocking the new character is not so fun. After tens of hours of playing Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, you have to fight through around 18-20 missions to unlock the new character. First, you have to fight to get your seasonal “Fear” ranking up to level 35 before you can even attempt to recruit the new character. Of course, you can also buy access to the game if you want to.
Unfortunately, leveling up your Fear ranking requires you to play through most of the same repetitive, regurgitated mission design you’ve already spent dozens of hours playing. Suicide Squad’s core gameplay loop is fun, but its uninspired, recycled missions have been stretched thin to the point of rapture.
Even the new missions introduced in Suicide Squad Season One are tired and tested. Strongholds are just the big gun turret fights you can only do a few times in the main game, and all of the new Joker missions simply task you with killing a set number of enemies. Of course, you’ve already killed thousands upon thousands of these enemies before.
This isn’t even the worst part about Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League’s first season. The worst part is a complete lack of story missions outside of the atrocious Brainiac boss fight. You get two cutscenes for rescuing Joker, no more. For a game that was literally held together by its character interactions in cutscenes, the total absence of cinematic story missions is a shocking awakening for those who have stuck with the game post-launch.
Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League does technically have more content with the release of Season One. However, there’s simply more to do, not more to experience. You can now fight a wave of enemies elsewhere, not in a new way. You can now play as The Joker, but not get to see their interactions with the rest of your crew. You can now fight a new version of Braniac, but the boss fight sucks. It’s a repeat of the Green Lantern boss with more rigid stages that make even the easiest difficulty take ages as the AI struggles to remember what it’s supposed to be doing.
It’s a damn shame. Suicide Squad has always looked nice and played well, but the game’s mission designers have failed in delivering fun, inventive ways to stretch its core mechanics. There's no incentive to play certain missions as certain squad combinations; characters don’t play off each other in a gameplay sense, and missions don’t incentivise anything other than bigger damage against stronger enemies.
If this is what post-launch is for Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, there’s no future. With less players than the original Watch Dogs, Rocksteady’s live service game isn’t in a state where it can fail, and it really is failing. So much could be done with these intensely fun mechanics, but nothing is.