Summary

• Joker's story content is disappointingly short, with little new material, making the grind to unlock him frustrating.
• Most of Season 1's content seems to be a reskin, offering little new gameplay or story to entice players to stick around.
• The lack of substantial new content post-unlocking Joker is a major drawback, with no indication of improvement in future seasons.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's Joker-centric Season 1 content launched on March 28, and with the base game facing an extreme player dropoff in the nearly two-month period since its launch, those who did purchase the game, or stuck with it in that time, hoped the Joker content would breathe some new life into it after its endgame content was criticized for becoming repetitive with just a handful of missions, or the option to replay the story content again. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League peaked on Steam with 13,459 concurrent players around its launch in early February but fell to an average 24-hour peak of under 1000 concurrent players since, sometimes dipping well below 500. The Season 1 launch did bring it up to over 3000 for the first time in nearly 2 months, but this rapidly fell off again within a day (via SteamDB).

[Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League]

The roap for Season 1 promised plenty of new content, from new weapons, a new map, new incursions and strongholds, "and more" alongside the much-promoted playable Joker. With trailers heavily focusing on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's Joker, and Rocksteady talking about how different he would be from the previous Arkhamverse Joker - who died in Batman: Arkham City, but returned via Batman's hallucinations in Batman: Arkham Knight - it's understandable that players would have expected some new story content to show this off, and really get to know a bit more about Joker's world as Task Force X embarks on their mission to recruit and save him from Brainiac.

Joker's "Story" Content Lasts Roughly 6 Minutes

But There Is New Dialogue In Old Locations And A Collection Of Interview Tapes

Recap videos such as the one shared by Ben-Gun on YouTube show that the entirety of Joker's story cutscenes come to a total of six minutes and 17 seconds. Upon loading up Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, regardless of whether the new seasonal content is selected or not, a motion comic-esque animation will play with the new Joker narrating a recap of how Brainiac invaded his world, captured him, and terraformed it much as he did with Lex 2's Earth. This recap sets up the idea that players would spend plenty of time exploring this new Joker-world as they work on a way to free the new Clown Prince of Crime, as per Amanda Waller's orders.

Sadly, this isn't the case, as the game simply has Waller telling Task Force X over radio comms that she wants the Joker brought in, and the only other cutscenes - this time one more in line with the others seen in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's campaign - takes place when they begin and end their fight with the Brainiac on that Elseworld, and bring Joker to the Hall of Justice. Upon bringing Joker in, players get a glimpse at his character as he shoots up a bunch of A.R.G.U.S. agents before saying "Wait... we don't shoot these guys here?" and willingly injects himself with a nanobomb after creeping out the rest of Task Force X with his tales of how he killed his version of the Suicide Squad because he "truly cared about them".

Most of this cutscene was shown in the promotional footage for Joker already, so there's very little that's new here for players who have been following the game. There are some unique pieces of dialogue if Joker interacts with other playable characters in the new holding cell within the Hall of Justice, or the Squad and A.R.G.U.S agents situated there. Upon re-visiting "The Batman Experience" within the Metropolis History Museum, Joker will also comment on the following:

• His version of Arkham Asylum.
• Harley's outfit from Batman: Arkham Asylum.
• The concept of turning Gotham's low-income neighborhoods into a prison in Batman: Arkham City.
• Batman: Arkham City's version of Deadshot, who he calls "Problematic".
• The death of the Arkhamverse's Joker.
• Scarecrow in the Batman: Arkham Knight exhibition.
• The Arkham Knight character, whom Joker describes as having "a face for crowbars".
• The fake death of Bruce Wayne, where he comments on Batman's name.
• The story of Batman ing the Justice League, and the end of the tour, where Joker proclaims that he wants to visit the gift shop.

There are also eight unlockable interview tapes for Joker. As with other characters throughout Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and every Batman: Arkham game before it, these are designed to give some insight into the character's past. The Season 1 interview tapes focus on the new Joker interacting with Amanda Waller and Rick Flag as the duo take turns trying to learn more about what he saw while in captivity aboard Brainiac's Skull Ship.

