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Rocksteady Games has built a strong reputation from the Batman Arkham games, and the developer has sought to take those concepts to the next level with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. This co-op third-person shooter can be a lot of fun, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing due to a slew of bad design decisions and other miscellaneous annoyances.
But the only aspect where Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League manages to impress is the image. Created with Epic’s Unreal engine, Suicide Squad flaunts high production values in its environments and character models, but what’s really under the hood? How does it harness the power of 9th generation machines and how does the game scale across platforms?
With this technical analysis, we try to answer these questions, break down individual aspects of the game and evaluate them with a critical eye along with a performance profile on both PC and PS5.
game engine
As mentioned above, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is using Epic’s Unreal Engine for its rendition of Metropolis. More specifically, Unreal Engine 4 is used, which may come as a surprise considering it’s exclusive to current-gen consoles, but the team seems to have made good use of the features available to create a visually competent experience of the current generation
The decision to go with Unreal Engine 4 instead of 5 also helps keep the baseline a bit lower, which should allow for a more optimized experience on a wide variety of PC specs. Everything from the world streaming technology to character models and post-processing effects looks pretty competent from a 9th-gen perspective, despite being based on an older version of the engine.
Character models
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League features some very detailed character models that boast fairly high poly counts. The skin meshes are very complex, and the clothes these characters wear are also made up of physics-based materials that react appropriately to light and sway with your quick movements.
Characters like King Shark show off some impressive details on the material side of things. The implementation of the hair physics is nothing short of spectacular, but the rendering of the hair itself is quite fantastic with impressive levels of hair density per model. You can obviously notice artifacts along fine edges if you really zoom in on the details, but overall the character models look great from a visual standpoint.
Similar quality efforts seem to have been made in the animation department as well, where we can see an excellent translation of the actors’ motion captures into the game’s character models. The skin meshes react to the movement of the lips and eyebrows, and the actor’s subtle movements also look quite sharp in cinematics.
environments
Like any other game of its kind, the macro-level detail of the open world is just as important as the attention paid to the micro-level of presentation. In the event that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice Leaguethe open world looks stunning from a visual perspective, but it just doesn’t have the substance to make players want to explore every corner of this huge map, but that’s not the point of this discussion.
On a technical level, the assets used in the environments are of a fairly high quality. Whether it’s the many buildings scattered across the map, the occasional roof garden grass or cobbled roads, Suicide Squad has some great looking assets that react to light and cast appropriately detailed shadows.
In terms of world streaming, Rocksteady makes great use of the increased memory of current-gen consoles to render large chunks of the map at once. The draw distance is quite high and the level of detail of distant objects is also very good, which is perhaps why we see such sparse use of volumetric fog to represent a sense of scale in the world. Level-of-detail swapping also works pretty well, and we didn’t notice any pop-ups or other signs of artifacting in our testing on both platforms.
Lighting and reflections
Shifting gears to lighting, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League doesn’t appear to use ray tracing for global lighting in the PS5 version. Instead, it appears to be using some sort of global screen-space lighting to illuminate its scenes which works well enough for the most part. As it turns out, the indirect lighting is pretty rudimentary, but it doesn’t really matter much in the heat of constant battle.
The same story continues with the reflections side of things as well, where we can see a screen space style implementation on consoles. The reflections are also updated in sync with the frame rate and look pretty good in action.
Furthermore, the intensity of the reflections also depends on the material it is placed on, so rougher materials such as concrete would obviously not reflect their surroundings as accurately as, for example, glass panels coated with a whole building Suicide Squad he also seems to be using additional cinematic lights throughout the game which add some depth to the scenes and the extra shadows cast from these lights help really bring out the detail in the character models.
PC configuration and test bench specifications
In addition to the PS5 version, we also took some time to test Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League on PC. Our test bench consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, Nvidia RTX 308Ti and 32GB of RAM, which is well above what the game recommends.
Taking a quick look at the settings menu, we have a fairly simple presentation where you have a dozen sliders ranging from shadow quality to scaling and highlights and more. It doesn’t show any comparison screenshots or the impact of the settings on system memory, so it definitely leaves something to be desired.
That said, Suicide Squad offers support for modern upscaling techniques like DLSS and FSR2, so it includes all the essential features and sliders, but nothing more. Given our test specs, we were able to crank up the game’s settings with ray-tracing reflections enabled, and ran the game at 4K with DLSS enabled.
Differences between PC and PS5 versions
Suicide Squad it retains the same base presentation on both PC and PS5, but ray tracing on PC helps create more realistically lit scenes, and indirect reflections look much better as a result. Asset quality is mostly the same on both platforms, but the PC version looks sharper, which could be a result of the higher upscaling of DLSS compared to what looks like an FXAA-based solution or TAA on PS5.
Draw distance, particle effects, and character models feature the same level of detail on both platforms, so there isn’t too much of a difference between the two versions. That said, it’s pretty strange that Suicide Squad on PS5 doesn’t have any graphics modes to choose from; there’s only a standard 60fps performance mode and that’s about it.
Performance, load time and conclusion
As mentioned above, the decision to go with Unreal Engine 4 instead of 5 offers a huge performance benefit, and we’re happy to report that. Suicide Squad it works quite well on both of our test platforms. The PS5 version is able to maintain its framerate in a solid way, and while there are occasional drops here and there, it’s a pretty consistent experience for the most part. Even on PC, we kept VSync enabled and the game was able to continue smoothly even during intense encounters.
As for load times, the game takes about 10 seconds to load a save on our PS5, which isn’t too long but isn’t too impressive either. We saw similar results on PC, which also took 13-14 seconds to queue up with bots and load into a save, which makes me suspect that the developer probably didn’t optimize the game for to the PS5 SSD or the Windows DirectStorage API.
In conclusion, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a great game that makes good use of Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 to create realistic character models and a visually appealing open world.
Source: gamingbolt.com