I absolutely do not recommend: Suicide Squad - Kill the Justice League (Review)

this video is brought to you by Channel partner 4 years running Squarespace stick around to learn more about them as well as a special offer they're making available through my Channel all right Suicide Squad kill the Justice League I want to start by saying that a lot of the commentary around this game suggests that it's phoned in lazy uninspired unoriginal Etc I do not agree with that in fact one of the things that I respect about this game is the fact that there's actually quite a bit of ambition and originality here and there was a fearlessness with which rock approached this whole thing on a narrative level the phrase Kill Your Darlings has never been more apt and the events of this game will elicit a response from you one way or the other like if you haven't seen spoilers to this point you might try to guess how the story plays out and where it ends but you would be wrong that doesn't make the story good but it does make it Stark and in an era where superhero stories often feel a little played out across most forms of mass media the ambition to tell a stark story is commendable similarly on the gameplay front there's never been a gameplay model quite like this one you can look at Sunset Overdrive or Crackdown as being the closest points of comparison but there's still a great distance between those games and this the combination of traversal guns melee attacks abilities and afflictions all augmented by passive bonuses provided by your skill tree and some active gameplay modifiers applied by your gear it's genuinely new if you start digging into things like itemization design you can see that it's also quite robust even at launch Suicide Squad is providing significantly more BuildCraft options than 95% of other looters at their launch and don't even get me started on this game's presentation cuz holy when it comes to that stuff Suicide Squad is legitimately industry leading in many aspects character designs facial animations the quality of The Voice work the cut scene Direction the art design of the precious few internal spaces we get to enjoy all of this is a straight 10 and I think that even the most strident critics of this game are willing to acknowledge that so that's why I don't think Suicide Squad kill the Justice League is lazy or uninspired or unambitious I don't think Rocksteady sat on their hands for s or 8 years turned around last minute and farted out something Half Baked and broken rather I think Rocksteady made some very early decisions that were the wrong decisions and after that the studio then needed to figure out a way to make these things work and I think that in almost every core aspect they failed to do that the decision to kill the Justice League that is a decision that rock city would have made very early on this project and when we talk about boss encounters and narrative I don't think anyone can disagree that Rocksteady absolutely failed categorically to make that work the decision for all combat to be centered on guns instead of combat kits unique to each anti-hero that immediately brings with it a great risk of homogenization across the different characters like they'd all feel too similar to play Rock Steady did not manage to solve this problem and the result is that while traversal options are distinct the overall feel of playing each character is nowhere as distinct as it needs to be especially given that these are existing anti-heroes with established combat Styles the decision to make this game a live service with a campaign aiming to appeal to both single player focused Arkham fans and the longtail focus looter shooter crowd that's a big decision that often results in half-baked campaigns and undercooked end games did Rock Steady managed to sidestep either of these issues absolutely not campaign mission design is so B that it's almost a parody and the end game is woefully anemic for each of these things I just listed rocksteady's developers have done their absolute best to work within these constraints and some of what they produced is fantastic you can point to the campaign's exceptional presentation and facial animations but it doesn't change the fact that the boss fight against Superman involves shooting him with a minigun you can point to the deep and flexible itemization system supporting combat but it doesn't change the fact that combat is a tragic mess of half bait Gunplay shallow melee and nausea inducing camera work and visual noise you can point to some of the better aspects of the end game like the world tier challenges or the event modifiers but it doesn't change the fact that the core endgame is running the same three boring ass open World style missions over and over and over again Rock cities developers have done a pretty remarkable job with the brief that was handed to them but the bottom line is that the people who laid down the foundations for this game laid down the wrong foundations it's resulted in a deeply compromised launch product and I strongly suspect that these shaky foundations will undermine the game's live service potential as well like I said in my preview I just can't see how this works as a life service and given that nearly a decade of rocksteady's time and potential has been spent on this thing it just seems like a tragic waste we're all villains here with yourself far what the hell of you s it's a bloody war zone out here we found evil Batman why don't you just mail me the bullet all right so we're going to talk about the story and I'm actually going to divide this section in two the first part will have some minor spoilers nothing major the second part we'll do full spoilers but I'm going to have a Tim stamp warning for that bit so you can just jump ahead if you don't want any of that stuff spoiled I've also had to borrow some gameplay footage from across the internet as I lost some of my