Suicide Squid: Kill the Justice League

Bugger.

Well I was or wasn't convinced by the extremely amazing or extremely tedious gameplay.

It's released on my birthday. What a treat.

Previews coming out across the board all saying roughly the same thing. Guessing it'll be between a 5 and 7 out of 10 across the board when reviews drop.

The bit with Batman in the Batmuseum (lol) was pretty cool, but yeah, it was terrible. It’s a third person shooter with a DC skin. At least Avengers and Gotham Knights had the characters feel like the characters they’re portraying, but here everyone functioned the same, with just a unique animation to differentiate them. Also the alpha had you facing the same generic purple monster things ad infinitum.
I’ll wait for it to drop to $15 just for the story, but it’s not worth a full price purchase.

Screenshots of the UI been floating around and it really looks like that parody Elden Ring screenshot if developed by Ubisoft or something. I mean wtf is this



The fact that it comes out on the same day as P3 Remake, the gods of clean UI, is pretty funny.

The alpha test NDA has been lifted so if anyone wants to say how they got on no one is going to go after them.

I didn't play it so I've no opinion but I certainly didn't like the previews that came out this week.

They have shown a lot of gameplay with none of it so must have options on what you see.
If I get this I'll be making sure all that's switched off.

Finally I can escape my life of fear. Daren't go out in case I said anything out of turn. 

Honestly a lot of the previews sum it up. The world is stale and lifeless, side quests and even the main quests are as uninspired as can be. Enemy types are repetitive and mindless. Some also teleport away when you get close, usually above you meaning you have to go chase them again, it gets really grating if you're playing a non sniper character. The live service elements also clearly hurt the game design in other ways, like the bland "number go up" loot system. Controls also feel really unintuitive for a good while.

But having played a decent amount, I honestly did find the combat fun when it clicks. There's a combo system like the Arkham games and zipping around, countering, mixing in melee and racking up kills started to feel quite satisfying. Not anything groundbreaking, but I did launch the alpha here and there just to mess around doing that which I guess is a good sign.

Still won't be buying it any time soon though. Unfortunately all the other elements meant even the combat lost its charm just during the short time I played the alpha. The only real hope was the Alpha was intentionally pared back massively and kept basic but it doesn't seem like that's the case. It didn't feel like a game near release at all. Not because it was buggy, but because so much of the ideas were half baked. 

I don't remember the HUD being too messy but that screenshot above looks about right to me honestly. It gets much busier playing 4 player multiplayer and that is how it looks when you consider mission objectives and tutorials which are both on screen as well as an unspent talent points reminder. Never did figure out how the scores were calculated though. 

I do think at some point I will play it though no matter how it reviews. Said it before but it's such a damn shame when Rocksteady were one of my favourite devs.

I'm guessing they realised they went OTT with the amount of Riddles in Knight?

From the looks of it this has the same fundamental problem as the avengers game too, which is that it doesn't matter what characters you have, if you're making a co-op game like this then it by definition requires stripping away individuality and homogenising how the characters play and what they can do, because every piece of content has to be playable by each of the characters, and offer a similar level of challenge to each of them too. Hero shit is the worst choice for this kind of thing, because the GaaS structure hampers it even more than other properties because there's an inherent feeling that you're missing something.

Yeah, I'm still kind of interested in blasting through the story, but will wait until the dust has settled and it inevitably pops up on a service I'm subscribed to.

Makes me laugh that they're detailing post launch support with seasons/battle passes for a game that's definitely not GaaS.

This is the funny thing, it doesn't even need to be bad to fail. Anything less than blowing peoples tits off will just see a collective shrug because everyone is sick to the back teeth of games like this.