Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has struggled with its marketing campaign from the start, and that continued on Friday with streams featuring big content creators like DrLupo, Shroud and Tarik.
Things could have gone better.
The idea was that these talented shooter players were meant to demonstrate the endgame of Suicide Squad. However, as a sponsored stream there apparently was little time for them to actually prep before this, and the players, through no fault of their own, often struggled with basic systems, like Shroud not knowing you could overcharge a jet pack to move faster, meaning he was crawling the entire time.
At another point, Poison Ivy disappeared from the cutscene she was in, a lovely bug showcased to thousands of people who were giving the gameplay pretty mixed reviews in chat. There remain consistent complaints about how cluttered and chaotic the UI is, which has been a frequent point brought up from the start.
For what it’s worth, there was at least some interesting information revealed about the endgame itself, including Elseworlds missions in alternate dimensions, endgame armor sets for build synergies and an infinite paragon system. But it feels like the preparation for a stream like this was simply not there, and these players should have been given way more time to familiarize themselves with the core systems of the game. Though by the end, it felt like they had gotten more of the hang of it.
It is absolutely bizarre that the one positive bit of marketing in really the entire past year has been freeing NDA-ed alpha players to talk about the game, which was a far better preview than when they flew out gaming journalists and YouTubers to do a technically mangled preview for just a couple hours. Now, they tried to do a traditional sponsored stream with big names that attracted more negativity than anything.
The sense I’m getting from Suicide Squad at this point is that it feels like a game that may actually be quite fun when you get your hands on it, and its base campaign may be enjoyable. But marketing is marketing for a reason, and there’s every reason to expect poor marketing is a gateway to subpar initial sales and reception. Then, on top of that, this is a live service, so you can’t just be “pretty good,” you have to be actively great to keep people playing. So far, I am getting very, very strong Avengers vibes from all this, a game that could actually be very fun in parts, but suffered from lackluster marketing and ultimately collapsed as a live service, considered a failure.
As a hardcore looter person, I am desperately hoping that Suicide Squad is great, but it needs to be roughly 100 times better than its marketing campaign has been, that much is clear.
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