2024 DEI-Dumpster Fires: Concord, Dustborn, and Suicide Squad

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Hey there, fellow gamers! It’s your friendly neighborhood asshat, Ayefkay, back again to spill the tea on the gaming industry. The thing I love most about running reportafk.com? I get to talk about everything I love—and hate—about games.

So today, we’re gonna have a little chat about the recent affronts to gaming —Concord, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and Dustborn and why they face-planted so hard you could hear it from deep space.

Let’s dive into why these games fell flatter than Alyssa Mercante!

1. Concord – A Disjointed Space Mess

First up is Concord, a game that claimed to bring us a fresh take on the space-shooter genre.

The activists pretending to be gamers were absolutely buzzing when the teaser dropped, with all the murky and androgynous character models aplenty, but then the game was released…and uh, where’s the gameplay?

Criticism hit fast and hard like a freight train.

The game felt like it was released half-baked—if that. After 8 years of development time, an estimated $200 million to make, and a backing by Sony it all boiled down to one thing: this abomination isn’t a game.

Even outside of all horrible character design and boorish mechanics, Concord was trying to break into a well-established genre with a fat $40 price tag while competing with better free to play games like Valorant, Apex Legends, and Overwatch.

It didn’t help that the devs seemed to have their heads up their asses with little direction on where to take the game.

The public reception?

Think No Man’s Sky launch levels of bad—but without a Sean Murray-type figure to turn it all around. Being pulled by Sony after only two weeks, Concord was dead on arrival and will go down in the books for one of the biggest flops in gaming history.

2. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – Live Service, Live Suffering

Next up is the hot mess that is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Who asked for this? I mean, seriously. It’s like the devs looked at the superhero gaming landscape and said, “Hey, let’s do what people hate most—make a “progressive” live-service game with microtransactions!”

And boy, did they deliver on that front.

The excitement surrounding this game was off the charts when the trailers dropped and the premise sounded admittedly fun. Everyone was ready to be Harley, Deadshot, and the crew, but the game landed with all the grace of a cannonball in a kiddie pool.

What we were expecting:

Image Credit: 2016 Warner Bros Entertainment

Versus what we actually get:

Another victim of Sweet Baby Inc., the game gives you everything you don’t want. Not only does every straight white male character die in the most pathetic way humanly imaginable (while Wonder Woman is the only hero who dies with dignity – because she’s so stunning and brave, of course), but you get a 7-course meal of race swapping, gender bending, and good ol’ pride flags wherever SBI could fit ’em in.

Image Credit: Cosmic Book News |@cosmicbooknews

It’s riddled with repetitive, uninspired gameplay, and the live-service aspect? A disaster. Nobody—and I mean nobody—wants to grind daily quests in a game where you’re supposed to be badass villains. The backlash was swift and brutal, with fans tearing apart the game for turning what could’ve been a fun, chaotic romp into a grindy, microtransaction-laden, DEI-injected snooze fest.

3. Dustborn – Woke to Death?

Now for the final contestant in this year’s “What the Hell Were They Thinking?” awards—Dustborn.

A narrative-driven, road-trip game about resistance in a dystopian future sounds…like a game? Maybe?

Nope, sorry. This epic shit show is so stuffed with overly preachy themes and lackluster gameplay that it was just never going to happen.

Don’t get me wrong—I love a good story (not this), and I have no problems with developers making the game they want to make. But Dustborn was trying waay too hard to shove its message down our throats, sacrificing any semblance of actual fun in the process.

The result? A game that’s about as exciting as reading a political manifesto while driving cross-country that will make you want to choke yourself. Reviews slammed it for its clunky mechanics, stiff animations, and overly linear narrative.

I don’t know if the developers in Norway think that this is somehow relatable to any audience, but this game is headed for the trash heap as well, failing with flying colors.

Final Thoughts

The gaming industry has seen better days, and these three games are just the latest examples of developers over-promising and under-delivering with crap you literally couldn’t pay me to play. Concord is lost in space, Suicide Squad should’ve stayed in Arkham, and Dustborn just altogether forgot that games should be fun.

So, what’s the takeaway here? Maybe studios need to take a step back (waaaay back), focus on making games that are, you know, fun, and stop trying to chase trends or force feed us crap that doesn’t resonate with any audience.

Until then, we’ll be here.