campaign footage due to a recording issue thank you to those whose footage I stole I will credit those people in the top right hand corner when I use their stuff Suicide Squad kill the Justice League is exactly what it says on the tin it's a story about the suicide squad trying to kill the Justice League why do you want to kill them well setting aside the fact that the suicide squad are all villains who have plenty of beef with the Justice League's members those members have also been brainwashed by Brainiac an extraterrestrial baddy who's arrived to conquer Earth and terraform it The Suicide Squad members Harley Quinn Deadshot Captain Boomerang and king shark are all freed from prison that's good but they have a bomb in their head that's bad working under the imposing Commander Waller they need to come up with a way to kill the Justice League members and Save the world before Walla loses her patience and Pops their heads like party balloons so it's a cool setup right and as I said in my preview the setup is genuinely excellent you arrive at the Hall of Justice where you can gaze in awe at Holograms and statues of these Heroes you get to look at all of their stuff you can hear them spout inspiring backstory and Exposition it's cool you are conditioned in these moments to rever these Heroes as Gods because they kind of are and that not only makes them very imposing narrative forces but it also makes the actual job of Killing Them seem all but impossible for a group of anti-heroes whose Arsenal consists of oversized mallets boomerangs and teeth the opening hours of Suicide Squad kill the Justice League are absolutely the high point for the entire game because the setup and construction for this story is expertly handled you really can't fault it with your early interactions with Wonder Woman The Flash Green Lantern and Batman being Pitch Perfect introductions you were just like hell yeah man this rules can't wait to see where this goes sadly it doesn't go well but we'll get to that part later first we have to recognize the the extraordinary presentation Factor here these character designs are incredible The Suicide Squad members have never looked better I've never seen a better rendition of Wonder Woman anywhere that includes the movies Batman's suit looks sick as hell they all just look fantastic and they're brought to life as never before thanks to what may well be the best facial animation work I've seen in a video game I mean we're really splitting hairs here between the naughty dog stuff and Guardians of the Galaxy and this bottom line it is incredible as a technical feat each of these character design and animations are remarkable shout out to The Voice work as well there are no bad performances in this game just none all of them are fantastic Tyra strong as Harley Quinn man every time she opens her mouth I'm like please do not stop talking Deborah Wilson plays Commander Waller and Wilson does not know how to turn in a bad performance Daniel lepine plays Captain Boomerang and look there are a few moments in the script where they lean a little too hard into some Aussie slang that we haven't used for quite a while now but overall he does a great job of making it work Samoa Joe plays king shark and Nows every line the only problem being that he's kind of just draxx 2.0 and having seen so much of draxx over the past decade it does take the edge of his character a little bit and finally the late great Kevin Conroy does a remarkable job as always albeit within the constraints of a script that I don't know it doesn't really let him shine but we'll talk about that later so all of this stuff works really well in fact some of it is top shelf the problem is when you start getting into the back half of the game where things utterly collapse Side characters are a good example you meet them early on and it's kind of cool because you're like hey the penguin he's in Metropolis wonder what this Wy old bird has install for us this time the answer absolutely nothing he has an intro Mission and after that he is nothing but a vendor that hands out generic open world missions and lets you craft guns that is it poison ivy is in this game and that is a minor spoiler but she's not the sultry seductress she often is depicted as here she's a child like literally a 6-year-old and that could be interesting I guess but again she just becomes another vendor NPC you've essentially taken one of the most interesting Batman villains and removed her defining personality trade without adding anything back to replace it by Far and Away the biggest issue though is the inconsistent morality of the heroes and anti-heroes and the unreconciled Power Balance between the suicide squad and the Justice League and to make that point I really do need to go into Major Spoilers so there's a time stamp on screen now there's also a chapter in the YouTube video player if if you don't want any spoilers just skip this section because I'm now about to discuss some of the biggest moments in the game okay so the suicide squad they're bad guys right well sort of they're more like anti-heroes depending on which day you catch them and certainly here in this game they are meant to be less sociopathic less malevolent you see that in their budding camaraderie as a team but also in their concern for protecting innocent civilians for example there's also just a general absence of them saying or doing evil up which kind of makes them seem more like Heroes than anti-heroes except when they all of a sudden turn around and do some really up so for example when you kill the Flash and then Captain Boomerang proceeds to piss on his corpse so it's like okay look I'm not Pearl clutching here I'm actually okay with this as a concept but have we built that character up to the point where that makes sense I don't think so we know that Boomerang doesn't really like flash like it kind of hates him but is he such a grub