Despite repeated delays, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has been generating quite a bit of hype. It features a unique premise that puts supervillains in a superstar role, and is being developed by Rocksteady – the studio behind the popular Arkham series. However, since its announcement in 2020, an alarming outpouring of information about what the game will look like has been steadily released. From its direct-service features, to its price hike, to revealing “RPG-style” grinding mechanics, Kill The Justice League is starting to look a lot like a certain AAA comic book affair. While it’s too early to call out whether a DC title is anything to go by in stripped-down content, it’s hard to ignore the similarities to the overly monetized wasteland that was Marvel’s Avengers.
The similarities surfaced earlier this year with leaked images of live service items, including the battle pass. This has been confirmed by Rocksteady along with the fact that Kill The Justice League will require a stable online connection, even if you’re working alone. Just as with the Avengers, it looks like a game that could just be a single-player slam-dunk experience looking to extract every penny from the player base.
Single-player games aren’t instinctively superior to online multiplayer, of course, but it’s the live-service model that has rapidly saturated the market, with only a handful of games able to withstand the massive demands of a live-service operation. On top of that, the premise of the game’s plot (i.e. having the Justice League push daisies) is a solid standalone story that doesn’t need to be stretched out over seasons for years to come.
With Gamestop Italy listing the game at €75, the game will likely follow the trend of NBA 2K21 and Breath of the Wild 2 and charge $70 for the bundle. It’s bad enough to increase the price while asking for microtransactions, but the fact that AAA live services are often launched entirely undercooked means it’s a sham about whether or not Kill The Justice League will cost $60, let alone $70. This monetization intensity is another parallel to the Avengers – not only is Avengers released with an entry fee, a battle pass, and plenty of microtransactions, but its superhero characters have a variety of skins supported on top of everything else.
Then there’s the controversial “Gear Score” system. While this isn’t brilliantly explained in Sony’s State of Play overview of the game, it looks like it will be a leveling system where the more Gear you find, the higher your Gear score – allowing you to access harder missions. Add this to weapon stats (such as ‘Suicide Strike Resource Gain’) that hint at resource-gathering mechanics, and we might suspect that grindfest will wait once the game starts, amplifying the time-consuming trajectory already set by the battle pass’s insertion. If Kill The Justice League attempts to rely too heavily on grind and ‘looter-shooter’ elements, that will be another lesson not learned from Marvel’s Avengers or other similarly aimed games, like Anthem (which, in fairness, have Defenders here at the site).
Marvel’s Avengers was notorious for its grind – not only was it bad at launch, but the game may have sparked serious controversy when Crystal Dynamics decided, for reasons not yet known to science, to make the game equal. grinding After launch by making the XP requirements for certain levels greater.
Anthem had similar issues, with its loot drops being so stingy that players were already demanding a refund for a bug that made it drop more generously in the game. Both flop games had the same issue, yet it looks like Kill The Justice League might pick up where it left off. With the game’s current excerpts pitting the player against a group of faceless enemies as well as similar grinding systems, the comparisons to their live service counterparts only get more intense.
Kill The Justice League is almost certainly a grind-based service game, and it already feels a lot like Square Enix’s debacle of 2020. Even in a best-case scenario, which can happen given Rocksteady’s decent track record, Kill The Justice League will still have all the trappings. full of greed that held back Marvel’s Avengers.
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