Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice Leaguehasn’t been well-received. Its reviews are middling, its gameplay accused of being repetitive and uninspired, and fans of the Arkham games have been left scratching their heads, wondering how the same studio that brought them one of the best superhero trilogies ever could create something that falls so far short of their prior Batman standards.
The answer is simple. The idea for Kill The Justice League was dreamt up the better part of a decade ago. A time when every studio saw gold in the live service hills. But since then the genre has become so saturated that all the gold has been sapped. If you didn’t grab a seat at the live service table five or six years ago, you missed out. That realization was likely made byRocksteadytoo late into development to do anything about it, so it powered through and hoped for the best. Sadly, powering through hasn’t panned out all that well.
It won’t have come as a surprise to Rocksteady that people are upset about its Arkham follow-up. There’s also no escaping the Suicide Squad/Marvel’s Avengerscomparisons, the latter’s live service swing missing the mark more than three years ago. However, just like Avengers, I appear to be in the minority. I quite liked playing as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and I’m really enjoying my time with Task Force X. The visuals are fantastic, getting to grips with the characters' move sets has been fun, and above all else, the story, albeit short, has pulled me in.
It’s that last point that makes me hopeful Rocksteady hasn’t left it too late to learn the right lessons from Marvel’s Avengers and make sure there’s a future for its own comic book team. The story in Avengers' base game was pretty good too. However, it became very apparent that despite a long-standing plan to build on that via new characters, very little thought had gone into where that story might go next.Crystal Dynamicswanted you to keep coming back to see and use its new characters, but it didn’t supply much story to go along with them. Keep fighting AIM and battling its bots with no inclination as to where this all might be headed.
It’s what happened to Marvel’s Avengers post-launch that Rocksteady can still learn from. We already know that there will be more characters coming to Kill The Justice League,starting with a version of Jokerthat travels to the Arkhamverse from an alternate universe. Rather than simply giving players a new character to get to grips with and new outfits and weapons to unlock, Joker’s arrival should build on the story so far.
If Joker is nothing more than a new character with a slightly different way to traverse rooftops, killing faceless purple baddies as he goes, then Kill The Justice League is destined to go the same way as Marvel’s Avengers. Probably a lot faster, too. Harley Quinn might have mainstream appeal, but Captain Boomerang and King Shark don’t have the same pulling power as Iron Man and Thor.
The live service elements that are off-putting to so many are already entrenched in Kill The Justice League to the point that there’s no getting rid of them. That doesn’t mean they have to ruin your experience with the game, though. I have no interest in grinding for a melee weapon that does 25 percent more damage but incurs an additional second of cooldown. Once I’ve completed the story, I will not play Suicide Squad again until Joker arrives. If that chapter is as compelling as I know it can be, the game will keep me coming back for more every time new story content drops.
This might be a little much to ask, but Rocksteady has a chance to redefine what people think when they hear “live service.” Right now the term conjures ideas of pumping money into a game to unlock cosmetic items, or grinding for hours and getting a fancy hat in return. In reality, a live service game is one that is added to over time. Instead of those additions being unimaginative weapons no one cares about, Suicide Squad’s can effectively be new episodes. A TV show in video game form that players flock back to every few months when the story continues.
It’s not as if Rocksteady doesn’t know how to tell a good superhero story. Sure, a lot of the people who worked on the Arkham games have moved on, but the DNA of those games remains a part of the studio. Its devs know how to tell stories, and they have decades of characters and stories to pull from thanks toDC. I’ve not lost hope in Suicide Squad yet, and while a pivot from whatever the plan was to an episodic live service model is probably wishful thinking, I hope that Rocksteady didn’t learn from Marvel’s Avengers' mistakes before it was too late to do anything about it.
