One of the boldest moves Rocksteady has ever made it exposed Suicide Squad game after years of rumors its subtitle: it will be a game about you, as players, fighting and being forced to kill DC's greatest heroes, before Braniac can puppeteer them to become his own deadly force of conquest. Then Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League really came out, and almost no one was happy. Now, weeks before its first anniversary, the live-service game is coming out with… well, not really a bang, and hardly a whimper.
The base version of the Kill the Justice League climaxing with the deaths of Superman and Wonder Woman, as the titular team prepares themselves for Brainiac's defeat and the realization that there are dozens of alternate realities with their own Brainiacs under threat for them to save, which sets up the game's live-service. structure for the coming months. But then Kill the Justice League faced a critical drubbing and heavy sales, leaving Rocksteady scrambling to offer fixes alongside planned future content launches—content that ended this week in the eighth and final major update of game, just two weeks before the game celebrates its first anniversary . That would not be great if Kill the Justice League stuck with any kind of landing, but instead, the final content of its story revealed that the whole thing was some kind of pointless hoax.
The story content of this week's eighth episode concludes with the defeat of the final variant of Braniac in the multiverse at the hands of Taskforce X… with a little extra help from Superman and Batman, who appear unscathed in the events of main game. Rather, those deaths—which ignited a sea of controversy at the time, when it was believed Kevin Conroy's portrayal of Batman in Kill the Justice League was his last posthumously released performance as the Dark Knight—that of the clones.
On the one hand, players who actually stick around shouldn't be surprised—previous updates saw Harley, Captain Boomerang, King Shark, and Deadshot free Green Lantern and Flash from Braniac's clutches after their apparent deaths , which travels to alternate worlds and puts them in stasis, so the revelation that Batman and Superman are also clones comes as no surprise. And yet, it means that the players who are standing next to it Kill the Justice League at its lowest point was rewarded with the realization that they didn't really get to, well, kill the Justice League. The only casualty at the end of it all was actually Wonder Woman, who evaded Braniac's mind control in the initial game, only to be killed by (the newly revealed to be a clone) Superman.
And so, Suicide Squad Taskforce X and the Justice League end up going their separate ways: the League is left to atone for “their” crimes by tracking down the multiverse to end any remaining threat of Braniac, and the Suicide Squad, freed from the -embed explosive by Amanda Waller, finding their own little pocket of the multiverse to celebrate and hang out. But to end it all this way—an animated slideshow cutscene and a casual, nonsensical explanation from Harley Quinn via voice over covering the clone revealed halfway through—speaks to how sad a conclusion it all is. this, for what is meant to be the long-awaited future of Batman Arkham universe.
At least there are some heroes alive today that they can carry on, should that future ever come?
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