that he'd piss on his corpse maybe but to me this moment just felt really out of place Batman's death has been discussed a lot I do not agree with the commentary that his death is somehow disrespectful to Kevin Conroy's memory nor do I agree that Batman is so sacred a character that he can't be killed but I do agree that his death was very badly handled Harley Quinn executes him in Cold Blood on a park bench while Batman HS patronizing abuse at her he's just a mind-controlled puppet at that point and Harley essentially puts him out of his misery Harley's had her fair share of experience with the clinically insane and mentally broken and for her to just Dome Batman like that in the middle of a park so as to attract Superman's attention I don't know man it just feels like Rocksteady could have arrived at A better ending point for Batman but also for Harley Quinn since her finally killing Batman marks a serious end point for her as well in Suicide Squad kill the Justice League the inherent moral compass of the anti-heroes never Fe feels properly calibrated which is why it can often start spinning at a moment's notice before quickly resetting to a predictable North for us as players it's disorienting and we can't quite tell if Rocksteady are riding heroes or anti-heroes or Arch criminals there's no such confusion when it comes to the Justice League though these guys are just straight up Stone Cold mustache twirling villains and it's a really shitty rendition of each of these characters because of it the entire time Green Lantern is calling you convicts to lean into the the whole Space cop thing Batman is belittling you and murdering civilians The Flash Delights in the idea of torture and gleefully rips out Lex Luther's still beating heart this would have been kind of cool had there been moments when these Heroes were able to snap out of it and Batman could stand over the corpse of a murdered cop and be like what have I done where Green Lantern could have a Moment of clarity and try to destroy his ring rather than risk more innocence where Lex Luther could somehow bring Superman back from the brink and Superman would then ask Lex to kill him because he's the only one that can I'm just spitballing here but there's nothing close to any of this except for one brief snippet when Wonder Woman has Barry in her lasso and he's like you have to kill us Diana that's the one moment where it gets interesting because you can see these characters underneath their mind control written as they are these aren't Heroes at all they're just one-dimensional fact similes they feel like they're just clones of the Justice League all of their power but none of their personality or morality as such you don't feel anything when you kill them killing Superman is a really big deal and yet when he's dead he's just dead I think Rocksteady kind of knew this as well which is why none of the Justice League members get an actual death scene when they say their final words when you kill Superman he just kills over and then he's a corpse that's barely acknowledged and then it's straight onto the next scene killing the Justice League is a very motivating concept for an audience and it's pretty remarkable that Rocksteady found a way to make you feel almost nothing when you take down each of its members the only thing they managed to deliver is cheap shock value the shock of pissing on the Flash's corpse the shock of executing Batman In Cold Blood on a park bench the shock of how anticlimactic it is to kill the Superman Kill Your Darlings yeah absolutely but if you're going to do that you have to make it mean something Rock Steady absolutely failed to make any of these deaths mean anything at all okay so that's the spoiler part over let's wrap up up the story block when I did my preview for Suicide Squad killed the Justice League the story was the thing I was most excited to experience because those opening hours were fantastic and when coupled with rocksteady's strong storytelling pedigree I was extremely confident that we were in for a great show sadly I was totally wrong the story is a mix of undercooked and underutilized characters and Side characters a confusing cast of main characters and a disappointingly shallow Justice League a bunch of rushed conclusions that rely on shock Val and an ending that is deliberately unresolved so as to set up for the infinite life service future I was never really expecting to love the gameplay side of this package and so to have been let down so comprehensively by this story is a real disappointment and it's sad to think that we waited 9 years for [Music] this cover suicide squad kill the Justice League is set in Metropolis and there could be no more stalker comparison between Rock's previous cityscape and this one Gotham was dark Gothic brooding blanketed In Perpetual night and Rain you stalked its goon infested streets just as often as you grappled and glided across its gargoyle adorned rooftops Metropolis is the opposite of all of those things it's bright it's colorful even it does have spans of night but your memories of it will surely be those of it during the broad daylight which certainly feels like the city's default setting it Art Deco rather than Gothic and it does achieve a visual distinctiveness that's at times Pleasant Metropolis is at its best when you're standing high above it surveying its rooftops as they Cascade out before you punctuated by a small but notable collection of landmarks like a gold statue of Superman The Lex Corp headquarters or the Empire State likee Daily Planet building there have been comparison videos that compare Arkham Knights Gotham to Suicide squads Metropolis but the suggestion being that Gotham looks better and is more responsive than Metropolis a city that arrives some 9 years after Arkham Knight I think those comparisons are interesting for sure as there's definitely something to be said about how much