After what has been a whirlwind of games to wind down the year, marketing has begun for early 2024 games. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was one of my most anticipated games up until the reveal. After it, well, my expectations have been a bit dampened. Having said that, the first of their Suicide Squad Insiders did a whole lot to alleviate some of my apprehension. That isn’t to say that no questions remain.
Here are our five thoughts after viewing Suicide Squad Insider #1.
Traversal actually looks great.
If your traversal is bad, then your game is bad. There really aren’t any other ways about it. I was initially hesitant because I had no idea how they would make it make sense. I couldn’t fathom how they would make traversal feel both fun and seamless across differing characters. Well, it turns out they had a nice story bit to explain just that. As you can see in the below video, they wind up in the Hall of Justice and take various traversal items from the museum. Each character’s traversal mechanics look both fun and fitting for each character lore-wise. Most importantly, they all look to play well within both traversal and battle segments.
Metropolis looks detailed.
Rocksteady has always been about atmosphere, although this is far brighter than their previous work on the Arkham Series. I wasn’t sure of how that would translate, but Metropolis looks nearly fully realized. Everything is so crisp, and the city looks very detailed. Its verticality also feels like the perfect playground to creatively kill your enemies. I truly hope there isn’t any sort of downgrade on release, or that this isn’t running on a supercomputer. It puts similar games of its ilk (like Avengers) to shame. If this runs at 60 and looks like that, phew.
Enemy variety, or lack thereof?
Speaking of Avengers, I’m cautious Rocksteady learned a lesson from their counterpart and realized we don’t want to run through light enemy 1, heavy enemy 2, boss. From the looks of it, there are a lot of little purple corrupted guy, big purple corrupted guy, etc. I am confident the bosses will be more exciting, but the canon fodder looks like it could become boring quickly. It really needs that hook, and battling through similar enemies just isn’t it.
This is still a shooter…
My biggest complaint on reveal looks to still be present. You have a diverse set of characters of which all their main forms of attack is….shooting. This is one of the areas where Avengers excelled. All their base heroes felt different. They felt unique in traversal and combat. They basically ripped them out of the movies and comics and said “here, go shoot your repulsors as Iron Man, while Thor rains down lightning while swinging his hammer.” It seems that “iconic melee attack” is the main aspect that is to differentiate one character from another. Is it enough? I am not so sure. What does sort of help is that most of the characters don’t seem too strange holding a weapon, sans King Shark.
A solid story, an unknown endgame.
It remains to be seen, but the story they are developing looks like it does delve deeper than just the Justice League being corrupted. I was shocked to see mentions and scenes with Cobblepot in them. The amount of lore they have to pull from is immense, and I am happy that it seems they are taking care in doing so. It feels like the meat of this game is like the solo campaign of Avengers with Kamala. I felt Avengers succeeded due to that sort of story-based content. Suicide Squad feelimg more intimate with its story-content has me excited. What wasn’t shown, but likely will soon is the endgame content. A great story mode can take you far, but the time spent will be on end game content. So few games have pulled it off, can Suicide Squad fall in with the select few that have?
I hope I am wrong about the guns pulling down my enjoyment. Everything else seems like a massive step in the right direction. The tone, story, and environments all hit. The game looks gorgeous, and traversal feels like an evolution from the Arkham Series. February 2, 2024 can’t come soon enough, and I am wholeheartedly rooting for another slam dunk from Rocksteady. Look forward to our thoughts on the next Insider as it comes out.
