Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Review: A Tale of Two Games
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League isn't bad, but it's not great either.
It is only February, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League may end up being one of the most divisive games of the entire year. The new third-person looter-shooter from Rocksteady Studios continues the Arkham universe but from the perspective of the Suicide Squad this time. Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang are forced to band together as Task Force X to take down the Justice League after they become brainwashed by Brainiac. Not only does the fate of Metropolis and the world itself rest in the hands of these scummy DC characters, but so does the fate of some of the most iconic characters in all of fiction.
There are many reasons why Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been controversial. For starters, it's a live-service game which has a negative stigma no matter what game that descriptor is attached to, but doubly so for a developer known for well-crafted single-player games such as Batman: Arkham City. Secondly, you're by all intents and purposes targeting and killing beloved characters that fans have invested years of their lives into. While we won't give away who dies and who doesn't, it doesn't seem like a spoiler to reveal that there are some big names taken off the board during this game's story.
With all of that said, it would be oversimplifying things to say Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is just good or bad. It has a lot of layers, some of which make for a really strong product and some of which weigh it down tremendously. The story of the game is likely what a lot of people are going to be drawn to given the core premise and Rocksteady's pedigree as a renowned group of storytellers. I can safely say that Rocksteady's narrative prowess remains intact in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League even amidst some outrage over big twists and story decisions.
This is a game with a gargantuan sense of scale and that only continues to ratchet up as you progress through the story. Superheroes are throwing each other through buildings and hitting each other so hard it sounds like thunder is cracking in the sky while universes collide with each other.
Killing the Justice League
Rocksteady Studios had serious cojones to make a promise like killing the Justice League and then not cop out. It's a big swing and it understandably won't work for a lot of people who are really attached to certain characters, but it's a risk. The fact Warner Bros. and DC weren't cringing at the idea of blowing the heads off of some of the most valuable characters they own shows the studio has earned a lot of goodwill and trust.
Rocksteady has also proven it is capable of doing more than dark, gritty stories like the ones in the Batman Arkham games. It can completely change the tone and do something that is far more comical like Suicide Squad. Kill the Justice League is a truly hysterical game that had me laughing out loud thanks to the banter and antics of the four playable protagonists which went beyond simply having funny dialogue.
There's a lot of smart comedic moves made on the technical side. The facial animation in Kill the Justice League is some of the best I have ever seen and allows for these characters to just give a look with no words and still make you laugh. Even things as simple as where the camera is placed goes a long way. One of my favorite jokes in the game comes from Harley Quinn off-screen, shouting something from the corner of the room, which shows Rocksteady has a great handle on comedic timing and execution. The game is as irreverent as you'd hope and very few jokes miss the mark.
The only time the comedy can feel a bit misplaced is when characters held with a lot of reverence are lying dead at their feet and the Squad are cracking wise, giving little fanfare to an icon who was unceremoniously brutally murdered. It's a bit jarring and removes some of the impact of the idea of killing the Justice League. That should be a herculean effort and more often than not, it's actually quite easy and the Squad seems like they've barely broken a sweat and don't seem to bat much of an eye at God-like characters being vanquished. They're so unbothered that they can riff for a few minutes about it like it was just another day on the job, even though this is their first day at said job.
A Mixed Bag
On the gameplay side of things, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is an extremely mixed bag where it begins to feel like two separate games haphazardly slammed together. Rocksteady is known best for creating the innovative and graceful combat mechanics in the Batman Arkham games. It's true, you did feel like Batman in those games. Rocksteady managed to carry those skills over to Kill the Justice League and create a really different but satisfying combat system for four characters who could not be more unlike Batman.
The action in this game is stupendously frenetic, and at times, even a bit overwhelming. This is not a slow shooter by any measure – if you stand still for too long, you will likely die. It's very bouncy and punchy, encouraging you to constantly be flinging yourself into the air using your traversal methods (Deadshot has a jetpack, Harley Quinn has a grappling hook, etc.) to rain hell down upon your foes below. It almost starts to feel like a game of The Floor Is Lava where you know standing on the ground for too long would be a fatal mistake.
I played primarily as Deadshot, and his jetpack made me see the vision for a great Iron Man game. You can propel yourself through the sky, drop bombs on enemies, hover in the air and headshot enemies with your AR or sniper rifle, or you can run up the side of the building, boosted by your jet pack, and kick an enemy standing on the edge of the roof before dropping a grenade between his legs and flying off while it explodes behind you.
The movement feels propulsive like Sunset Overdrive, the combat takes inspiration from Doom by encouraging you to use different attacks to get enemies to drop different things like shields, and it even mixes in a little bit of Gears of War with an active reload-esque mechanic. It's an interesting but successful blend of different mechanics from other great games that helps the combat feel engaging like it's constantly building a sense of momentum.
It's a ton of fun, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is also what saves the game from one of its biggest problems. Kill the Justice League doesn't have a terribly long story, which is fine, but it pads itself out with a lot of filler missions that don't feel dissimilar to regular side missions. A lot of the missions in the game have you fly to a rooftop and defend an objective or destroy one, kill X amount of enemies before the time runs out, or escort a very slow truck across the city. Those are pretty much the only missions you're going to play in the game excluding boss battles which admittedly aren't terribly inventive either.
It can grow to be very repetitive and monotonous, especially when it doesn't feel like there's much rhyme or reason to these filler missions. One mission toward the middle of the game has you killing a bunch of enemies to collect "data shards" from their bodies. It's just a typical shooting gallery, but I didn't really understand why we were doing it. At the end of the mission, a summary screen read: "Somehow this will help us stop The Flash? We missed the details." Which feels like a pretty lazy way of "We just needed to give the player something to do for a bit."
Live-Service Conundrum
These kinds of missions feel designed to be replayed in co-op or made for a live-service grind. They're short, they're formulaic, and they are made to let you keep your finger on the trigger for several minutes without letting go. It's not what I'mlooking for from Rocksteady, and it's also not particularly interesting regardless of if you like live-service games like Destiny or not.
It also doesn't help that the loot didn't really excite me. None of the weapons I got aside from a grenade really blew me away and upgrading them felt even less exciting. The system is all RNG-based where you reroll the stats on your weapon, and often, it resulted in an inferior weapon. A large chunk of the game's cosmetics are earned either as simple mission rewards or locked behind a very dated microtransaction store. There's very little reason why a $70 game should have $20 Harley Quinn skins like Fortnite when the previous Batman games had loads of free skins. Rocksteady even released a free update to 2015's Batman: Arkham Knight in December which added Robert Patinson's Batman suit to the game.
It's all disappointing to see and feels like it was all made for a completely different, possibly even free game. Given it was reported that Rocksteady was previously working on a new multiplayer game, unconnected to DC prior to this game, it's possible remnants of that title made its way into Kill the Justice League.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is not a death rattle for Rocksteady Studios. If anything, it shows the studio was able to salvage a piece of its identity in a game that is clearly at war with itself. Whether that's a result of Rocksteady having an ever-evolving vision that was misguided at some point or requests from Warner Bros to make it more commercially viable, we'll likely never know. The point is, the things that Rocksteady is known for are found here. Rocksteadystill excels at satisfying superhero combat and larger-than-life comic book stories. However, it would be a mistake for this studio to double down on these live-service elements in future games. This isn't a great game, but it's also not a terrible one. It's simply two different games of varying qualities blended together to create a violent cocktail with mixed results.
Score: 3.5 out of 5
A PS5 review copy of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was provided by the publisher for this review.