attention to detail has gone into Gotham versus Metropolis but the context really matters when you are making a game that is a four-player C- experience where all four players can go wherever they want at any time and where you can expect dozens of enemies to be on the map at any moment that imposes a massive number of restrictions on how detailed and responsive your world can be there was a point that was made ironically enough Enough by Warner Brothers themselves when they release Gotham Knights so I do think that Gotham City looks better and is more detailed sure but I think that's an unfair comparison personally I think Metropolis looks pretty good but really its visual design and the destructibility of its assets are the least of my concerns the biggest problem with Metropolis is that all of it feels exactly the same because the gameplay model demands that it all feels exactly the same if you design a combat model built around characters is jumping really high all of the time then there always needs to be plenty of room above them for them to do that as such there are essentially no indoor spaces in this entire video game there's one fight I can recall which happens in a stadium and green lenon kind of puts a makeshift roof on it but otherwise you are always always always fighting on rooftops always that means you never walk the streets of metropolis you just bound over it you never need to contend with a specific location that has a unique layout demanding a specific style of play you just jump run up walls jump some more rinse and repeat until you can't take it anymore if I was a level designer working at Rocksteady I'd feel kind of frustrated that I put this much work into designing so many things that the player will never see or use Because unless that thing is a rooftop it is utterly useless to the player and it may as well be invisible as such Metropolis is one of the most most forgettable video game environments I have ever spent time in and that is nothing to do with art or level design it is entirely down to the core game design and how it neuters any meaningful relationship to space it's also largely devoid of any activities that might liven it up there are some traversal based Riddler challenges as well as some Riddler trophies to collect outside of that there's floating drones which you just need to shoot down for daily rewards I don't know who came up with that as an idea for an activity but this should have stayed in the drafts there's also some patrolling enemies and rooftop placements but they hang out in such small groups that a single well-placed grenade can dispatch them and killing them gives you an infantes small number of crafting resources there is never a reason to stop on your way towards your next mission to engage these patrols because they're never worth the few seconds of detour it takes to dispatch them so what are you doing on this map then well this is where things start to get get really dire because we're now going to have to talk about the campaign missions and side missions and it's really hard to know where to start here um when I first booted up this game I really expected to see something similar to what we've seen from other lutter shooter campaigns which is a mix of more linear curated missions that feel at home in a single player campaign as well as open World style missions that leverage broader lter shooter game design what's truly staggering about suicide squad kill the Justice League is that there's basically none of those linear single player style missions I would say in the 10ish hour campaign approximately 30 minutes is spent in those sorts of experiences the rest are just open world activities over and over again if you've played Destiny or Diablo or whatever you'd be familiar with public events suicide squad's entire campaign is just a collection of public events there's one where you have to save some hostages and then deliver them to the battle bus another where you need to collect data shards and then return them to the battle bus another where you need to escort a car from one place to another there's one where you need to protect Poison Ivy's plants for a really long time these missions go forever there's two or three other types but they're really just variations on these other ones just jumping between rooftops killing some dudes and dunking some things do that for 10 hours and that no word of a lie is the suicide squad kill the Justice League campaign it is an astounding low when compared to even the more maligned lutter Shooters Avengers and redall both had significantly more diversity in their campaign mission design vanilla Destiny had more locations and used them to create linear scripted missions plus it also had numerous strikes at launch the division 1 and two both had numerous internal spaces where missions could be set in addition to a vastly more interesting open world to explore the closest comparison is Anthem in that all of it is set on one map and the entire campaign is open world but even anthem had multiple enemy factions to contend with where suicide squad has only one though I'm not suggesting that Anthem launched in a better State than this I'm just saying that in terms of the campaign mission design Suicide Squad is among the worst we have ever seen from a AAA looter shooter at launch and to Cap all of this off the bosses oh my God these bosses so earlier I commented that this game does not reconcile the power imbalance between the suicide squad and the Justice League it would take a lot of imagination to come up with ways for The Suicide Squad to be able to kill Superman both in terms of the narrative conceit underpinning that as well as the encounter design that would make that feel right like yeah sure you could just shoot Superman with Kryptonite bullets right but that would be kind of disappointing well get ready to be disappointed because you will absolutely