 Rocksteady is one of the most talented game development studios in the world, and everything that makes that so is on full display in their newest game, Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League. Game feel is fantastic. Traversal and combat both feel great. The enemy design is mostly excellent. Cut scenes, voice acting, art design, graphics, it's all great. So why is Suicide Squad such a massive failure? Let's figure that out together. The best live service failure ever, after the logo, doomed by its own success. Suicide Squad has had easily the most incompetent marketing for a triple A game in recent memory. Its reveal was a catastrophe, as WB laid no groundwork to prepare people for the gut-punch news that Rocksteady's new game was an always online, live service, co-op, third person shooter. Anthem maintained hype throughout its entire development cycle because nobody was expecting a new mass effect. EA's transparency, that's hilarious, meant that everyone knew what Bioware was working on. The same is true for Crystal Dynamics as Marvel's Avengers. Instead WB decided to go the Fallout 76 route and spring a surprise that literally nobody wanted on their millions of eager fans. Rocksteady had not released a game in 8 years. Players have been waiting since 2015 to see what they were working on. There had been leaks that the game was Suicide Squad, but nobody believed it was a live service game and certainly nobody thought it was going to be a looter shooter. When the reveal trailer was finally released, it was overwhelmingly despised. And that furious reaction is entirely the fault of WB. In a current climate of live service catastrophes, one would assume that somebody at WB would say hey, we need to get out in front of this and tell everyone exactly what this game is before we dump a trailer on them. But no. Instead, the world, all together, found out that not only was Rocksteady's new game a co-op game, it was also a live service game and for no other reason than it had to be designed around loot, a shooter. So that was a terrible start. But then every other decision was also bad. The publisher screamed loud and clear that they had zero belief in this game. No open beta, no demo, no review copies. There was a closed beta that was something they believed in so much they NDA'd everyone who took part. Then they had a disaster of a press event that reviewed so badly they undid their own stupid NDA but you know what, the damage was done. Suicide Squad seems to have had a catastrophic launch. A week in, Steam had 1800 reviews, 1800. They were positive, but as an example, Baldur's Gate 3 right now has 500,000 reviews. And when I bought that game a week after launch, it already had like 250,000 reviews. Suicide Squad is a sales disaster. This much is already clear and that is entirely down to the publisher because the game is good enough that it should have had an open beta and a demo and review codes. WB's own slimy cowardice has doomed a game that probably could have sold much better than it has. Now, that does not mean that this is a great game. It is a titanic disappointment, but not in the way that Anthem was. Suicide Squad is extremely polished that has a good story with great voice acting. In fact, the story is so well done, it's a perfect example of how Suicide Squad fails. Because that great story never let you stop thinking, wow, this would be awesome if it was the story of a rock steady game instead of this. This extends to every single aspect of the game. Every positive thing in the design actually hurts the game overall. Let me explain. The thing that people hated in that trailer was that the Suicide Squad all seemed to be flying around an open world and that the game, from its UI to its movement, looked very arcadey. And it is. Suicide Squad is more crackdown than crackdown. And that crackdown movement and arcade style combat feels great. I read a bunch of stuff about the campaign being 8 to 10 hours long, but it took me almost 20 because I spent so much time just flying around killing stuff for like no reason at all. The movement system does feel overdesigned in a couple of characters and I found Harley and Deadshot to feel way too slow. So I had a bad initial reaction. But when I finally played as King Shark, I never switched again because he's the only one who can actually fucking sprint and moving around the map as Shark feels great. Fighting enemies and flying all over the place feels amazing. It's basically, honestly, a much, much better version of crackdown. And yet, this ultimately hurts the game too in a strange way. The best thing about it, for me at least, because you can literally cross the entire city in about 30 seconds. And because the combat is completely designed around being in the air, Metropolis really doesn't exist for the player. Rocksteady obviously realized at some point in the development that the player is literally never on the ground and would therefore see next to nothing of the map they designed. So they did put those Riddler trophies in there, but there's just no reason to find them. In the Arkham games, you crossed the map and did side activities on your way to interior, highly designed story missions. In Suicide Squad, there are no story missions. How can you possibly have missions inside? With actual level design, when the entire combat system is built around literally jumping 300 feet into the air. In Suicide Squad, the traversal is the combat, which means unlike Spider-Man or the Arkham games, everything happens outside. Everything. Right off the bat, that would be a problem because it means the game cannot change up combat or the field of missions with level design or art design. You're in Ruin's Gotham 200 feet in the air