One Year Later – An Autopsy of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League

The first glimpse anyone got of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was during the online event DC Fandome, in August of 2020. At the end of its cinematic teaser, a release date was slated, for the year 2022. This would age poorly, as the game underwent two major delays, finally releasing in February 2024. Looking back, people’s first reactions to the teaser were a huge contrast to its reception on release. Most had been eagerly anticipating another entry from the then spotless record of Rocksteady, who revolutionized the superhero genre of video games with their Arkham series.

Unfortunately, things didn’t get better from there. When the gameplay trailer reared its head a year later, people started to notice what the game was about. Each of the four playable characters mainly used guns instead of unique character-specific mechanics, which clued future players to the game’s looter shooter foundations. Even then, Rocksteady was a household name that had yet to disappoint, reassuring fans to hold their reservations at bay.

But then the co-founders of Rocksteady left the studio at the end of 2022, before the game’s release, leaving the remaining employees to pick up the pieces of a vision that was not theirs. Having just played Suicide Squad, now a year since its release, with the developers announcing they’ve stopped supporting the game, I have to say that there are good things that surprised me and lessons to be learned from bad habits in the gaming industry.

What went right?

Before delving into its cause of death, I felt it right to celebrate the game’s brief life. The idea for a Suicide Squad game was conceived as early as 2010, and then teased three years later at the end of WB Montreal’s Batman: Arkham Origins. Another three years passed before WB Montreal evidently cancelled the video game, handing the development to Rocksteady instead. Suffice it to say, the version of the game in stores right now may have had around a decade of on-and-off development, with numerous changes, with the end result being entirely different from its first conception. 

Without talking about the what if, the game the people are actually playing is a competent third-person shooter with amazingly fun traversal while carrying all the faults of a live service model. The core gameplay loop of Suicide Squad centres on getting around the open-world city of Superman’s domicile and shooting aliens to earn loot. The traversal does wonders to spice up repetitive missions and enemy types. Each of the four characters has their own way of traversing the world, such as a jetpack, grappling hook, and my personal favorite, teleporting boomerangs.

The city itself is a joy to explore, sporting a truly unique art-deco look meticulously designed by a team of artists. Like the usual Rocksteady venture, Suicide Squad has a lot of collectibles and challenges that encourage exploration but never get overwhelming, a welcome distraction between missions. There is great environmental storytelling, especially in one rare indoor mission where players are placed at the other end of Batman’s fists. But like most parts of the game, there is a lack of harmony between what the game tries to do and what it delivers. 

One example is the game’s irreverent characters. Their jokes hit at times, but there is a dissonance between them and most players who end up controlling them. They have so much disrespect for the heroes, the titular Justice League that they’re supposed to kill, but the majority of players do not. Fans have enormous respect for the DC universe that Rocksteady has built since Arkham Asylum in 2009, and moments of Suicide Squad can feel like the characters are not only spitting in the face of four previous games but also on someone’s childhood. One wonders if all or most of this was designed by a committee, mandated by out-of-touch suits who hold the money.

There is great environmental storytelling, especially in one rare indoor mission where players are placed at the other end of Batman’s fists. But like most parts of the game, there is a lack of harmony between what the game tries to do and what it delivers.

The game’s controls, on the other hand, are intuitive, and snapping from traversal straight to combat is incredibly smooth. It bears similarity to Insomniac’s Sunset Overdrive more than anything else, but another source of inspiration that would not be as obvious is that of Doom Eternal. Like previous Rocksteady Arkham games, Suicide Squad has a counter mechanic, where you can effectively repel enemy attacks. Unlike their prior games, countering enemies leaves them open for a “shield harvest,” where players can regenerate their shield bar by attacking enemies glowing blue with predetermined melee animations.

This is not dissimilar to Doom Eternal’s "glory kill" system, which emphasizes aggressive gameplay, discouraging players from running away and keeping them engaged in the action. Their similarities end there, however, as the rest of Suicide Squad’s systems do not support this core tenet. In between story missions that recycle objectives and enemies, side missions repeat the same thing, desensitizing what was once fun combat. The only incentive for players to keep going is to see the story’s ending, which, due to it being a live service game, is artificially extended through endless grinds. The cast of Suicide Squad, from its villains turned heroes to its heroes turned villains, falls flat from lack of polish and even satisfying cutscenes past the halfway point.

If only the traversal had been more motivated in the lull between missions, meaningfully integrated beyond a way to get from point A to point B, and maybe even included in linear platforming sections, it could have helped with the pacing. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t have been in line with the game’s live service model, and any detours from the reusable open-world mission design have been discarded. The game’s prolonged development time seemed dedicated to its always-online mission cycle with microtransactions and battle passes. 

This pattern has brought down many successful game franchises before, as many companies have succumbed to the attractive allure of endless growth promised by live service. A decade of development for decades of players spending money on the same game looks like a fair trade-off on paper, but that is assuming the game would reach the success of heavy hitters like Fortnite or Overwatch, ignoring the cautionary tales of so many others. In actuality, Suicide Squad’s player count ended up averaging around a hundred people, and its lifespan closer to ten months.

