Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League finally released for all major consoles and PCs on February 2nd, after a long wait. Developed by Rocksteady Studios, best most known for the Batman Arkham series games, Suicide Squad continues where the story of Batman: Arkham Knight left off.
The game gives the roles of the band of misfits to players, aiming to recapture that feeling of being a powerful superhero traversing an open world of comics. What better way to do that than by making the game an online 4-player co-op shooter with micro-transactions, right?
Not quite.
In all honesty, playing this game will make fans wonder how the same company made this. You would think that a studio like Rocksteady would have had some quality control when making this game, but that’s exactly what seems to be lacking.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s Cool Kids
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
As mentioned, the game’s story takes place a few years after Batman: Arkham Knight. While being transported, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang find themselves in the middle of Braniac attacking Metropolis. Making this even worse, Brainiac’s brainwashed members of the Justice League to force them to do Brainiac’s bidding.
The way they’re introduced is actually scary. Seeing Batman from the perspective of the ones he’s beating gives the player a whole new perspective. Now throw in the Flash, Green Lantern, and Superman, and you’ve got yourself a real power team. At least that’s what you would expect, but we’ll get to that later.
Now convinced the greatest heroes are beyond saving, Amanda Waller gathers the Suicide Squad to give them their ultimate mission: kill the Justice League.
Cheerful, right?
Well, The Performance Is Admirable
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
When it comes to the performance of the game, it at least runs fairly well both on PC and consoles. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaggue runs on the Unreal Engine 4. The amount of objects and on-screen prompts is pretty incredible, even if the visual noise can be a bit much.
The facial expressions of the characters are pretty fun to watch. Very detailed expressions, they really catch the player’s eye. As for Metropolis, the futuristic art-deco vibe it’s going for definitely looks impressive. There’s even a weather cycle that can change the game’s mood. Still, there are also times when the weather makes the game look almost last-gen.
Yet it’s refreshing to see a game perform the way it should without any sort of hiccups. Even when maxing out all the graphics, there’s hardly any sort of stuttering while capturing at 144 frames per second.
Gameplay In Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
Fans of the Arkham games enjoyed the attention to detail given to Batman and his rogue’s gallery. The game told an amazing journey of solving crimes, unlocking new abilities, and chaining together melee combos. However, Suicide Squad does away with all of that and turns it into a subpar third person shooter.
Gunplay in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
As expected, Waller gives the Suicide Squad access to a lot of guns. Pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, check. Heavy machine guns? Got those too. Each character comes with their own preferred load-out to keep things interesting. For example, King Shark excels at heavy weapons, while Harley Quinn excels at dual pistols. Some grenades issue ice or poison damage.
Melee
The melee combat is a downgrade from the Arkham games. Hence, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League involves uppercuts to launch enemies in the air and allow you to juggle enemies with your gunshots. Almost like Devil May Cry.
Some take-downs look interesting. Yet, they’re almost the same for every character despite having a different animation.
Traversal
In an open world map like Metropolis, each character takes a different path through the large city. Harley controls the most, using a grapple gun to get around along with a drone that follows her to give her a double jump. King Shark uses his brute strength to climb up walls and jump high distances, which seems to be a call back to the old Incredible Hulk games on the PlayStation 2.
Meanwhile, Deadshot uses a jetpack that has the most use and traversal. The jetpack lets him fly around so long as he has enough charge. Plus, players can also use this ability to get a second wind for an extra boost.
Captain Boomerang, however, controls the clunkiest one. He uses his Speed Force tech to teleport to short distances while jumping in mid-air. This is a bit tricky to master considering that you’re at the mercy of the maximum distance given by his teleportor.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s Main Mission
The main mission is, of course, killing the members of the Justice League. This leads to an iteration of Brainiac. Throughout the journey, players search for a special weapon to will allow them to aim for the Justice League’s weaknesses. Which in turn, makes them conveniently freeze up to allow players to shoot them for five seconds.
One of the game’s more challenging boss fights occurs with Batman, who pulls off all the moves that you would have performed in the Arkham games. As for Green Lantern, Superman, and the Flash, let’s just say it won’t be anything as epic in the DC Comics movies.
