Imagine there’s a restaurant known for its wonderful burgers. They’re loved and respected in the industry. These Burgers changed the way all future burgers by other restaurants are sold. Now, imagine the place made a new dish. You’re first in line. You have to have it. When the waiter comes, he serves you a nice, beautiful plate of saltine crackers and some cheese. This is how it feels to play Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League after playing Batman: Arkham Asylum.
One is a genre-defining game with innovative combat, a compelling and gripping story, and an overall unique presentation and approach. The other is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. It’s hard to fully grasp that Rocksteady Games made both titles.
The title of this game tells you the main objective and, admittedly, on paper it’s a good one. You play as Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang as they set out to, well, kill the Justice League. You see, the team has been brainwashed by Brainiac, who is now hours away from a total invasion of Earth.
I like the premise and setup a lot! The characters are written pretty consistent with the films and comics and the actors behind them give solid performances. For example, the always excellent Debra Wilson, gives a perfectly hate-able Amanda Waller performance, just as Viola Davis did in the films. Of course the late Kevin Conroy steals the show, has he provided one of his last performances as The Dark Knight. The Suicide Squad members themselves also gave very natural performances, with Tara Strong’s Harley Quinn being the highlight of the bunch.
While the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League plot does sort of get away from them, I don’t think I would say it was poorly written. Rocksteady actually took a few risks with the story, which at least makes it interesting. It’s definitely going to elicit a lot of opinions from people, and I’d rather see that than something safe and cookie cutter. However, there are some seriously bad lines of dialogue in here. Like the team fed early MCU scripts to an AI and rolled with it. In fact, that actually may have been what they did. I had to pause some scenes to allow myself time to sufficiently cringe after a particularly corny “comeback” more than once.
Sadly, I wish the characters played as good as they look. The Suicide Squad is composed of four completely separate and unique characters… so why does it feel like they all play the exact same? They all play like how I imagined only Deadshot would play. It’s just all about guns. Regardless of how many talents I unlocked or new weapons I found, I never felt like the game deviated from the core gameplay of “shoot until dead.” I mean, it’s a shooter game. That’s the point, sure. However, it just felt off here. It felt like all four of them are fundamentally the same, and the only challenge of the game was just how many times you could press the fire button.
This is the developer that created a melee combat system so good games, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 still borrow from it. Now Rocksteady relegated melee combat to a single move that breaks shields for more shooting. It just boggles the mind how we got to this style of combat for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. It feels like the team had an idea for a shooter and the Suicide Squad license, mashed it together, and called it a day. King Shark and Harley should have had a melee-style of play, and Deadshot and Captain Boomerang should have been ranged. It’s just dull, and it never feels like there’s ever a scenario or situation to switch characters at all.
When you’re not fighting, you’re “free to explore Metropolis” in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. However, you’re just as free to explore your local Applebee’s parking lot, and you’ll likely find just as much compelling content waiting for you. There’s just nothing of substance to do outside of fighting. To reiterate, this combat isn’t clunky or dysfunctional. I’m sure some people might even like the style, but it’s just so unimpressive. Rocksteady Games has such a pedigree when it comes to combat that this system feels like a letdown more than it feels bad.
I did like the characters got fresh traversal options from random gear they found in the Hall of Justice. That part felt very true to the Suicide Squad brand. Having Harley shooting around with one of Batman’s grappling hooks was a fun choice. It also let us get a taste of the Arkham trilogy.
That’s another, in my opinion, weakness of the game. It takes place in the same continuity as the Arkham games. The Batman in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the same one. Normally, this would be an interesting analysis or meta-twist, but here it just reminds you of those games and how much better they are constantly. Half the time I played, I was thinking, “I’m gonna boot up Arkham City after this.”
The real audience for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is likely going to involve folks playing multiplayer, and Rocksteady included a pretty good system for dropping in and out of parties and squads. Maybe when you have a full squad of four in a session, the game and it’s combat really start to sing? However, my experience with the multiplayer was “fine.” The AI bots were doing okay in my solo run, difficulty wise.
To the credit of Rocksteady Games, there aren’t a tremendous amount of technical issues plaguing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. This means it’s mostly delivered intact, which is good and we love to see that. However, it also means that patches won’t fix any of the issues the game does have. In my time with it, I also didn’t run into any server issues. (We do know there had been for others, though.) However, I’m not very happy I have to mention the server in this review at all. There are just so many issues with an “always online” game, and I’m not going to hide that I abhor them.
This is, at the end of the day, the game Rocksteady and Warner Bros wanted to make. I personally think that every single gameplay choice they made went in the opposite direction of what I’d consider fun to play. But, they wanted to make a live-service game, and they made one. This is of course the prerogative of Rocksteady Games and Warner Bros to do so. To bookend my analogy from the beginning, plenty of people enjoy saltine crackers and cheese! However, It’s just disappointing to see a studio known for innovating the super hero genre make such a bland and uninteresting game.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is available for the PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a third-person action shooter where the ultimate band of misfits must do the impossible to save the world: Kill the Justice League. Reviewed on PS5. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League isn't horrible, but it's bland and uninteresting and that may be worse. The real insult here is that Rocksteady Games had all the tools to do something great and innovative and just made a by-the-book live-service game instead.
- The entire combat system feels so undercooked and disappointing
- Little to no feeling of variety between playable characters when it should be drastic
- Despite some terrible dialogue, the story and performances were a slight highlight.