What went wrong?

To be fair, a lot of things were going against the game’s success. Kevin Conroy’s unfortunate passing made this his last video game voice acting role, having it carry more weight and reason for criticism than it would have otherwise. No matter what the developers did, they could never salvage the final product to satisfy fans of Conroy’s iconic portrayal, especially with the game’s reduced emphasis on story.

Apart from that, Suicide Squad was pulled into so many different directions during development, from founders and executives alike, that it was bound to be a mishmash of disjointed parts. I’m sure the developers wanted to release a game they could be proud of, and the developers tried their best to imbue the final product with some heart, but their game was stuck in a vicious cycle.

The longer a game is developed, the more money it burns, leading to a higher pressure for commercial success. Suicide Squad had followed a trend quickly going out of style, and its delays only marked its doom. Pressured by the shifting market’s ticking time bomb, and the devilish demands for mainstream appeal, the game was stripped of any identity other than the facade of recognizable IP.

Every decision that led to the game was motivated by gaining as many old and new players as possible, prioritizing their retention rather than crafting an enjoyable experience. They dangle the DC IP like a carrot on a stick, covering for the fact that their stick doesn’t stand out in an oversaturated market. Everything is worked backward in service of the live service model. The game introduces the multiverse, as an excuse for reusable boss fights and different maps. The plot is contrived, with most cutscenes there to explain away the types of game modes for grinding gear. 

Suicide Squad was pulled into so many different directions during development, from founders and executives alike, that it was bound to be a mishmash of disjointed parts.

Suicide Squad is so busy setting up its endgame that it falls from its back-heavy weight. It relies on the faith that people will buy it on release, making its budget back to produce new updates, and practicing the too-common habit of “fixing things in post.” Like its Hollywood counterpart of failed movie franchises, Suicide Squad’s commercial failure means that the future plans it set up will never be fulfilled, and what all the behind-the-scenes hard work amounted to was a “promise.”

There has been a trail of bodies with this same cause of death before. BioWare's Anthem followed up successive single-player action RPGs with a multiplayer-only bomb after almost a decade in development. Arkane’s Redfall followed critically acclaimed immersive sims with a bug-infested multiplayer looter shooter. Suicide Squad is just one of many recent victims. This is a trend, a Modus Operandi of the serial killer called corporate greed. Nothing about this case is new, neither the type of game nor its failure. 

But with Rocksteady steadily altering its course, encouraged to go back to its roots of single-player storytelling, maybe the future of AAA video games is starting to look bright after all, as companies learn the hard way that gambling on trends rarely bears fruit. With Warner Bros. reportedly losing 200 million US dollars from their video games division, maybe the only thing Suicide Squad killed is the future of live service games.

What could have been?

The name “Suicide Squad” presents a unique opportunity for adaptation from paper to controllable characters. The idea of an expendable team that you or your friends can control, each member having an equal chance to die before the credits roll, is ripe for edge-of-your-seat tension. It is, by and large, a great premise for a video game, particularly a multiplayer one.

Regrettably, what we got instead were interchangeable one-dimensional characters with different colored firearms. To put salt in the wound, the CCO of DC at the time, Geoff Johns, spoke in 2012 about the then-upcoming game, commenting on the storytelling potential of lead characters permanently dying. Alas, that was a time before live service became the titan that it has been for years. And now, that ingenious concept runs opposite to a game that’s supposed to last forever, meaning that the whole premise of the title isn’t even remotely utilized in the final product.

If the game was either a multiplayer battle royale or a linear single-player story, it could have a chance at translating the core idea of the IP. But to have it both ways means that the game wasn't faithful to the source material and never needed the expensive sheen of its IP in the first place, other than to reach a larger audience, which it ended up alienating either way. 

It is worth noting that the developers spent a large part of their careers and years of their lives making this game. Suicide Squad was most likely in development before the first appearance of a battle royale game and around when Bungie’s Destiny became popular. It’s important to look at its development within that context, as Rocksteady wouldn’t have been able to respond to the failure of other live service disasters, like Crystal Dynamics’s Avengers, with enough time.

With the writing on the wall for Suicide Squad’s fate – even before the game hit the market – Rocksteady’s founders jumped ship, leaving their brainchild in the oven midway through production. So the team was left to adopt and raise a baby that was not theirs. They were not even informed that they were going to be making a live service game when they were hired by the company. By the time the final product reached the Steam store page, there was no love left, which is bad news for a live service game that requires constant content to be churned out.

In game development, chasing trends sometimes means you’ll find it already dead of old age when you catch up to it. Releasing a $70 live service game while the genre is on its last legs ensured Rocksteady’s game would be dead on arrival. Instead of a breath of fresh air, Suicide Squad is now just the most recent victim buried under many different Steam categories, unsure of its identity, constantly on sale.