shoot Superman with Kryptonite bullets in a boss battle that just has him frantically flying around like a March fly the flash fight is basically the same as the super Superman fight in that you just counter shot him to make him vulnerable and then shoot him a bunch the Batman fight oh man like I'm not going to show it here because its visuals are the one thing that this fight has got going for it there are no mechanics to this boss battle none it is Amateur hour stuff and I'm stunned that Rocksteady produced this there's also a green lanter fight which just involves shooting his construct bunch and then shooting him so did you notice the through line here it's shoot the Justice League SS pretty dumb right and it is but when you build a game around shooting guns then you either need to be able to shoot the Justice League to death or you need to be able to design interesting boss encounters that allow you to damage the Justice League in other ways Rocksteady chose the first option and as such the boss battles here are all a colossal disappointment that makes every Victory feel cheap unearned anticlimactic and unsatisfying combined with the lifeless open world the repetitive Mission design and the poorly written story The Campaign experience for Suicide Squad kill the Justice League is a total bust and the end game is no better I am buing this incubator weakness strike look we'll keep this part brief because there isn't a lot to talk about when the final showdown with Brainiac happens you learn that the Fight Continues because of course it does it's a live service game with the season pass and battle passes and cash up and the fight must go on forever the first thing you're going to want to do are your supporter side missions so each vendor you unlock dur in the campaign like penguin or poison ivy or whatever they have a quest chain associated with them it's still just doing more of the exact same missions from the campaign only rock steady have found an Innovative way to make them way worse they add these infuriating restrictions like you can only deal damage With Grenades and if you're out of grenades then bad luck you can only deal damage with counters so you're just standing around like a waiting for the enemy to shoot you so you can counter them there are like six of these Quest chains and they just suck so bad and the only good thing about them is that when you're done with them these restrictions that they impose never seem to surface again after that the main goal are what's called incursions These are actually trips to the Multiverse where you're visiting other versions of metropolis you doing the exact same missions as in your version of metropolis but here you're able to adjust the difficulty of the challenge which adds Mission modifiers things like exploding enemies or whatever to do these missions you need to do regular open world missions in your Metropolis to earn the currency that will let you buy into those so the loop is do a bunch of open world missions so you can do the same missions but slightly more difficult in a different metropolis and rinse and repeat that until the heat death of the universe when I first settled into this groove I was like whoo this sucks but it got way worse when I realized that these incursion missions that you do when you you know buy into them through the portal whatever they aren't randomized the open world missions on your Metropolis are at least random but these incursion missions are the exact same three missions on the exact same tile sets over and over again I couldn't believe it I'm not sure if these like rotate on a weekly schedule or something but I'm certainly not sticking around to find out in addition to that there's an infinite duration horde mode I did that a little bit at this point I'd already spent around 20 hours in the game and doing the endless hord mode thing just wasn't really what I was up for at that point there's one interesting system involving doing certain challenges like slide kills or melee takedowns or whatever and when you do enough of them it summons this hit squad who come to take you out it's the exact same type of enemies you've been fighting the whole game but it's cool and you get a little bit of loot out of it and that's about it the main Chase here is for notorious items now these are your really powerful endgame items with some big modifiers on them that open up new builds and play Styles the more you grind out those endgame incursions and the higher you crank the difficulties the more of those become unlocked in the loot pool and then you can just keep grinding them as regular drops that really is the whole end game it's six random open World Mission types in Metropolis to earn a currency that lets you do three specific open World Mission types so you can unlock can grind out notorious items now this is a truly terrible end game and it's weird that some people are like nah actually this is really good man that's a that's a good amount of content if you compare it to other live service looter Shooters at their launchers and I'm like it's been 14 years since Borderlands launch kicking off this genre the fact that very few games have got their end games right at launch does not justify suicide squad's failings it's kind of the opposite it's like really we really haven't learned the lessons that 14 years worth of failure have imparted we're still launching live service games with 10hour campaigns and three missions on repeat at the end game only now we're charging $70 and change at release instead of $60 or $100 if you plan to play 3 days early and I know people are going to be like oh man there's more content coming just be patient well we have been patient we waited 9 years for this if you want to launch a game that has a great endgame at launch and you want to give us more after that then great fantastic but if you want to launch a game with a bad campaign