Squad Busters 2.0 and Supercell's YOLO Strategy
Written by Mishka Katkoff, a lifetime Supercell admirer and an ex-employee who serves game companies with well-intended constructive criticism, albeit in a snarkyish style. He can’t help himself.
Supercell has rebooted Squad Busters. Again. And they told us all about it in a roundtable interview with trusted game journalists. Massive kudos to Supercell for such unique openness that allows folks like me to dive two levels deeper.
In a move that signals both humility and defiance, the Finnish powerhouse has rolled out Squad Busters 2.0 – a sweeping overhaul that tries to pivot the game from casual chaos to midcore strategy. It’s an attempt to not just fix what was broken, but to reposition the very essence of the game. And it comes with a clear subtext: “We heard you. But we’re still going to do it our way.”
Let’s unpack what’s changed, what hasn’t, and why this reboot feels more like a company wrestling with itself than with its competition.
Clarity, Control, and the Illusion of Choice
The 2.0 update introduces several headline features designed to address player feedback and gameplay friction:
Pre-round squad selection gives players the illusion of control and meta-strategy.
Hero characters provide a focal point with clear abilities and defined strengths.
Cooldown-based powers inject tactical rhythm into battles.
Improved controls and faster time-to-kill (TTK) remove randomness and raise skill ceilings.
You can now move and shoot at the same time. Goodbye, Archero controls.
The death of a hero eliminates the whole squad. Hello, “What just happened moments”…
It takes two duplicate Squaddies to upgrade. Not three like before. All leading to faster TTK.
On paper, it all makes sense. You reduce chaos by limiting the squad sizes. You raise agency by reducing the time-to-kill, and you create a stronger sense of mastery by adding a Hero, Power, Traits, and Turbos. In practice, however, this might be an elaborate redecoration of a fundamentally unstable house.
Now you start a match with a Hero unit and two Squaddies reducing the early game resource gathering phase and time-to-kill.
Heroes have some depth. Less than Brawlers.
Each Hero can be equipped with two spells, bringing the total shoot buttons to three. Mid-core game means more buttons.
Currently, there are only four Heroes. Definitely not enough. But you've got to start somewhere, and the balancing is easier with fewer variables.
Despite the redesign, some of the original issues persist;
The gameplay remains repetitive. While not anymore locked into a single mode, the game has fewer character options (only 4) – a stark contrast to Brawl Stars, where every new mode or Brawler reshapes the experience and impacts the meta.
The chaos, while slightly refined, still feels overwhelming and ultimately unmasterable. While the squads are not swarms anymore, the end-match is still filled with Squaddrons muddled under a VFX storm and SFX thunder.
The weak long-term progression, where the match-to-match and session-to-session progression is high but week-over-week progression is lacking. Missions drive your sessions. Unlocking Squaddies and Worlds gives a longer-term incentive, but after that, there’s not much to do. The Squaddie upgrades grind to a halt rather than tapering off in a way that drives monetization. The mastery is limited due to the chaotic nature of the core. And there’s not much social layer.
The limited social layer indicates that the game was tested by playing it on-site amongst the employees. It’s fun when everyone is in the same room. But that’s hardly a scalable social structure. It’s confusing how a company known for clans doesn’t have a clans system in their latest game.
What’s left is a slicker, tighter version of the same experience, still anchored to a single game mode, still suffering from repetitive loops, chaotic gameplay. It’s a fun game, as it has been from day one. But it’s also surprisingly shallow for a game that wants to be played for years, not months.
The Design Philosophy of Confusion
Squad Busters struggles with a central identity crisis: it wants to be accessible and skillful. Chaotic and competitive. But straddling that line is incredibly difficult without tight iteration and rigorous systemic clarity.
The core gameplay is now more structured – you move, you shoot, you activate powers – but it still lacks the tactical diversity and counterplay of games like Brawl Stars or Clash Royale. Without varied modes, map types, or character archetypes that drastically shift strategy, players eventually hit a wall of monotony.
It’s like Team Fight Tactics (TFT) meets Brawl Stars. Except it lacks the strategic layering of TFT and the tactile mastery of Brawl Stars.
The result? A game that is difficult to improve at and easy to give up on, for a player. Not for Supercell. After all, the company put its full force behind the troubled title, integrating all of its IPs and shipping it with the biggest launch (budget).
No Soft Launch? Blame Brawl Stars.
Supercell is open about its post-launch rework, and props to them for that. But let’s be real: Squad Busters should never have launched when it did.
Squad Busters was Supercell's biggest launch. All the IPs in one. Massive celebrity campaign. Unwarering internal belief. It all came crashing down inside the first month. The big update in December failed to turn the course.
The $100M marketing blitz, stuffed with celebrities and Super Bowl-sized swagger, gave us a classic case of premature scaling. The game hadn’t earned its confidence yet. And now, 60 million people have downloaded it, played it, and moved on. Reacquisition is notoriously hard, not to mention expensive.
While hindsight says the launch was a mistake, it’s perfectly understandable why Supercell did it.
Before Squad Busters, Supercell hadn’t launched a new game in 6 years. The graveyard was getting full of killed could-be-hits that failed to pass the internal gauntlet, or the soft-launch stress test.
The process wasn’t working. The company was, and still is, restructuring the way it makes games. And then came the Brawl Stars resurrection. The game that the company nearly killed several times became their blueprint for success. And that seems to have unlocked a new corporate strategy: launch now, fix later.
After a gruelling 18-month-long soft-launch and three pivots, Brawl Stars made it to global launch. The game faced a near-death moment four years later, only to soar to new heights. Cheating death so many times has given Supercell the self-confidence that they can fix a falling plane mid-air. Which in turn has led to launching games without their trademark internal gauntlet.
As an anonymous senior industry person on Deconstructor of Fun Slack (join!) put it “Perhaps Supercell just got sick of measuring every detail and being super careful and are now just saying, fuck it, lets launch some games and figure it out later”.
The jury is out on whether this YOLO-launch and fix-it-later strategy is working or not. But it was clear something had to be done to end the no-new-games-dry-streak.
Philosophical Musing
Squad Busters is a good game. It’s polished. Fun! Full of action. Novel. Easy to pick up. Filled with recognizable characters. And has probably the best music and SFX in mobile gaming.
I also believe that Supercell is doing the right thing by not pulling any punches to fix it. Brawl Stars serves as an example that they can do it.
The game is also a fascinating case study in how even the best game developers can get caught in the fog of war. The reboot could be an improvement; time will tell. But it’s also a reminder that a marketing muscle can’t replace mastery.
Supercell covered Squad Busters with marketing rocket fuel — celebrity cameos, a $100 million campaign, and a tidal wave of 60 million installs — igniting an explosive launch. But fires fed by petrol flare bright and fast, only to fade just as quickly. Now, the blaze has burned out, leaving behind a game still searching for sustained longevity.
Beneath it all lies the big-picture problem: a company known for launching only massive hit games is struggling to launch any game at all. And all this frustration culminating into “fuck it, just ship” strategy forgoing stress-testing the games’ long-term appeal.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Squad Busters is a good game. But it’s not a great game that as many people as possible will play for years and that will be remembered forever. At least not yet.
