Rocksteady Video games has constructed a powerful popularity for itself on the again of the Batman Arkham video games, and the developer has tried to take these ideas to the subsequent degree with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. This co-op third-person shooter could be a decently enjoyable time, but it surely doesn’t fairly stick the touchdown resulting from a bevy of unhealthy design choices and different miscellaneous annoyances.
However the one facet the place Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League does handle to impress is the visuals. Constructed utilizing Epic’s Unreal Engine, Suicide Squad flaunts some excessive manufacturing values in its environments and character fashions – however what’s truly working below the hood? How does it leverage the facility of ninth-gen machines and the way does the sport scale throughout completely different platforms?
With this technical evaluation, we attempt to reply these questions, break down particular person features of the sport, and assess them with a vital eye together with efficiency profiling throughout each PC and PS5.
Sport Engine
As talked about beforehand, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is utilizing Epic’s Unreal Engine to render its rendition of Metropolis. Extra exactly, it’s utilizing Unreal Engine 4 which could come as a shock contemplating that it’s unique to current-gen consoles – however the group appears to have made good use of the out there options to craft a visually competent current-gen expertise.
The choice to go together with Unreal Engine 4 as a substitute of 5 additionally helps in preserving the baseline a bit decrease, which ought to make for a extra optimized expertise throughout all kinds of PC specs. The whole lot from the world streaming tech to character fashions and post-processing results seems to be fairly competent from a ninth-generation perspective regardless of being based mostly on an older model of the engine.
Character Fashions
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League options some extremely detailed character fashions that flaunt some fairly excessive polycounts. The pores and skin meshes are fantastically complicated, and the garments that these characters don are additionally comprised of bodily based mostly supplies that react appropriately to mild and sway together with your swift actions.
Characters like King Shark flaunt some spectacular element on the fabric facet of issues. The hair physics implementation isn’t something spectacular, however the rendering of the hair itself is fairly nice with spectacular ranges of hair density per mannequin. You’ll be able to clearly discover artifacts alongside the fantastic edges if you happen to actually zoom in on the main points, however general – the character fashions look actually good from a visible standpoint.
Related high quality efforts appear to have been put within the animations division as properly, the place we get to see some glorious translation of the actors’ movement captures to the in-game character fashions. The pores and skin meshes react to the motion of lips and eyebrows, and the actor’s delicate actions look fairly crisp in cinematics as properly.
Environments
Like some other recreation of this ilk, the macro-level element of the open world is simply as vital as the eye that’s gone into the micro degree of the presentation. Within the case of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, the open world does look beautiful from a visible perspective – but it surely simply doesn’t have the substance to make gamers need to discover every nook and cranny of this enormous map however that’s irrelevant of this dialogue.
On a technical degree, the belongings used all through the environments are of fairly top quality. Whether or not it’s the quite a few buildings peppered all through the map or the grass on the occasional rooftop backyard or the cobbled roads, Suicide Squad has some great-looking belongings that react to mild and forged detailed shadows in an applicable style.
As for the world streaming, Rocksteady makes nice use of the elevated reminiscence of current-gen consoles to render enormous chunks of the map without delay. The draw distance is fairly excessive, and the extent of element throughout distant objects can also be actually good which is maybe why we get to see such scant utilization of volumetric fog to painting a way of scale inside the world. Degree of element swapping additionally works fairly properly, and we didn’t discover any pop-in or different indicators of artifacting in our take a look at throughout each platforms.
Lighting And Reflections
Switching gears to the lighting, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League doesn’t appear to be utilizing ray tracing for the worldwide illumination on the PS5 model. As a substitute, it appears to be using some type of display screen house international illumination to mild up its scenes which works properly sufficient for essentially the most half. Oblique lighting is fairly rudimentary in consequence, but it surely doesn’t actually matter a lot amidst the warmth of fixed battle.
The identical story continues over to the reflections facet of issues as properly, the place we get to see a display screen space-styled implementation on consoles. Reflections additionally replace in sync with the framerate, they usually look fairly good in motion.
Moreover, the depth of the reflections additionally is dependent upon the fabric on which it’s forged – so rougher supplies like concrete wouldn’t clearly replicate their environment with the identical precision as, say, glass panes lined all through a constructing. Suicide Squad additionally appears to be utilizing further cinematic lights throughout gameplay which add a little bit of depth to the scenes and the additional shadows which are forged from these lights assist in actually bringing out the element that’s current inside the character fashions.
PC Settings and Check Bench Specs
Along with the PS5 model, we additionally took a while to check Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League on PC. Our take a look at bench consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, Nvidia RTX 308Ti, and 32 GB of RAM which is properly over what the sport recommends.
Briefly having a look on the settings menu, we have now a reasonably barebones presentation the place you may have a dozen or so sliders starting from shadow high quality to upscaling and reflections amongst others. It doesn’t present any comparability screenshots or the setting’s influence on system reminiscence – so it undoubtedly leaves a bit to be desired.
That being mentioned, Suicide Squad does function help for contemporary upscaling methods like DLSS and FSR2 – so it comes with all of the important options and sliders however nothing greater than that. Given our take a look at specs, we had been in a position to flip the sport’s settings all the best way as much as excessive with ray-traced reflections turned on, and we ran the sport at 4K with DLSS turned on.
Variations Between PC And PS5 Variations
Suicide Squad retains the identical base presentation throughout each PC and PS5, however the ray tracing on PC helps in creating extra realistically lit scenes, and oblique reflections look a lot better in consequence. Asset high quality is generally the identical throughout each platforms, however the PC model seems to be crisper which is likely to be a results of DLSS’ superior upscaling as in comparison with what looks as if an FXAA or TAA-based resolution on the PS5.
Draw distance, particle results, and character fashions exhibit the identical degree of element throughout each platforms, so there isn’t too massive of a distinction between each variations. That mentioned, it’s fairly bizarre that Suicide Squad on PS5 doesn’t have any graphics modes to select from; there’s simply a typical 60fps efficiency mode and that’s it.
Efficiency, Loading Instances And Conclusion
As talked about beforehand, the choice to go together with Unreal Engine 4 as a substitute of 5 provides fairly the profit for efficiency – and we’re comfortable to report that Suicide Squad performs fairly properly throughout each of our take a look at platforms. The PS5 model is ready to maintain its framerate in a strong style, and whereas there are occasional dips right here and there – it’s a reasonably constant expertise for essentially the most half. Even on PC, we stored VSync on and the sport was in a position to chug alongside easily even throughout intensive encounters.
As for the loading instances, the sport takes about 10 seconds to load a save on our PS5 – which isn’t too lengthy however isn’t too spectacular both. We noticed comparable outcomes on the PC which additionally took about 13 to 14 seconds to queue in with bots and cargo right into a save – which does make me suspect that the developer has most likely not optimized the sport for PS5’s SSD or Home windows DirectStorage API.
In conclusion, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a good wanting recreation that makes good use of Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 to craft visually interesting open-world and practical character fashions.