Side Quests
Between the main missions, side missions give players access to money, upgrades, and weapons. Which could be cool; however, a ot of these missions are nothing special at best and recycled at worst. They involve destroying generators, holding off a horde of enemies from a fixed location, and defeating a specific target. Really original.
Or how about this old classic: guarding and escorting a slow-moving vehicle as it makes it way across town in the slowest amount of time possible? Riveting.
The game tries to mix it up by adding conditions to certain missions. For example, a certain character needs to take over the role of the leader. Players can only damage enemies with critical hits, or with poison or freeze attacks. Yet these can’t mask the fact that players complete the same missions over and over again.
Rinse, Repeat, Rinse, Repeat
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
One of the biggest downfalls of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League isn’t just that it drew away from the formula of the Arkham games, but how it handled those changes. There is so much visual noise that it almost feels like there needs to be an epilepsy warning every mission.
It’s dizzying and disorienting. From hits to critical hits to elemental damage, combos, and money gained, there’s just too much going on.
Plus, they try to shoehorn in an RPG system where characters can get upgrades. However, these upgrades are meaningless. All characters share every upgrade, just with different animations.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Never Ends
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
Unfortunately, the missions are too padded out. Many of them go on for so long that if you die, you have to start back from the beginning. On that note, sooner or later, you are going to die, just because your attention span starts to wane.
For example, when you reach the point where you can take on an iteration of Brainiac, you need a specific amount of resources that can only be gained from completing missions. Which again, reinforces this artificial padding in the game that is unnecessary.
Oh, and did we mention this isn’t even the final mission? You have to kill Brainiac thirteen times. Have fun with that.
Another issue is that players can’t swap weapons while on a mission. You have to select your load-out from the hub area, and then load into the match. Since you never know what kind of enemies you will encounter, you could end up taking a shotgun to an assault rifle fight.
Also, because this is a live service game, there are a lot of micro-transactions and useless “loot boxes” that seem out of place.
Disrespecting The Suicide Squad
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
A common complaint from players has nothing to do with the gameplay loop itself. It’s the characters.
While the premise of evil heroes isn’t bad, even though the whole “what if Superman was evil?” trope has been done to death at this point, these iterations just aren’t interesting. Green Lantern acts like a pretentious and authoritarian monster. Batman’s a cold killer with no remorse.
When you do kill these characters, none of them seem to reconsider their awful mistakes. They are just killed off in the worst way possible. Which kind of undoes the whole principle of the Suicide Squad itself: what if good and evil aren’t black and white?
Speaking of which, the boss fights are lazy. They pull off a trick where you can’t kill them with what you got so far considering they’re “superpowered.” Players are left hunting for the one specific item that hinders them. There’s also hardly any strategy. Those specific items are just there to be there.
The way they handled the Justice League in general was almost a big slap to the face to anyone who grew up with these heroes and are huge fan of the source material. Considering Kevin Conroy passed away and this was his last role as Batman, you’d expect that they’d treat the characters with respect.
They all deserved better. We, the fans, deserved better.
Rocksteady forgot that most people grew up with DC Comics and enjoyed Batman, Harley, Superman, Flash, and Wonder Woman. Again, this is very ironic considering how well the Arkham series has been!
The Real Killing Joke
[Image via Rocksteady Studios]
Overall, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is just an underwhelming game that came from one of the most successful gaming companies that gave us Batman: Arkham Asylum. The plot, characters, gameplay, and live service model stands in contrast to the high quality fans expect of Rocksteady.
It’s safe to assume that they thought they could repeat what Square Enix did with Marvel’s Avengers and tried to cash in on it. Yet this came is just not good. Considering how this was Kevin Conroy’s last performance before his death, it just adds insult to injury.
Rocksteady is planning on releasing future content for the game with DLC and other characters to interact with. However, so far, with what is given, we can’t recommend this game.
At the end of the day, it’s still way better than the Jared Leto Suicide Squad. Not a high bar, though.
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