basically no endgame and an IOU note that says see you next month then no I'm not okay with that furthermore I can only review the game in front of me and if I was full enough to believe every promise that live service road maps have made over the years I'd have been laughed off this platform long ago this this end game is maybe it gets better maybe it doesn't but right now it's and after reviewing a dozen of these sort of games that have launched with end games it just sucks to see how little progress we've made on this front over the years that they're looking forward to killing the J all up you know these guns are a bit when it comes to combat itemization and progression I'm going to preface all of this by saying that this whole review is subject as all reviews are but this section in particular is subjective because I've heard from plenty of people that really like combat and the loot and if there was more endgame content they could see themselves continuing to play this game because the core gameplay Loop appeals to them I'm not saying they're wrong I'm just saying that that's not the conclusion that I have reached and if combat looks and sounds appealing to you then you should probably give it a crack at whatever price point you feel works for you because there's every chance that it might click for you in a way that it didn't for me personally I did not enjoy this combat I think it's fun enough that I was able to play this game for around about 20 to 25 hours without me hating the combat but I do think it's badly designed and I'm really glad that after this review is done I won't have to play any more of it there are so many issues with combat that this is going to sound a bit ranty but I want to start at the very highest level and that is the fact that the character kits are centered on guns instead of on the characters themselves I do feel as though this point has been made repeatedly prior to release during the previews and in other reviews so I won't belabor it here but yeah it's sucks that king shark is riing on a minigun and Captain Boomerang is riing on a sniper or an SMG or whatever it is fundamentally less interesting than if you built unique character kits based on Captain boomerang's Boomerang or Harley's mallets and explosives or King shark's teeth but what makes this even worse is that the guns themselves are terrible I'm seeing commentary out there like oh the gun play is really tired it feels good to shoot things and I'm like what the are you talking about these weapons have no personality whatsoever no unique recoil patterns no distinctive sound design there aren't different archetypes with subtle but important handling differences that give them a unique feel these weapons are just auto aim driven zero recoil statstics I'm stunned that you could base your game around guns and put absolutely no effort into making these guns f feel like actual guns go and play Remnant or out riders or the division if you want to see how you do third person weapon design where you can actually feel the distinctiveness of a weapon in your hands this is a massive massive oversight and I'm really surprised no one else is talking about this for me personally it was one of the biggest reasons I just couldn't enjoy this combat so having said all of that if combat is based on guns you ideally then need to design a complimentary set of character abilities that still deliver on the core fantasy of each of those anti-heroes as best you can rock Tedy have tried to do that through traversal melee attacks and talent trees but despite their best efforts it just doesn't come together traversal is the one standout success story within the combat framework each character has their own way of getting around and it's very deeply baked into their kit so Harley is all about swinging into the action and king shark is all about these big Power Bomb Dives Etc these traversal skills aren't particularly true to each character's core conceit but if we kind of handwave away that stuff it's fun to move around with all of these tools and the majority of combat is based around positioning reaching your foe or getting a good line of sight on them is 70% of the battle here so if this stuff didn't work then this whole package would be an utter catastrophe the melee stuff is unfortunately very one-dimensional there's only one melee attack there are no combos melee is often used to apply debuffs or harvest Shields more than anything else you can build towards melee and improve its efficiency but even then it doesn't quite work as well as it should and it always feels very clunky to use given the relationship between melee and Camera in this game a point will'll come back to outside of that there's a sort of melee finisher you can use on a cool down there are grenades there's a super ability and that's about it certain Talent choices lend themselves to certain play Styles like king shark being a brawler or Deadshot being more lethal with a sniper rifle but a lot of that manifests in passive Buffs that don't really change how it feels to play these characters bottom line just as Weapons lack a distinctive feel when they're in your hands these characters similarly lack a distinctive feel outside of their traversal they each feel too similar to each other to play and that is such a wasted opportunity when you're talking about a roster as diverse as this say what you will about the Avengers but when it came to distinctive character kits Crystal Dynamics understood the assignment and Rocksteady absolutely did not next we can talk about the overall hygiene Factor of good combat namely things like targeting camera visual Clarity Etc all of this stuff is a complete disaster here in Suicide Squad kill the Justice League yeah you can Target enemies at range sure but it is extremely difficult n on impossible to Target specific enemies with a melee attack if they are clumped up together