Kotaku called Suicide Squad a 'damn good shooter.' Rocksteady's live service lasted 346 days.

Let's start with the numbers that matter. Batman: Arkham Asylum — 92 Metacritic. Arkham City — 96. Arkham Knight — 87. That's Rocksteady Studios' pre-Suicide Squad track record: three consecutive games, three of the highest scores in action-game history, zero asterisks. Then Kotaku published their review of the studio's live service pivot. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League scored a 70 from critics and a 40 from players. Peak Steam concurrent: 13,459. Kotaku's assessment: "A damn good third-person shooter." The math ain't mathing.

Here's what makes the review structurally interesting as a document: Zwiezen calls it "a damn good third-person shooter" in the body and "just okay, fine, not amazing, not a trainwreck" in the conclusion. Same reviewer, same game, same article — direct contradiction of its own thesis. The game is simultaneously "damn good" and "just okay." That's not nuance. That's a reviewer who couldn't decide what they were reviewing and submitted it anyway. Meanwhile, the "bland" live service missions flagged as a caveat were 90% of all content a paying customer would ever see. That's not a caveat. That's the product.

Now the outcome column. The final seasonal content update shipped in January 2025 — 346 days after launch, eleven days before the game's first birthday. Warner Bros. Discovery acknowledged the game fell "short of expectations" in earnings calls. Rocksteady, the studio behind three of the most acclaimed action games ever made, faced layoffs and restructuring. The live service model that the review softpedaled as mere "shenanigans" turned out to be the entire product. You cannot call a live service game "damn good" while also noting its live service is broken. Those two sentences cannot coexist. One of them is wrong, and the market voted.

The review is still live at that URL, timestamped February 3, 2024 — one day after launch, eight months before WB's earnings admission, eleven months before the servers went into maintenance-only mode. "Damn good" and "just okay" in the same article, for a game that would never reach its first birthday. Rocksteady made Arkham City. Then they made this. Kotaku's final verdict: fine. The math ain't mathing.