Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is ditching the dark streets of Gotham for the city of Metropolis, an open-world playground that switches up more than just the colour palate.
In an interview with 12DOVE, associate design director Johnny Armstrong discusses the new setting for the supervillain spin-off and how it's the perfect place to realise the vision the team had for the game.
Having worked on Gotham for so long with the Batman Arkham series, the chance of setting was something of a breath of fresh air for the developer. "It was great to try something new," Armstrong says. "We knew [Gotham] like the back of our hand… but it's dark, it's dreary. It's rainy. It's Gothic. And it is nighttime all the time. So to be able to work on Metropolis was really exciting."
This sprawling city allowed the team at Rocksteady to offer an entirely new experience far removed from its Batman-focused offerings. "We knew we wanted to do something which would feel distinct from Gotham," Armstrong explains. "We wanted to have really, really fast pace traversal. Verticality is a hallmark of Metropolis anyway, so we've got the different districts and whatnot. So they organically came together."
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was originally due out in 2022 before it was pushed back to 2023 and then delayed some more to eventually land on a release date of February 2, 2024. When Sefton Hill, creative director and co-founder of Rocksteady, broke the news of the initial delay back in March 2022, he acknowledged how frustrating this can be for fans but added that the extra development time was being put into "making the best game we can".
Fortunately, allowing for that extra time seems to have paid off. 12DOVE's own Jasmine Gould-Wilson recently went hands-on with the shooter and had a blast. "With its kinetic traversal systems and joyful, colorful chaos, it's a total juxtaposition to the games that came before," she says in our Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League preview. "Don't let that put you off, though – this is one anti-hero shooter that dares you to have an absurdly good time, and more than follows through on the promise."
