Why our Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League review will be late

Suicide Squad early access has just started (Picture: Warner Bros.)

GameCentral explains the situation with Suicide Squad review copies and why their late arrival doesn’t necessarily mean the game’s no good.

It’s four months now, since the debacle surrounding Bethesda’s refusal to send out review copies of Starfield to certain outlets in the UK, including us, apparently in an attempt to limit the number of negative reviews at launch. But part of the reason it caused such a furore is because of how unique a situation it was.

It’s not particularly uncommon for publishers to withhold review copies until the last moment but usually everyone is treated in the same way. That seems to be what is going on with Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which we’ve only just received (two) review copies for. As far as we understand, everyone else is in the same boat, so unless the game turns out to be unexpectedly short we’re not going to have a review ready for the launch on Friday.

Unlike Bethesda, publisher Warner Bros. has been quite communicative through all this, so we were prepared for this eventuality and have already stocked up on Red Bull, in order to play it tonight and get you a review in progress for sometime tomorrow.

As ever, publishers are under no obligation to send anyone review copies, before or after launch, but this sort of situation usually always means the same thing: the publisher has no faith in the game getting positive reviews.

However, Suicide Squad is an online-only game, even when played solo, and the explanation we were given is that the servers didn’t switch on until today (at the same time those that had paid for the Deluxe Edition were given early access). That is quite possibly true, and certainly has been for online-only games in the past.

Quite why Suicide Squad is online-only is a different question, and there’s already been reports of a serious bug that prevents early access if you have the Deluxe Edition, so if we experience that problem we won’t be able to say anything about the game tomorrow.

We haven’t played the game before and while we were as unimpressed by the early gameplay videos as everyone else it’s worth remembering that this is by Rocksteady Games, creators of the Batman: Arkham games. In fact, as far as we understand, it’s a direct story sequel to Arkham Knight – even if it doesn’t seem that way from the trailers.

So, as fans of those games and DC Comics in general (DCEU excepted) we’re going to go into the game with open minds, with the hope that we’ll be pleasantly surprised. Obviously, we’re aware that a lot of the US previews have been negative but hopefully playing the completed game, from beginning to end, will reveal the game’s not quite the dud that many already assume it to be.

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