It’s becoming increasingly common for live-service games to launch and almost immediately fail due to a lack of interest, then shut down because there isn’t enough financial incentive to keep it alive. Concord was last year’s most disastrous example, but it’s easy to forget 2024’s second biggest failure:, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
While Suicide Squad wasn’t shut down quite as quickly as Concord (it would be hard to beat that record), it only lasted a year before Rocksteady delivered one final update and ended post-launch support for good. For most of the year it was active, player counts hovered in the triple-digits, rarely going over 600 concurrent players on Steam.
Suicide Squad Did What Nobody Dared To, Then Took It All Back
Suicide Squad was, obviously, by no means a hit. It reviewed poorly, with many critics saying that while it had a compelling story and good writing, its repetitive missions and live-service elements (particularly its ending) worsened the experience. Players dropped off it quickly. It sold so poorly that, at one point, you could pick it up for $3, and then it became available for free on PlayStation Plus, all within a year of release.
You probably don’t care, but spoilers for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ahead.But it did some interesting things regardless. Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley wrote an excellent piece about how Harley’s stone-cold murder of Batman was actually very cool. While it was a choice that made a lot of comic fans mad, I think it was awesome – maybe even brave – that Rocksteady committed to killing so many beloved superheroes. What other superhero game tells this kind of story?
Except it all ended up meaning nothing. The game’s ending, which was added in the latest patch, makes all of this boldness completely meaningless. In a 2D motion comic narrated by Harley Quinn, it was revealed that all the heroes killed by the Suicide Squad were just clones of the original Justice League, who had been watching from the shadows and biding their time to find the perfect opportunity to take Brainiac down permanently. The Suicide Squad decided to somehow remove their bomb collars and go on a new adventure, leaving all the mess for the real heroes to fix.
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Man, What The Hell Is This Ending
There are a few things about this that are particularly disappointing. One is that this was just a comic book-style rendering of what happens instead of a cutscene. Realistically, Warner Bros. didn’t want to put any more money into a game that was already doing so poorly and slated to be shut down anyway, but the game and its players still deserved a satisfying ending. The comic strip format isn’t necessarily a bad thing, depending on context, but here it just felt like a really sad death for a game that was led astray by its live-service ambitions.
Another thing is that the ending is incredibly lazy. So is Wonder Woman dead for real? Why were the Justice League letting Brainiac run amok? Is Robin also dead? There are so many loose ends, and Rocksteady doesn’t bother addressing them. By closing things out this way it dilutes every piece of good storytelling the game has to offer into nothing.
It’s pretty clear this comic strip format wasn’t the ending that Rocksteady had in mind, considering how haphazard it feels, and I’m not sure the ending to this story was what the devs had in mind when they started working on the game either. We’ll never know how much of this was intended and how much was just them throwing in the towel and moving on to something else.
But perhaps most disappointing is that it undoes the most interesting thing about the game, which is its central conceit, listed proudly in the game’s title. You kill the Justice League, and then it turns out that none of it mattered. It’s a cliche used time and time again in comics, where dead characters regularly come back to life to fight another day, but it wasn’t used in a nudge nudge wink wink way here – it was just kind of anti-climactic. The whole point of the game was that it subverted our expectations of the heroes and the villains, and then its ending just went back on all of that. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has ended with a sad, small whimper.
An open-world action-adventure from Arkham creators Rocksteady, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League puts you in the roles of the antihero squad. You must take on the aforementioned Justice League, either in solo play or online co-op.