at minute one and Ruin's Gotham 200 feet in the air at the end of the game. It's Ruin's Gotham 200 feet in the air all the way through. Now, perhaps this could have been overcome if there was a huge variety of stuff to do. I honestly doubt it, but perhaps. Unfortunately, Suicide Squad has perhaps the most disappointing set of missions I have ever seen in a game like this. In the Division 2, Marvel Avengers and especially in Destiny 2, a campaign is made up of both filler side stuff, but also set piece missions. In the Destiny 2 campaign, you will have to spend a few hours getting 75 headshot kills on dregs with a hand cannon. But it will also have you in strikes and tightly designed linear story missions with a variety of encounters, boss fights, and mini bosses. The Division 2 has a ton of open world chaff to do, but also story missions that take you on a tour of places that surprise you. Even the Avengers, which had a similar problem, the very best moments where it's tightly scripted set piece story missions. Suicide Squad has none of that, literally none. Suicide Squad's campaign is the equivalent of grinding Destiny 2's public events. Except imagine only doing D2 public events on Earth and only against the fallen. That's what the campaign here is. The combat and movement feel so fantastic that it's able to keep you having a good time for 10 to 15 to 20 hours. But I never once shook the feeling that this was a massive waste of Rocksteady's talent. I mean, I wonder if the level designers at least got to take some extra time off because like it's just the open world. Now, let's imagine a game where that D2 public event as story missions system could work. It would require an absolute metric ton of public events. You'd need to have so much public event variety that the player doesn't feel like they're just doing the same thing over and over. I'm actually completely stunned that Rocksteady did not realize this during development. Or if they did that they couldn't figure it out. For the first 10 hours of this game, you will do the same four missions over and over with the only variety being one of the few boss fights and the cutscenes. After beating the game and moving to the end game, you get a couple of new types. But you're still talking about five or six things that you do for your entire time with this game from minute one to end game. Even worse is the way the game is broken up into annoying little chunks as a result of the online co-op live service structure. I played this game solo, but the game still retains that live service structure. Every time you start an mission, you have to listen to the whole talking on the comms thing. Every time a mission ends, you gotta sit there for two minutes as it gives you an end mission screen to show you your loot exploding out of a box. So, so so annoying. I mean this game is constantly locking you in place to listen to pointless comms chatter. Eventually it infuriated me, man. Why? Why must control of my character be taken away for these? Actually, you do still have some control. You can spin slowly in a circle, but that's it. You must spend hours spinning in circles waiting for people to shut the fuck up. By the middle of the game, I was just so angry. I was literally saying out loud, please shut the fuck up and let me play the game. Who possibly thought this was a good idea? And then, after pissing me off at the beginning, having to sit through more comms and then the like mission completed scene and the slow explosion of your loot out of a box scene and then the stats thing, it just crushes the pacing of this game. How is the live service stuff? Bad. It is bad. If you're going to make a game that's all about loot progression, it's kind of important to make you progress through loot. It's also a good idea to not completely lock anything interesting to the end game. In Borderlands, Diablo, Destiny or the Division, you will constantly progress through loot. In some games like Borderlands, it might actually be a little too fast in that you actually don't get to use cool stuff long enough before the next thing drops. But in all of those games, from Outriders to Fallout 76, you will at least be consistently switching out old gear for new gear and getting that manipulative little dopamine rush that comes from getting new stuff. And this game knows that because annoyingly, the squad is constantly talking about how much they like getting new stuff. So imagine my surprise when I found out that you just don't? Oh, I mean, yeah, stuff drops every single mission clogging your inventory and the entire campaign is literally fucking unlocking vendors. But the game also gives you great weapons in the first two missions. I went hours and hours without ever switching weapons. And there are only about five weapon types total anyway, with very few variants. And each character is, for some unimaginable reason, locks down to only one or two gun types, further limiting what is supposed to be literally the central design pillar of this game. Imagine if you were playing Borderlands or Destiny or the Division and used the same gun for seven hours straight. That would be pretty weird, right? Well, in 25 hours, I used four guns, two melee weapons, and maybe four of the shield and traversal mods. In Borderlands or Destiny, what guns you use massively changes how you play the game. But in Suicide Squad, that's just not the case. Sure, some guns have fun effects, but you're still not getting much diversity in the combat here. There are only a few types of enemies, only a handful of different types of encounters, and you will always spend almost all of your time flying through the air. Loot does indeed get better at the endgame, but by that point you've done