Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (PS5)
Warner Bros.’s continued push for the Suicide Squad makes sense on some levels and is baffling on others. Villains are often the more fascinating characters in a piece of fiction, their justification for doing evil things adding some interesting depth for a narrative to explore. Stick some bombs in the necks of those baddies and force them to fight for the side of good and you’ve got Suicide Squad able to explore them a bit more without us necessarily following such characters as they are doing irredeemable things. However, in an era where even using the word “suicide” can get you in trouble on places like Youtube and Tiktok, the push for Suicide Squad feels weird even before you factor in that its early efforts bore weak fruit. James Gunn put together a fun film starring them, but sadly, the third-person shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League feels like it embodies the more baffling side of this ongoing push to make this villainous team concept relevant.
As the game’s name promises, the usual paragons of heroism known as the Justice League are the antagonists on the chopping block for this adventure, and for good reason. An alien known as Brainiac has taken over the city of Metropolis, his advanced technology meant to terraform Earth into a replacement for his home world of Culo. Part of this process is turning people into corrupted servants in his army, and since he landed on a world where there are superheroes like Superman and Green Lantern, he was able to make quite a daunting army by forcing them onto his side before they could mount a proper resistance. Amanda Waller, leader of a government group called A.R.G.U.S., sees the only way to have a chance against the corrupted superheroes is to coerce some supervillains into aiding them, Waller releasing the criminals Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark from prison to form a group called Task Force X, or more informally, the Suicide Squad.
While there are some unlockable characters to acquire after the main story and a few villains like the tinkerer Gizmo who serve support roles for the team, the initial four are the main focus of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and whether they work in their role or not is debatable. Harley Quinn is a wisecracker, and in a game that can already struggle with letting any genuine moment stand as cool or serious, her contributions are overly frequent and not always creative enough to get a laugh. King Shark is a more likeable lead, as he seems to be a genuinely good guy but also completely disconnected from human affairs so he doesn’t see why eating people is wrong or fails to understand when he’s going too far. He is clearly inspired somewhat by Drax from the Guardians of the Galaxy film, a lot of humor coming from King Shark speaking plainly, misinterpreting figures of speech, or not really understanding the tone of a situation, but he can also feel like a big goofy kid along for the adventure so even if he’s throwing out some poorly written attempt at being too literal, he can charm you and even provide many of the game’s funniest and most memorable moments. Deadshot feels like he gets the short end of the stick, presented as a serious foil to the other members and yet he doesn’t do enough to really standout between the constant chatter of the others. Captain Boomerang though presents an interesting case, because he is crass, unlikeable, egotistical, and yet, over time, that’s what makes it fascinating to see how he’ll bumble through a situation or prove himself to be the scummiest member of the team. He’s awful in an interesting way, undermining moments often because of his bad attitude or lack of intelligence rather than just treating everything as a joke.
Perhaps these main four characters could have been salvageable in a tighter story with better written quips and moments of heart, but instead, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League really can’t help but overstuff the game with constant prattle that wears on you rather quickly. Already, despite being an online game meant for up to four players, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s story is a cutscene heavy affair where you can find yourself doing a mission briefly and watching a cutscene that can be three times as long even though you’re not at a key moment like facing off against a member of the Justice League. There is an ambitious effort to write a plot rather than focus as much on how you’d play your way through it, and even when it’s dragging its feet telling jokes that don’t land, there are some parts you can’t help but marvel at. Mainly, the graphical quality and attention to detail is superb. At one point Amanda Waller gets blood splattered on her face, and after she wipes it, you can see a realistic smear. When characters talk in the rain, the drops falling off their hair and clothes have an unusual amount of care put into them, and character’s faces can emote in incredibly small and subtle ways. However, it’s not exactly being applied to the best material, and even worse, a huge amount of work was put into environmental story-telling for little pay-off. You get a section solely about looking around the Daily Planet newspaper office and yet it doesn’t feel like much of what you’re learning makes the world more interesting. A codex filled with audio files and the like can again add depth to the world, but it is technically deep while not really being compelling. Motivations aren’t very strong nor are they really tested in personal moments, as Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League really is primarily a game about hopping around Metropolis completing missions until you can face down the Justice League members in combat.
