Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is in the hands of more people than ever this week because it’s one of January’s PlayStation Plus Essential games. But is it worth revisiting or playing for the first time nearly a year after its release?
That question loomed as I saw this PS Plus news in the wake of deep discounts for Suicide Squad during the Steam Winter Sale, just as Rocksteady confirmed that its updates would end in January. At this point, Rocksteady’s latest is infamous for being a live service flop: a game that Warner Bros. hoped would be a moneymaker for years to come but instead was dead on arrival. Getting back into Suicide Squad a year later is a conflicting experience.
As my review of the game around its launch mentioned, there is good to be found in the experience, particularly in how it feels to play. Sadly, revisiting Suicide Squad reminded me of how that’s all buried under horrendous UI, dull and repetitive mission design, and lots of confusing game systems and jargon. As a curiosity, I think Suicide Squad is worth downloading, but once you play it, you’ll understand why it wasn’t the next big thing in live service gaming.
Rejoining the Squad
About 10 months had passed since I last played Suicide Squad, so I booted it up with the simple goal of unlocking Deathstroke, the final new playable character to come to the game post-launch. When I first opened the game up and tried to log in, I constantly got a “can’t reach server” message. It turns out that my PS5 let me launch the app even though I was downloading an update for it, but it still felt like a bad omen for things to come.
After the update was completed, I was greeted by a King Shark taunt. While the system is supposed to be for players who do better at missions than one of their friends, this taunt featured placeholder text for the player’s name and score. That one-two-punch of problems killed some of my motivation to dive in, and things got even more confusing once I tried to start playing.
I initially loaded my campaign save file but saw no new content. To work toward unlocking Deathstroke, I had to return to the main menu and start a new session in Episode 7 of Suicide Squad’s post-launch content. Once I loaded in, I was bombarded by several pop-ups telling me about the new additions in the episode. That’s when I remembered just how terrible the user experience is.
All of Suicide Squad’s menus are cluttered and confusing. It was hard to find simple information, like what I needed to do to obtain Deathstroke or whether or not I’d played a mission before. All of the different buffs and status effects tied to my characters also read like jargon. It was so bad I tried to look up a guide online, only to find one that was clearly AI-generated — seemingly because so few websites are still actively covering this game a year after its release.
Eventually, I reset my bearings and understood how I needed to play missions to reach Episode Level 30 to access the Brainiac fight that granted me Deathstroke. The fact that the re-onboarding process was so miserable made me better understand its failure. If a live service game is this hard to broach, even for someone who beat the main campaign like me, there’s no way it will have mass casual appeal.
The misadventures of my Suicide Squad
Once I started moving around Metropolis as Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang, I got a more positive reminder: Suicide Squad feels good to play. Movement is slick and full of distinct personalities depending on who I was playing as. In turn, it was fun to hop around battlefields, annihilating mindless hordes of enemies. This gunplay and platforming would be showered with praise in a better game. In Suicide Squad, it’s a small piece of gold buried under dirt.
Within an hour of my Suicide Squad revisit, things got repetitive. It has so few kinds of mission objectives for players to complete, and even then, almost all of those boil down to “kill enemies until the objective is complete.” I’d hoped that Episode 7’s new missions would feature more unique mission design, but most of them just asked me to kill a certain number of enemies within a time limit.
I found it odd that the newly added content all took place in Elseworlds rather than the beautiful, massive open world of Metropolis. It’s odd that I’m shuffled off to a new area rather than dropped into a Metropolis rethemed around the Episode’s Medieval vibe. Successful live service games like Fortnite don’t just add new content; they recontextualize what’s already there, too. It’s yet another way in which it’s clear that Suicide Squad never had a chance to thrive.
After a few hours of grinding, I finally unlocked the Brianiac level to unlock Deathstroke. I was disappointed when this raid-like mission swapped out the final battle for a brawl against hordes of standard enemies, considering that is all I had been doing in the grind-up to this mission and for the prior objectives of the Brianiac mission itself. After fighting those enemies for a while, Brainiac pops out but is instantly put out of his misery by Deathstroke.
That feels like a metaphor for this game as a whole.
An unceremonious death
After all that, I unlocked Deathstroke. I love his traversal abilities, which allow him to dash through the air almost endlessly and float while shooting a gun. Unfortunately, minutes into my first mission with him, a Suicide Strike on an enemy got me stuck in the level geometry. After that, I knew I didn’t want to play much more of Suicide Squad ever again.
There are still three other characters I could grind for, but they’re all original creations of Rocksteady’s. An Elseworld version of the Joker, Mrs. Freeze, and Lawless just aren’t exactly exciting compared to an established hero like Deathstroke. Doing so would require hours more of completing the same objectives I got tired of in this brief replay. Is coming back to Suicide Squad one year later worth it? Based on how I’m feeling after only a few sessions, no.
I’m grateful that it’s now possible to play offline so all of Rocksteady’s work won’t eventually be lost in a server shutdown, but poor design choices make this something I want to be preserved for preservation’s sake rather than a love of the experience. The final content update rolls out later this month, and I hope Rocksteady gets the chance to move on and make something better after this.
If you’ve never played before, you might have some fun after downloading it through PS Plus. Just know that after a few hours, you’ll have seen almost everything that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has to offer. For a game that was meant to be a live service launchpad for WB Games just one year ago, that’s damning.
