Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League released its final update today. Something a bit strange is that they released a really good quality of life feature by greatly reducing the XP needed for squad skill points. I was pretty surprised when I opened the game up and saw I now had 344 additional points to spend!
The strange thing is that they waited until the very last patch to change it so leveling up is much more frequent. But I guess better late than never. The episode itself was fully playable, so at least the game won’t be left totally broken in the years to come (though there’s still the annoying bug where the codex constantly highlights all entries like they’re new).
For the final fight against Brainiac, they actually changed things up some by having Flash and Green Lantern out of their recovery pods and helping the squad fight against him. Instead of fighting just one Brainiac, you fight the final three Brainiacs one after the other, which reuse Flash, Green Lantern, and Superman’s boss fights once more.
And now we get to the ending. It is a comic book style cutscene like they used for each episode’s intro, with just Harley Quinn narrating what happened. It’s clear that they couldn’t finish a fully animated cutscene and so that’s what they did. A lot of people are complaining about it, but I have no idea why they would expect a fully animated cutscene when they didn’t even finish the one for Deathstroke last episode. Frankly I’m kinda surprised the game actually did have a conclusion and wasn’t just left incomplete. The leakers said there was Kevin Conroy lines recorded for the post launch, but they’re nowhere to be seen. I’ll be generous and assume that Rocksteady couldn’t finish the cutscene and implement the lines, not that the leakers lied for clout. You also get a little group picture of the squad at the end.
So what events happen in the ending? Well, Superman and Batman are shown to be alive. It’s confirmed that the evil Justice League who we kill in the main game were actually clones (even though other stuff implied they were the real ones who were then revived). The real Justice League get to work on setting things right, except for Wonder Woman who remains dead. The squad hacks their nanite bombs, escapes from Waller, hijacks the Skull Ship, and goes off to explore the Elseworlds. Lex Luthor runs for Senator for some reason. And the final iteration of Brainiac is not killed, but taken into Waller’s custody. So Brainiac might still be a villain in a future game.
As for the future of the Arkhamverse, who knows. The ending certainly does leave a lot of room for where Rocksteady could go if they do a game after this in the timeline. A Justice League game about them trying to regain the public’s trust and dealing with their trauma of being captured and experimented on by Brainiac. A solo game with Flash, Green Lantern, or Superman who had great designs and good characterizations. A Wonder Woman game where she was resurrected and has to learn how to be a hero again. Suicide Squad 2 focused on the Squad exploring the multiverse (ha). Or the most likely thing, making another Batman Arkham game to win the public’s favor back.
As for me, I enjoyed it and don’t regret the 266 hours I spent on the game. While it’s quite flawed, I still think the negative response to it was overblown, especially ridiculous stuff like it was disrespectful to Kevin Conroy, it’s not worth it even when free with PS Plus, it failed because of wokeness, or that it killed the Arkhamverse. In the future though, I don’t think I’ll grind all the episodes again, probably just replay the main story every once in a while. It is satisfying at least to see my fully completed codex!
Rocksteady does deserve credit though, especially on delivering the offline mode. They could have easily abandoned the game early, but they did stick it out and at least somewhat completed the game. They had a lot more planned for these seasons which was scrapped, but they delivered on all of the publicly promised stuff which is more than can be said for other game studios. I’m sure after the long troubled development and hugely negative reception a lot of the devs at Rocksteady are glad to be done with it and move on to other things. I’m optimistic about whatever their next project is, at the very least this game was an educational tool on what not to do. Hopefully before their next game releases the studio heads don’t jump ship to avoid backlash like Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker did.