While it appeared inevitable after the lackluster response from their recent release, Rocksteady has confirmed that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has been delayed. The delay pushes the game out of 2023 and is now set for release on February 2nd, 2024.
I’m a bit more understanding about delays for titles, but it is concerning that Rocksteady is soon to be going on nine years without a game release. As for what they showed, it was mostly okay with one big caveat: move sets for characters amounted to putting guns in everyone’s hands.
The Suicide Squad roster that is purported to be in the game (King Shark, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang and Deadshot), is one that leans toward guns, certainly. But characters like King Shark, Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang lose what really makes them special by being gun-oriented. From their recent videos, the only character-related traits they had seemed to be movement and specific abilities. The vast majority of the gameplay seemed to be all about guns.
If we were to relate it to another property that is somewhat similar in gameplay style, Avengers was the blueprint of what to do and also what not to do.
What Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Should Learn from Marvel’s Avengers
Character move sets
As many qualms as I had with the game, the one thing I thought Crystal Dynamics did extremely well was making each character (sans their echo characters) unique.
Thor wielded the lightning infused Mjölnir, where Hulk smashed around with his fists. The fighters felt unique in themselves, even if there wasn’t a lot of interaction between them. When you played as Iron Man, you really felt like the flying billionaire himself.
Locomotion
There is always some concern when you have characters that can fly versus those that have to run. Marvel’s Avengers did this well enough in allowing each character to keep up with the other for the most part. It was relatively seamless with how the levels were designed as well.
Costumes
Avengers was a massive swing and a miss on costume diversity for almost all of its characters. Not only did it usually take too long to get movie-accurate costumes into the game, but most of the costumes were also palette swaps. With decades upon decades of costumes to pull from, I was hoping things would get far more interesting than they ever did.
Grinding
With the nature of GAAS games, the grind is inevitable. It’s clearly a challenge that many studios struggle with overcoming. Continually running through familiar territory is what took its toll on me because the grind just was not fun. The loot was hardly justifiable since it didn’t alter much of the gameplay at all. The drops were lackluster because the costumes were so few and far between or just color swaps. The levels were uninteresting and surprisingly poor, graphically. But most of all, the enemy variety, for a game that could pull from across the cosmos, was lacking. The larger enemies were ok, but that didn’t make up for spending so much time with lackluster canon fodder.
It’s obviously far too early to tell where Suicide Squad is going. It’s unlikely they would change the entire structure of the game, even with the delay. However, I sincerely hope they opt for more character-unique playstyles for each member on the roster.