Looking past some poor internet connectivity issues and strange moments like two characters turning completely invisible until you exit the game, the gameplay side of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has some potential even after you learn about its unusual focus on firearms. A character like Captain Boomerang doesn’t foresake his namesake at least and Killer Shark can throw his weigh around, but a lot more of the combat is focused on things like sniper rifles, assault rifles, and miniguns. Your character choice will determine which guns you can use and if you don’t have a full squad of players, you can swap between the members you aren’t playing as if you like, and there are distinct reasons to select each character. Mostly, this actually comes down to traversal, and after raiding the Hall of Justice for some helpful tech, you have things like Harley Quinn swinging from one of Batman’s drones to get around the city or Boomerang adding some of Flash’s Speed Force to his weapons to make himself more of a supervillain instead of a guy really good at throwing bent wood. There is a bit of joy to be found in using your movement skills well, more on their own merits rather than what the game chooses to do with them. Completing missions in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will involve you crossing the city of Metropolis first to get to them, but the process is a bit of a pain without much point. There are Riddler related tasks you can stop to do, mostly hidden trophies, some actual riddles to see if you can find an interesting landmark, and a few checkpoint races, but other than those, the city gives you no reason to stop and fight baddies because of their low value and thus having to tromp to each objective gets old quickly.
Perhaps the choice to make Metropolis an open world you can technically explore despite there being no good motivation to do so stings even more because of what it does to the combat. Already, Brainiac’s forces have quite a problem in that they blend together quite a bit. You might make note of the snipers, the big guys that take more damage to kill, and some tentacled creatures that will take control of other soldiers to power them up, but they don’t exactly ask you to vary up your fighting style in big ways. Most of the time, a mission will throw a bunch of soldiers on nearby rooftops and you go over to blast them without much fuss. Your character has a shield meter to protect their health that you might need to refill with a melee attack from time to time and you can knock enemies up in the air and juggle them with your bullets in something that does admittedly look satisfying every time it happens. In fact, much like crossing the city with your powers, there are attacks in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League that are exciting on a surface level. Traversal attacks are often rooftop clearing maneuvers, Suicide Strikes let you deal heavy damage to a foe with a well-animated attack, and yet, they’re mostly speeding things up rather than being ways to expand your toolkit. If you don’t do these, you’ll just be shooting baddies with whatever two weapons you have equipped, and whether your defending a car, saving civilians, or helping a hard to tolerate child version of Posion Ivy infect part of town with her plants, things end up feeling a bit mindless. You can do countershots to stop incoming attacks, helicopters in the air have weak spots to focus on, but the battles grow stale remarkably quickly and perhaps interrupting them with frequent cutscenes is meant to avoid the stagnation that is destined to last once you get to the postgame content.
Looping back to the story for a bit, between missions you will have the squad, their allies, or even the Justice League constantly talking as you traverse the city, not helping with the bombardment of dialogue that makes you rapidly lose interest in what’s happening through sheer overexposure. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is unfortunately meant to be a weak continuation of the plot from the Batman: Arkham games, right down to a museum in the early adventure being devoted to recounting the events of Arkham Asylum, Arkam City, and Arkham Knight. It doesn’t matter too much save for occasional flickers of Harley noting her actions in the series or how it might inform the backstory of someone like Ivy, but it does some additional dissatisfaction to the story even before it begins to sacrifice its own plot on the altar of being a live-service game. While the plot is building towards you facing off with Brainiac, it also needed to justify having a lot of activities after the credits roll to keep people coming back and possibly paying for extra content. Unfortunately, it does this by making your grand successes ultimately not as important as they should be, and if you do play the extra missions unlocked after the plot, you get very little story, a lot of recycling or uninteresting adjustments to what you’ve seen before, and what new you do learn from the rare cutscene starts to undermine the whole point of your adventure even more.
One of the odder choices has to be in relation to how you get new and better weapons. After a mission you’ll be granted some new goodies for free, but Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is all too ready to drop legendary level equipment on you from the early game, making many of the extra loot you get along the way feel a bit underwhelming when you’re left picking between small improvements and rarely getting that feeling of finding something truly rare or unique. In a more interesting touch, many side missions do have better pay offs than just getting random weapons that are often almost too good. For example, Gizmo gives you a flying car to fight in at times, it fairly simple, too quick to self-destruct, and not really fun to use, but doing Gizmo’s missions will make it a more capable fighting vehicle even if it still feels like it barely adds anything to the missions it’s in. Some characters will open up new customization options for doing their missions like the chance to poison or freeze enemies, although these missions sometimes force you to fight in a certain way like only using those effects as your main means of damage, something that slows down the battles and removes the better fighting options you usually have. These are fine ideas implemented poorly, giving you even less reason to explore Metropolis, especially since you’ll likely be able to keep up with the power curve in the main adventure and even get a character to max level should you stick with them with little issue.