everything. Borderlands and the Division and Destiny keep you playing because you have both a huge variety of guns and also a very wide variety of content. In Suicide Squad, you have one of five guns with different effects and one of five missions that are exactly the same every single time. Okay, well perhaps that lack of variety in weapons is made up through the difference in classes. I mean, different classes can have a huge impact on gameplay in something like Diablo or Borderlands, and surely the difference between an 8 foot tall demigod shark and Harley Quinn is big enough to make switching between them a hedge against repetition, right? No. And perhaps the most amazing thing about the game, it feels almost exactly the same to play as Harley Quinn as it does a shark god. The difference between them is only in how they move. Imagine if the difference between Destiny classes was only the jumps. Each class uses guns. They all have a little super move that's not really terribly interesting as they're all kind of one-off damage moves. They all use the same combo system. The skill trees are shockingly the same with a bunch of the exact same unlocks across every class. Destiny 2 and the Division 2 probably have the least diversity amongst classes in the genre, but Suicide Squad is way, way, way less than both of those. The difference between a hunter and a titan is orders of magnitude bigger than the difference between shark god and Australian dude who has a boomerang. Wrapping up. Listen, Anthem was a bad game. Top to bottom. A laughably bad story that was a perfect storm of stupid and pointless. Below average shooting. Terribly designed enemies. Terrible enemy variety. Awful mission design. Anthem would have been bad as a single-player game too. Bioware is not and had never been an action game developer. I don't know, maybe Anthem will end up being an important first step towards a Bioware game that actually plays great, but it ended up being just an action game with no Bioware in there at all. Suicide Squad is made by a studio that knows how to make an action game. The bones of a fantastic single-player game are here. Game feel flawless. There's not enough enemy variety, but what is here is great. Boss fights are too long and a bit annoying at times, but are still totally unique and memorable. The story, despite me trying my best to hate it, is really, really good. It has legitimate heart, actual character development, and is somehow very moving despite being mostly a comedy. Rocksteady does an awful lot of development with very little actual story missions here. I know nothing of these characters. I have never read comic books and I didn't watch these movies, but they're such a talented team that even Krusty Old Me, who thinks nearly every comic book movie ever is massively overrated, liked this. The actual core of yet another all-time classic from Rocksteady is right here. Great combat, great game feel, great acting, amazing art, great story, amazing characters, fun movement. It's all there, but every single little thing surrounding that stuff sucks. The story is great, but of course you don't even get a damn ending. Tune in to season 1 through 12 for that. The mission design is awful. There is no level design because there's no maps aside from the one big open world that you will not engage with because you spend the whole game flying over it. The loot is not good. If this was a single player game, it wouldn't even need loot. There are no Borderlands 2 or Destiny 2 exotics or legendaries here. I guess in the end game maybe a little bit, but nothing like Borderlands 2 or Destiny 2. Just the same guns over and over with different boosts on them that put different status effects on. The progression tree is bad. It's laid out like Borderlands, but with precisely zero of the game-changing synergies that make that system work so well there. Slightly extending your melee range or having 15% more shields is boring and pointless. The four different characters play identically to one another. The only reason to pick one over the other is which one moves fastest, which is the shark by the way, you should definitely play as the shark. When all is said and done, Suicide Squad is a pretty good single player action game basically ruined by its live service mandate. It is easily the very best of the live service disasters. It's way better than Anthem and Marvel Avengers, but it's not even close to good enough to compete with Destiny. Not even close, man. It's not nearly good enough to be a great live service game and as live service elements hobble it badly. What could have been an all-time classic Rocksteady superhero game is instead an average single player game and a well, well below average live service game. And can this PLEASE be the last one? The credits for this game, I shit you not, are like 10 minutes long and list hundreds of people across the whole world. It took 8 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make this and it is clearly and obviously worse than if Rocksteady had just made another of their single player games. This WILL lose money, mountains of money, millions upon millions upon millions of dollars will be lost. Ungodly sums of money lit on fire, like Anthem and Avengers and Gotham Knights and Redfall. How much money must be burned until publishers finally realize that the only thing that can kill Destiny 2 is Destiny 2? There will be no new live service hits from single player developers forced to make something that they don't want to play themselves. Let this be the end. Years and years and billions of dollars wasted on a fantasy. It's the same shit as the disaster that was the search for the wow killer. Let it end. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.