My second favourite character of all time is Harley Quinn, beaten only by Marcel Proust’s Oriane de Guermantes, who captured my heart when reading one sweet summer’s- just kidding, my favourite character isX-Men’sMystique. The point is, I love Harley. And I love the Arkham Harley especially. ButRocksteady’sSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leagueonly makes me sad.
It’s not because of Harley, particularly. This game does nothing in terms of character development, aesthetics, or gameplay to justify its connection to the Arkham universe, but taken as a standalone experience the characters are its strongest point. They banter with each other in realistic ways that manage to be funny (and not just video game funny), and have you rooting for them. Harley is the most rounded she’s ever been - at least in pixel form - while Captain Boomerang steals the show. Kill the Justice League is built on the back of expertly written heroes who deserve a better game.
King Shark feels like too much of a Drax impression, but maintains a good dynamic with the group.
This goes for the heroes (by which I mean the villains) too. Flash, Green Lantern,Superman, and especiallyBatmanare distinct both from each other and their original personalities, but still manage to seem like the heroes we once loved.Wonder Woman, not afflicted by the Brainiac mind control, ends up feeling very dull, and her one emotional moment falls flat as a result. Brainiac himself is also very one note, and considering you’re able to have him in your ear for hours if you choose to chase the busywork of extra side quests right before the final battle, he gets old quickly.
So do the missions themselves. On paper, there’s variety between them as you’re tasked with gathering data fragments, defending the point, wiping out hordes, or destroying cannons, but they’re all the same thing. Carnage and bullet spray at the same basic enemy. There are no tailored missions, nothing unique about anything you do. For a short game, clocking in under ten hours, it runs out of ideas quickly and has you repeating the most generic gun fights against somehow even more generic enemies over and over again.
The gameplay can best be summarised by this: after my first mission, I unlocked a Legendary pistol. Nothing means anything in this game. It’s just guns rated at random, doled out at random, until you’re drowning in them. The characters deserve a game that explores their stories, but instead it’s the same gameplay on loop over and over again. Comparisons toSunset Overdriveare short of the mark - that game commits to its vision, but it’s hard to see what this game’s vision is. It’s not about anything beyond what is explicitly stated in its title, and even then Wonder Woman avoids this prophecy while Aquaman was seemingly cut for time - in a triple-A superhero game that took almost a decade to develop and can be beaten in single-figure hours.
Kill the Justice League is built on the back of expertly written heroes who deserve a better game
Usually with games like this, I’d deride them as soulless. To its credit, I must say Suicide Squad is not soulless. The characters manage to convince you it’s an actual video game and not just a hamster wheel that powers a cash extraction ray, and on a technical aesthetic level it’s highly impressive. You can see the bones of this thing - I don’t know if it began life as a seasonal looter shooter, but I do know that no one who didn’t stand to profit from it ever wanted that. However, it’s not phoned in.
The gunplay and traversal is repetitive and boring with a story that doesn’t do much aside from the twists the title gives away, but in the moments where the characters bond, you may sense something real. If it had arrived 15 years earlier with the rest of the series, it wouldn’t look nearly as good - but I bet we’d all have enjoyed it a lot more.
The best example of this repressed creativity is the boss battles. They’re still not perfect, but they’re something. Flash’s speed gimmick gets old quickly and doesn’t fit with the focus required to differentiate bosses from regular combat, and then the trick is repeated by both Superman and Brainiac.
Green Lantern is the pick of the bunch, asking us to destroy his Lantern constructs to bring down his shield, then attack. While ‘lower defences, kill’ is not the most original set-up, the variety of constructs and the spectacle of the showdown make it the game’s highlight. Batman, meanwhile, relies on his classic fear toxin, and for all the talk of his death not being fitting (I disagree), his final battle is way too ‘video games’ to be a mid-game showdown.
Of course, it’s not really a mid-game showdown. Batman is the third of five bosses, but the pacing is so reckless that the battle with Superman begins immediately after Batman’s demise. After this, you need to save up another type of currency (your seventh in the game) to earn the right to fight Brainiac through full side quests, then take on your third boss battle in the final four main missions. Outside of the dialogue, nothing in this game feels crafted or edited. It’s a first draft skeleton of a story that couldn’t develop any meat in a decade. This is a game we’re supposed to want to play forever? I wanted to give up after six hours.
I didn’t hate Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaague, but that’s only because it’s hard to feel anything too strongly about a game like this. This might be the most rinse and repeat a game of this stature has ever rinsed and repeated, and the fact it delivers good interpretations (though not Arkham accurate) of established characters is its only saving grace. With each new bundle of content likely to be low on narrative and chock full of the same missions (probably with a new name that play exactly the same way), it feels like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is only going to get worse from here.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
WHERE TO PLAY
An open-world action-adventure from Arkham creators Rocksteady, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League puts you in the roles of the antihero squad. You must take on the aforementioned Justice League, either in solo play or online co-op.
