After multiple delays, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was eventually released on February 2, 2024. However, right up to its release, the game has been smeared with controversy.
From WB Games declining to send IGN a review copy to the servers being shut down within an hour after the Early Access release, Rocksteady did its best to rescue an unpopular idea. However, as the numbers started rolling in, it was clear that their best wasn’t good enough.
Some media outlets are now comparing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to Marvel’s Avengers, another big title that failed to live up to the hype. According to SteamDB, an independent Steam data aggregator, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s peak player count 24 hours after launch was just 13,459.
Marvel’s Avengers outperformed it in that regard by pulling in 29,916 players in the first 24 hours. Both games offered an early access period with perks that included having access to the full game a few days before the official launch.
Both Marvel’s Avengers and Suicide Squad shared a lot of things in common including requiring an online connection to play. However, while the former required a one-time connection, the latter required the player to be consistently connected to the Internet. Crystal Dynamics ended all official support for Marvel’s Avengers on September 30, 2023. The game has now been delisted from all storefronts.
Of the two games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League appears to be faring more badly. Within an hour after it was launched into early access, Rocksteady pulled the servers offline after a bug led to players experiencing automatic game completion when they logged in the first time.
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To pacify Early Access players affected by the glitch, Rocksteady sent out $20 worth of in-game currency. Besides the peak concurrent player count, every other metric has been against Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
What was wrong with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League?
I think what was mostly wrong with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was bad PR. The poor reception of the game mostly boiled down to two sets of people. The first set were those who hated the idea that Rocksteady chose to kill their favorite superheroes. The second category are those who jumped on the bandwagon without waiting to experience the game.
Morgan Park of PC Gamer was one of those that didn’t give the game a chance. However, after 8 hours of playing the game, Park said, “This is not at all the high-profile trainwreck that some (even some of us) were waiting for”.
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The negative sentiments about the game based on the points I mentioned are visible when you visit the score aggregator website, Metacritic. The game has garnered an average of 70 points on PC and 62 on PS5. Those numbers will likely swing—I can’t say in which direction—in the coming days.
While Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is fun to play, the one big issue I found was how the missions quickly become repetitive. This drained the enthusiasm out of the great story. The other elephant in the room is the live service model—which doesn’t appeal to everyone. Some of these views were echoed in the reviews left on Metacritic.
“Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a great game for a certain type of player, having all the hallmarks of a fantastic single-player cinematic experience,” wrote Gamers Heroes on Metacritic who rated the game 85, its highest at the time of writing this post. “It features a great story, excellent voice acting, beautiful environments, and captivating characters, but it all feels cut short to service this live-service model. I had a lot of fun playing through, and I’ll likely dive more into the end-game grind. Still, I can’t help but ask: What if?”
Rocksteady has lined up tons of post-launch content for Suicide Squad. Will it be enough to salvage the damage that has been done to the reputation of the game? I don’t know! However, I think people should learn to experience games themselves rather than running away with another person’s opinion.