you just have to press a button and hope it works that's particularly annoying when you want to harvest a shield from one of them who is vulnerable to that and I've died on more than few occasions owing to this ISS next is the baffling link between melee and Camera watch this so what's actually happening here is that whenever I melee my camera will always swing in close behind me and then point up to position me for an air juggle with my weapon cool concept except it is utterly nauseating to watch this play out like this over and over again especially when you are in tight spaces where the camera hasn't got many places to go you can focus on melee in this game but this camera work is so bad that I would never want to do that because I would never want to endure this I maned king shark during my playthrough but I actually found Deadshot the most Pleasant to play because his melee attack is still ranged which means the camera doesn't lose its mind every two seconds and yeah visual Clarity and visual noise this was a big meme that went around before the game's release and I thought people were kind of cherry picking screenshots or whatever but the final game is actually way worse as the later game combination of high-end build modifiers and increased enemy density makes the game regularly unpassable just a totally unreadable confetti of particle vomit obscuring your view and when combined with the awful camera work this is one of the most unpleasant looking games I've played I'm actually really glad that I don't have to play any more of this but I'm almost more relieved that I no longer need to watch any more of it and I have never felt that ever playing any game ever with Mission design character kits and weapons all feeling really homogenized there was a desperate need for a diverse roster of enemies to fight against necessitating different tactics setting up a sort of combat chess framework like you'd see in any great shooter unsurprisingly at this point Suicide Squad kill the Justice League does not deliver that either there is one enemy faction with basically three types of enemies grunts annoying snipers and sack brutes there are also tanks and helicopters but they're much more rare later on you do unlock some Justice League augmented troop types so they're the same grunts but now they've been merged with the flash so they can move faster and the snipers they get some bat blood and now they can turn invisible making them even more annoying to fight these variants add nothing to the equation and because there are so few enemies and because they're so basic in their construction combat feels extraordinarily mindless and and repetitive it's some of the worst and most limited enemy design we've ever seen in a Luda shooter the last line of defense to bring some diversity to this core is the itemization and progression and here your mileage may vary greatly it must be said that Suicide Squad kill the Justice League has a number of very flexible and very functional Loot and customization systems you can craft weapons you can roll weapon stats you can apply status effects and make those effects more potent you can Masterwork your weapon allowing you to customize them more freely you can unlock endgame gear sets with gamechanging modifiers that do this or that there's a lot there's also a paragon system allowing you to infinitely level your character with minor stat Buffs it often takes live Services many content updates to reach this number of gear and progression systems and Suicide Squad is launching with all of them on day one so that is really good I will also say that some of this loot is pretty cool and interesting the main gear set this season is based around Bang and it will essentially confuse nearby enemies and then you deal bonus damage to them when they're confused and they also drop a power up which you need to manually pick up which boost your damage further I've unlocked a grenade type which does a ton of damage but it also damages me when it sits in my inventory so I'm encouraged to kind of dump it as soon as I get a new one there are lots more examples like that absolutely but mostly the gear and talents that I unlock they just feel like passive Buffs that kind of do stuff without making my character any more interesting to play like yeah I can immediately craze an entire group of enemies with a single melee attack and I do more damage to them but then what I still just shoot them all the same because the foundational aspects of this game are so weak the additional stuff that you put on top of that does not enrich it at least in my personal view I've seen plenty of commentary from people being like Oh I made this build that does this thing with my grenades and my melee whatever cool like I said at the Top If you're liking it great for me I did not get a single piece of gear or unlock a single talent that made this game feel better to play I do more damage I produce more explosions I create more visual noise but combat at max level in the end game feels just as unrewarding and messy as it does at level one and that's not an issue that live service updates are going to be able to fix because that is about the very core foundations of this game's design stuff so deeply baked into it that it will never change because to do so would require a total overhaul of the combat framework and I just can't see Warner Brothers green lighting that sort of overhaul because personally I just can't see how this goes the distance as a live [Music] service Suicide Squad kill the Justice League went live 3 days early for those who who bought the $100 deluxe version only many of those people didn't get the full 3 days of access because as soon as the game went live service had to be taken down again owing to a game breaking bug the game was down for nearly 12 hours and because this is an always online live service game you can't play offline even when