Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

A beloved studio's follow-up to one of gaming's most respected trilogies

Rocksteady Studios built one of the most trusted reputations in the industry with the Batman: Arkham trilogy — Asylum, City and Knight are still regularly cited among the best superhero games ever made, praised for atmosphere, combat feel and genuine respect for their source material. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was the studio's long-awaited follow-up, first announced at DC FanDome in 2020, and the gap between that pedigree and how the game actually landed is central to why its reception became one of 2024's defining gaming stories. One detailed review captures the specific heartbreak directly: a player with more than 1,300 hours across the Arkham trilogy writing that they "have a hard time believing this game is made by the same Rocksteady."

A critical and commercial gap too wide to ignore

The numbers alone tell an unusual story. Critics landed the game at 60 on Metacritic — mediocre, but not catastrophic. Players rated it 3.8 out of 10 on the same site, a genuinely severe score that reflects far more than ordinary disappointment. Part of that gap traces to a specific, widely reported decision: Warner Bros. withheld review codes from outlets until after the game's servers went live, meaning no independent critical assessment existed in the world before players themselves started posting their own reactions — a choice reported at the time as a deliberate attempt to control the initial narrative, whatever the game's actual quality turned out to be.

What followed was a genuinely widespread, though never conclusively resolved, controversy over the review numbers themselves. Multiple top-voted Steam reviews, several with vote counts in the thousands, allege that negative reviews were being actively removed to inflate the visible positive percentage — one citing a specific 84% figure they call impossible to square with the game's own visibly declining player counts. Steam's own systems make mass review deletion at that scale a technically disputed claim, and no independent investigation conclusively confirmed it either way. What isn't in dispute is how loudly and specifically players were making the accusation, in numbers large enough that Steam's review page for this game carries some of the highest individual vote counts this library has recorded anywhere — a single review sits at just under 6,000 votes, another close behind it.

What the game actually asks you to do

Set the numbers dispute aside, and the specific gameplay complaints are consistent and concrete. The core loop — travel to a location, complete an escort, kill, protect or destroy objective, sit through a cutscene, repeat with the occasional modifier — is described by reviewer after reviewer as wearing thin well before the campaign's midpoint, a structure that reads as a generic live-service shooter template applied to characters and a studio capable of much more. Boss encounters draw particularly sharp criticism, with multiple reviews calling major fights against Justice League members disappointing rather than the dramatic confrontations the premise promises. Movement and traversal are the one area where genuine praise survives consistently — flying and grappling across Metropolis has real kinetic appeal, several reviewers say, even as they criticise almost everything built around it.

Monetisation compounded the frustration for a full-price release. A seasonal battle pass and separately sold cosmetics sitting inside a NZ$119.95 game struck many reviewers as a mismatch on principle, live-service monetisation layered onto a purchase price that already matched or exceeded most premium single-player releases. The game's own subsequent history settled that argument in practice rather than just opinion: live content support concluded with Season 4 in January 2025, eleven months after launch — a strikingly short run for a game built around ongoing seasonal content — and Suicide Squad now regularly appears on storefronts at a 95% discount, a concrete, verifiable marker of how the commercial bet actually played out.

A concession that arrived after the argument was already lost

Season 4's offline mode deserves acknowledgment on its own terms, since it's a genuine, concrete response to one of the launch's specific complaints — the always-online requirement that made the game unplayable during connectivity issues or server maintenance, a real point of friction for players who'd expected a substantially single-player-capable experience given the source material and the studio's history. Letting the full campaign and seasonal content run offline is exactly the kind of change a live-service game should make when a persistent-connection requirement stops making practical sense. The timing undercuts how much credit it can reasonably claim, though: it arrived in the same season announced as the game's last, meaning the fix for one of the launch's loudest complaints doubled as an admission that ongoing live support wasn't continuing regardless. It's a genuinely useful change for anyone picking the game up today, but it reads less like course-correction than like a studio converting a dying live-service game into the offline experience it perhaps should have been from the start.

Verdict

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is, by nearly every available measure, one of 2024's most significant disappointments — not simply a mediocre game, but a specific, well-documented collapse of trust between a beloved studio and the audience that followed it here from the Arkham trilogy. The movement and combat retain flashes of what made Rocksteady's reputation, but the repetitive structure, tonally mismatched writing, aggressive full-price monetisation and a critic-versus-player reception gap serious enough to fuel unresolved manipulation allegations all point the same direction. The game's own eleven-month content lifespan and current 95% discount have already delivered the verdict the review scores argued about at launch. Approach it, if at all, purely for the movement feel at a steep discount, and treat any full-price purchase as a bet against evidence the market itself has already settled.