Highlights
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a departure from the Arkham games, with its live-service shooter gameplay that is vastly different from the action-adventure style of the Arkham titles.
- Most Arkham games have serviceable New Game Plus modes that lack replayability, and it would be a missed opportunity if Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn’t improve upon this aspect.
- As a live-service game, it’s unlikely that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will prioritize New Game Plus, and it may instead focus on post-launch content to keep players engaged in the long run.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League arrives in about a month and though leaks have already let loose a bunch of potential story details it is still exciting to see the newest chapter of the Arkhamverse nearly here. There’s no telling what Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will mean for the larger Arkhamverse in terms of what kind of game to expect Rocksteady to make afterward, but there’s also no real way Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League could iterate on the Arkham games since it’s as polar opposite as it could be.
As a live-service shooter, there’s not much in common the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League might have with Arkham titles’ action-adventure gameplay. Of course, not enough has been publicly shown to truly know if shooter combat and unique traversal are all players can anticipate, but it’s unlikely the gameplay will be as dynamic as Batman hacking comms frequencies, solving crime scenes using AR deductions, or taking out a room of thugs silently. However, if Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has a New Game Plus option, it has an opportunity to right one egregious wrong the Arkham games never rectified.
WB Games Montreal Deserves a Slice of the New Arkhamverse Pie
WB Games Montreal’s name is commonly and unjustly left out of the Arkhamverse conversation and it’s about time it returned to the franchise’s canon.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Has to Heal Old Arkhamverse Wounds
The Arkham Games All Have Subpar New Game Plus Modes
The primary issue with New Game Plus across all Arkham games is that it is fleeting. Players only get a single New Game Plus playthrough before having to start from scratch on a fresh file, meaning it isn’t infinitely replayable with New Game Plus perks, and New Game Plus runs cannot be reset.
To be fair, this wasn’t exactly a ubiquitous quality-of-life feature for New Game Plus modes a decade ago, but it’s still egregious due to a lot of collectible hunting throughout all of the Arkham games.
Each one would have felt far more gratifying to achieve full completion if players were rewarded with infinite New Game Plus’ thereafter, though Asylum is still the only Arkham game that made sense not including a New Game Plus mode in the first place since it’s a Metroidvania that relies entirely on gadgets retrieved for progression in an already short story.
It’s great to start New Game Plus runs in City, Origins, and Knight with some gadgets already unlocked, but they too have many gadgets or areas locked behind progression regardless of New Game Plus. That said, the worst offense is knowing that completing all of Riddler’s challenges and collecting all of his trophies isn’t a lasting satisfaction because players only get one New Game Plus run to enjoy the leisurely spoils of their hard work in a single save file.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Might Prioritize Live-Service Post-Launch Plans
Unfortunately, the nature of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League being a live-service game likely infers that New Game Plus won’t even be an option for the story campaign. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League does seem to be making a priority of its story thus far, but that won’t always be its emphasis and it’ll need to satisfy players in the long run, apparently in the way of seasonal content.
New Game Plus would certainly be a boon for replayability, especially if skills and the like carried over, but New Game Plus modes aren’t abundant or remarkable in live-service multiplayer games. Knowing how the Arkham games treated their own New Game Plus modes probably says everything it needs to, and if Rocksteady doesn’t feel like it needs to include one at all then it most likely won’t.
This would be a shame, though, because a New Game Plus mode for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League that is infinitely replayable would be a great correction of how New Game Plus modes have been back-burned in the Arkhamverse beforehand. Knight does include a fun trick to play on New Game Plus runs where Joker suddenly begins laughing during his cremation at the start of the game, too, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League could hopefully come up with more fun tricks like that.
