izigame.me

Needs More Than A Price Drop

I got Suicide Squad the last time it was 80% off and although I've had SOME fun, I wouldn't really say it was worth it even at a budget price.
The core combat is definitely the best part, which is the bulk of the gameplay. Movement is generally very good and with a bit of practice you can zip, slide and fly around while shooting all at once. Once you settle on the character you enjoy most and get them leveled up it can be pretty addicting just charging from fight to fight. I like that even reloading has a dynamic element of getting faster reloads for timing them right. The endgame has some endless levels where the enemies slowly ramp up their stats as your increase your body count that can be a fun challenge.
Despite the "squad" focus, I feel like the game works fine for single-player. I've only played with others a couple of times and it didn't feel that much different than with bots other than human players seem to take longer to revive you vs. bots who are programmed to just come and pick you up once you're down. Maybe if I was part of well oiled full team instead of just having fun with a random single player I'd notice a bigger difference but I don't feel like I'm missing much playing on my own.
But the further you get away from the main combat, the worse things get. The attempts to introduce variation to make things less repetitive actually make fighting less fun. Collect dropped bits to toss at a weakpoint, guard a certain spot until a timer finishes, use the game's one and only vehicle to kill enemies, it all just feels like hoop jumping. You're not allowed to just enjoy slaughtering enemies during these parts, you gotta make time for these cliched objectives that unlike the combat, have no real novelty or thought put into them.
The level up system is very basic. Each character has their own unique skill trees, but on said trees you're only allowed to spend one point per each tier. You must then spend another point in the next tree, and the next before cycling back to the first one. It's a lot of excess to make the skill system look more complicated when it's very linear. Even more linear than the Arkham games which didn't have a complicated skill system either. Some tiers don't even have a choice, just one skill you MUST pick.
The equipment system though offers a lot more freedom. There's a lot of potential to make some busted builds and I've managed to cobble together some pretty satisfying ones myself, but it felt like it took a lot more work than it should have. Poor UI and weird design choices drag out what should be otherwise simple. You've got the standard colored tier levels for rarity but then you got pink "nefarious" gear which has unique bonuses and red "infamy" gear that have bonuses that get stronger for using more pieces from its specific set.
It took me a while to realize that each infamy set has three COMPLETELY different sets of bonuses based on the numbered tier AND what villain it belongs to. There's no in-game database listing all the gear effects you see, you just got to look at EVERY item individually to see what they do. The game throws weapons and mods at you for everything you do so eventually you'll hit your cap meaning you'll have to constantly store or break things down to make room for more. If you don't, every bit of new loot gets stored in their own individual emails you must click on to claim to add ANOTHER clunky system onto the already bad inventory management.
And beyond those issues is this is still a very buggy and poorly optimized game, even six months past launch. I've been running the game on the lowest settings and still getting crashes fairly often. There's no easy way to quit missions and sometimes closing the game bugs out my weird online ID in a way that seemingly locks me out of the server for several hours. Sometimes you just can't get logged INTO the server at all and you MUST be logged on at all times, even when you're by yourself because this is an ALWAYS ONLINE game.
It's also a "live-service" game, but they've botched that so bad that the only way you'd notice if there's a costume you REALLY want that costs extra. They're still pushing out updates for these "seasonal" content additions, which suggests the dev team is being mandated to prioritize new content over fixes and improvements. And the in-game UI for the "episodes" at the time of writing this shows we're not even half-way through this weird multiverse adventure. Assuming things continue at the rate they are and they just don't pull the plug in the future, it'll be probably 9 months before they're done with the add-ons, which means it'll be that long before FIXES and OPTIMIZATION can be the priority.
They are doing bug fixes with the updates, but the notes for the last update clarify a previous fix wasn't retroactive and so they just UNLOCKED a bunch of in-game audiologs for the first three episodes cause they couldn't figure out an actual fix. And the unlock requirements for the audiologs for the most current two episodes have bugged out on me so I'm stuck waiting for a future fix to presumably just unlock them for me cause glitchy Riddler content (yes, he's back again...) is impossible to count for some reason.
I don't got a lot to say about the story because it's a mess lots of other people have already covered from different angles. The short version is you got numerous conflicting scripts and concepts all hastily cut and pasted together to form a schizophrenic trainwreck. Someone clearly really liked the Justice League. There's a lot of weight put into the scenes of them being used and mind-controlled by Brainiac... then someone else was asked to write bad jokes for the Squad to be annoying DURING these scenes, if even that. A long fight between Wonder Woman and Superman has the Squad standing around doing NOTHING for like three minutes, probably because they weren't even intended to be in that scene.
Although there's a LOT to take issue with, I'd say the biggest problem with the story is the Squad are just unfunny and awful. Harley and Boomerang are both just brash, dumb, losers with no redeeming qualities. Deadshot really isn't any better. He has a daughter he'll barely mention and a facade of being a "professional" that drops all the time to show he's as petty an stupid as the others.
King Shark is the only bright spot. He was effectively raised in prison and is very well educated but has little outside experience, which is mildly amusing. He's also the only who notes the cruel irony in having to kill heroes who actually SAVED the Squad just earlier in the game. The story would still be a mess, but if they populated the squad with more semi-likeable people who can occasionally be funny, that would have gone a long way to salvaging this mess.
You CAN unlock additional characters but this is part of the "seasons" set after the main plot, so none of these new people can interact with the main plot. There is a new plot of rescuing the Justice League, whom apparently weren't completely dead or something? But these have VERY few cutscenes, most of which are narrated concept art, so this part of the "story" feels like an afterthought.
EDIT: Well they've since released the fourth and apparent FINAL season. There clearly WAS going to be two more as evidenced by the big board with 12 Brainiacs to kill (2 per season) but Deathstroke just killed two off-screen and in the final update you kill 3 in one battle, which since Brainiac fights have three stages doesn't feel different from killing one.
The final "cutscene" is concept art narrated exclusively by Harley at her most annoying, wrecking the tiny bit of catharsis we might have gotten from saving Batman and Superman... also Wonder Woman is just dead for real. Guess we can't have her upstaging the literal clown show that is Harley Quinn.
There has been one small post-content patch for bug fixes. Hopefully not the last.