Just Unlocking Joker Is A Massive Grind

For Those Who Don't Want To Spend $10

For as little Joker content as there is, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League sure does make players work for it. The mission Rescue the Joker only becomes available when players reach the Fear rank level 35. To reach this, players must grind through previous levels and incursions with a new Joker redesign. Playing each Incursion level on the highest difficulty, "Sweating Bullets" essentially gives players 1 Fear rank, so they have to play them 35 times to get anywhere.

This alone is repetitive, but players also have to get enough Promethium to unlock those missions. If they didn't have plenty already banked from playing the game previously, this creates a further grind to get the in-game currency required to "pay" to unlock the Incursions at around 1000 Promethium per-mission.

Promethium can be acquired by killing Red Cargonauts, opening Caches scored from destroying Carrier Drones, playing side missions and Squad missions, and playing the horde-mode-type Killing Time mission (which itself takes 500 Promethium to unlock). Players can also go through the tasks on the Raising Hell checklist to unlock Promethium and other resources.

Once players do grind their way to Fear rank 35 and unlock the Rescue the Joker mission, they are faced with one of the game's most difficult boss fights yet. This sees Brainiac taking the form of Green Lantern, much as he did with Flash at the end of the main game. As with the standard Green Lantern boss fight, players must destroy constructs to drop Brainiac's shields to make him vulnerable to attacks, and this time, Toyman and Hack the team in doing so.

The problem is that Brainiac throws everything in his arsenal at his players constantly, with nearly every enemy type being armored, several helicopters often flying overhead at once bombarding players from above. Even when Brainiac is vulnerable, each hit only seems to knock one or two percent off his health bar regardless of how powerful the weapons being used are, making him a bullet sponge and dragging out the fight for longer, even when dropped to lower difficulties.

At times, it feels like Warner Bros and Rocksteady are almost encouraging players to give up and pay the extra $10 in the in-game store to unlock Joker immediately. Joker is fun to play as once he's unlocked, especially for those who like to take out their enemies with aerial assaults, but if anyone does pay the $10 to unlock him, it just feels like rewarding the studio for intentionally frustrating and repetitive game design with very little new content on show.

Most Of Season 1's New Content Is A Reskin

Same Missions, Just With Some New Joker Decor

It's clear that the Brainiac boss battles are reskins of previous Justice League fights, albeit much harder, and the mid-season update will see Brainiac taking on the form of Superman. With only four Justice League fights in the game, it's unclear how future seasonal content plans to portray Brainiac's boss fights, as there's only Batman left, who is just a very skilled mortal, so his DNA won't give Brainiac anything new in the way of superpowers.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the game's Season 1 content seems to be a reskin too. The "Elseworlds Mayhem map" feels the same as Lex-2's crumbling, terraformed world, but with some Joker-themed buildings, and while it's clear what these "new Incursions" mentioned in the roap are because of the Joker re-design, players would be forgiven if they thought the "new Strongholds" d were cut from the game or pushed to the mid-season update instead.

As it turns out, Strongholds are a further reskin of the one-off, open-world missions involving anti-aircraft guns and bomb buses that already existed during Season Zero. It isn't made clear within the game that these will be referred to as "Strongholds" going forward, but Forbes' Paul Tassi shared screenshots from the official Suicide Squad Discord that confirmed this is the case.

Therefore, what's left to do after grinding to unlock the Joker? Nothing except retread the same levels as before with a fresh lick of paint, just to work through 76 tiers of the Battle to acquire new content. There's no post-unlock Joker story content yet, and while one would hope this could come in the second part of the season, there likely won't be anything of substance other than the confirmed reskin of the Superman boss fight if it's anything like the first half.

One of the main complaints about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's endgame was that there wasn't much to do, with it simply consisting of replaying a handful of levels, resulting in many players just leaving the game behind. For a game already on an abysmal player count, the way Season 1 has been handled isn't going to encourage those few remaining players to come back for future characters. With many already deeming Season 1 "lazy", and Warner Bros. Discovery already expressing disappointment in the game's performance, it feels unlikely that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will survive past its first year unless there are some major improvements in future seasons.

Sources: SteamDB, Ben-Gun/YouTube, Paul Tassi/X