One of Rocksteady’s boldest moves was when exposed her Suicide Squad game after years of rumors was its subtitle: this will be a game about you, as the players, fighting and being forced to kill DC’s best heroes, before Braniac can turn them into his own deadly occupying force. Then Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League actually came out, and almost nobody was happy. Now, weeks before its first anniversary, the live service game is coming out with… well, not quite a bang, and hardly a whimper.
Basic version Kill the Justice League climaxed with the deaths of Superman and Wonder Woman alike, as the titular team prepared for Brainiac’s defeat and the realization that there were dozens and dozens of alternate realities with their own Brainiacs under threat to save them, setting up a live service in the structure game for the coming months. But then Kill the Justice League faced critical crashes and dire sales, leaving Rocksteady scrambling to offer fixes in addition to a planned rollout of future content—content that came to an end this week with the game’s eighth and final major update, just two weeks before the game celebrates its first anniversary . That would be not-so-great if it did Kill the Justice League he stuck any kind of landing, but instead, the content of his final story revealed that the whole thing was a senseless hoax.
The story content of this week’s episode eight concludes with the defeat of the last Braniac variant in the multiverse at the hands of Taskforce X… with some extra help from Superman and Batman, who it turns out were not killed during the events of the main game. Instead, those deaths—which caused a sea of controversy at the time, when it was believed that Kevin Conroy portrays Batman in Kill the Justice League would be his last posthumously published performance as the Dark Knight—if they were clones.
On the one hand, players who actually stuck around shouldn’t be surprised – previous updates have seen Harley, Captain Boomerang, King Shark and Deadshot already free Green Lantern and Flash from Braniac’s clutches after their apparent deaths, traveling to alternate worlds and putting them in stasis, so the revelation that Batman and Superman were also clones isn’t that surprising. And yet, it means that the players who stood on the sidelines Kill the Justice League at their lowest points they were rewarded with the knowledge that they never actually managed to, well, kill the Justice League. The only casualty at the end of all this is actually Wonder Woman, who escaped Braniac’s mind control in the initial game, only to be killed by (newly revealed to be a clone) Superman.
And so, Suicide Squad ends with Taskforce X and the Justice League going their separate ways: the League is left to atone for “their” crimes by overseeing the multiverse to end any lingering threats from the Defenders, and the Suicide Squad, freed from the explosives planted by Amanda Waller, find their own little pocket of the multiverse in which you can go celebrate and hang out. But to end it this way—an animated cut-scene slideshow and Harley Quinn’s casual, flippant explanation via voiceover covering the clone reveal in half a line—speaks to what a poor conclusion this all turned out to be, for what should have been a long-awaited future. Batman Arkham universe.
At least now there are living heroes for everyone to go on, if that future ever arrives?
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