playing solo Rox City have said that they may add an offline mode in the future but I would not put big money on that because there is no return on investment for Warner Brothers in doing that that $100 version comes with a collection of classic cosmetic skins and I was genuinely pretty stunned when I logged in to apply those skins and I noticed that I had been given the starter versions of those skins and that there are multiple extra components and color swaps available and If I wanted to get the full version of the skin that Warner Brothers had so generously included in the $100 version of this game I'd have to give them another $30 Australian dollar that really does tell you everything you need to know about what this game is why it was made and how much value Warner Brothers are trying to deliver at point of sale they can't even give you a skin for $100 without putting their hand out to ask for more rock Tedy and Warner Brothers have said that future gameplay content will be free financed by a battle pass offering Cosmetics as well as a cash op selling skins for like 40 bucks a pop or something l free content in exchange for Wales purchasing skin sounds pretty good right here's the thing though this game in its launch weekend achieved a Max concurrent player count of 135,000 people on Steam yes sure PlayStation and Xbox numbers aren't included here but there's absolutely no reason to think that they'd be proportionately different the first rock steady game in nine years hundreds of millions of dollars spent across development and marketing and it is without question a flop this is in addition to scathing reviews the title currently sits at a week 63 on open critic as well as some pretty hostile Word of Mouth do we imagine then that the good Souls at Warner Brothers HQ are looking at this and thinking time to double down put more money into this if we just give the consumer more free stuff they're going to love it no of course not right now they are surely looking at these metrics and they're thinking how do we make our money back I suspect it'll be a variety of things I suspect the promise of free future content is not one we should Bank on and I'll probably have to start charging for some of that stuff I also expect elements of the gameplay will get monetized as well Bethesda did exactly the same thing with Fallout 76 back in the day promising that they would only sell Cosmetics before eventually selling all manner of booster and convenience items hell they even sold a monthly subscription for that game I'm sure Warner Brothers will be considering any and all options at this point and here's the more dire prediction I just don't see how this survives I genuinely don't and that's actually less to do with the disappointing campaign for the current lack of endgame content and far more to do with the fundamentals of what this game is I just don't believe that its combat model is robust enough to withstand the prolonged exposure that a live service demands and I believe that fixing those issues is a job too big for the live service business model like Diablo I and Destiny 2 both had issues at launch a lot of them in fact but those games were clearly fixable and they were too big to fail for their Publishers do you really think that Warner Brothers sees the suicide Squad as too big to fail Harry Potter yeah absolutely if this was a live service Harry Potter game that went bely up I can see Warner Brothers Spend an endless cash to get this thing going but Suicide Squad I don't know man I personally doubt it from the moment this game was revealed people really had it out for it in large part because it was frustrating to see Rocksteady abandon its Heritage as a studio that makes brilliant single player games and instead be put to work on a live service looter a genre that had already claimed number of scalps like Crystal Dynamics Platinum Games and Arcane Studios I was always willing to keep an open mind about this and see how it all shakes out I like live services and if you can make me a good one I'll play it but if you can't and you're charging $100 for a painfully repetitive 10-hour campaign and a barely existent endgame but I'm not only going to be disappointed but I'm also going to be frustrated frustrated that 14 years after this genre emerged it feels like every single release is repeated the exact same mistakes frustrated that $100 doesn't even buy you a complete skin on the cash shop but more than anything else frustrated that this genre and this business model has claimed yet another scalp 9 years for Rocksteady to follow up on one of the most seminal trilogies in the history of video games and this is what we got what a shame if nothing else I truly hope this is the last time we see a talented single player Studio wasted on the live service golden goose chase but I strongly suspect that it will not be I absolutely do not recommend the suicide squad kill the Justice [Music] League have you ever dreamed of starting your own business doesn't have to be the next Amazon it could just be you making stuff you like to make selling it online for a neat profit maybe you want to provide a service giving your time and expertise to others whatever it is you might want to do you're probably 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Channel: Skill Up

Views: 675,266

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, suicide squad: kill the justice league, suicide squad: kill the justice league review, suicide squad, suicide squad kill the justice league, suicide squad game, kill the justice league, harley quinn, king shark, suicide squad kill the justice league review, suicide squad gameplay, game review, game reviews, video game review, video game reviews, gaming reviews, review, reviews, suicide squad review, suicide squad game review

Id: reQKHNg0jh8

Length: 45min 44sec (2744 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024