Even the confrontations with the Justice League disappoint. Initially the game shows some incredible promise with your first encounter with Batman. It embodies the expected confusion and terror you’d feel being on the other side of a hero who so deftly uses stealth and intelligence to control a situation, and if encounters with the League had been about turning the tables on a superhero in their element like that, they could have been truly memorable encounters. Instead, most of the time when you face a member of the League, it’s in a bit of a chaotic closed arena where you’re constantly spinning around to deal with their range of attacks. The superpowers are often used to decent effect, but some battles feel anticlimactic considering the caliber of foe you’re facing, and the game has fairly few boss formulas in general even when you go into the post-game missions, it particularly disappointing to see the same fight rehashed by an imitator rather than giving you more unique battles to conquer. It ends up hard to point at highlight moments because almost all of them squander their potential in some way, and ultimately, the best time you’ll likely have with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is when a fight is so basic and quick that you can mindlessly complete it.
THE VERDICT: Some incredible talent is on show in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but nowhere near where it needs it. The visuals and animations do superb work even if the world they’re showing isn’t always meant to look nice, but it’s all attached to a boring third-person combat system where you’re constantly fighting interchangeable gunners on rooftops with ease. You cross a city with almost nothing to do but waste time to take down the Justice League in underwhelming showdowns and get characters constantly yammering in your ears as they often fail to be funny. There are “needle in the haystack” moments that are satisfying, humorous, or impressive, but there are so many haystacks and so few needles that it’s going to be filled with far more disappointment than cheer.
And so, I give Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for PlayStation 5…
A TERRIBLE rating. I tried and I tried to just give this game a Bad because in my head I can see the parts where things almost worked. It’s not like its a miserable time to fight always, sometimes it’s nice to whip out your cool looking moves and cream some foes with little resistance, but that’s most of what you’re doing between cutscenes that really struggle to get you invested or get you laughing. Hypothetically, if you skip the cutscenes, you are still left with hollow treks across a bland open world, you’re still going to have the characters talk your ear off chatting about things that won’t often interest you or amuse you, and when you get to the action, its best moments are often when it’s simply tolerable. There are good ideas in places like making most side-missions pay off with true benefits, but then you also spend so much time in the story meeting some new character who doesn’t provide a meaningfully different mission and their contribution is often just a new way to customize weapons that are already going to be powerful enough unless you dive into the absurdly high difficulty levels and post-game treadmill content. This isn’t like Marvel’s Avengers, a game that had good combat and a proper storyline despite stapling on live-service elements to try and justify you coming back to play it beyond the story, and even Avengers had more meaningful additions over time than Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s extra seasons of content mostly just slap new paint on old ideas or introduce playable characters that don’t have much room to show their stuff comparatively, although it’s hard to see why you’d invest time working on unlocking them or even paying your way to skip that process. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn’t make you like it during its main story, because while a character like Captain Boomerang could work surprisingly well in a better adventure, here he’s the one case where an unlikable element was intentional. Combat that can’t concoct creative new twists, boss fights that won’t thrill, characters you wish would stop talking since it feels like the comedy is being forced in rather than coming naturally as part of script-writing, it all makes it so that the experience really struggles to deserve attention before you even stumble into the rare but sometimes flagrant technical problems like accidentally invisible characters in cutscenes.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is terrible because it doesn’t apply the clear talents it does have to a proper game format. This shouldn’t have been set in an open world, it shouldn’t have had a focus on gun drops and crafting, it shouldn’t have tried to keep itself going with low effort extra seasons of content. It needs a proper editor, it needs a battle planner, it needs room to stretch its legs with things like the boss fight design but also it needs to know when to rein it in when it comes to character chatter. It could have been a fun four player co-op adventure that made proper use of the art team, it could have found better opposition for the character skills that are still a bit exciting to use despite only being usable on plain minions, but it feels a bit foolish to keep saying what it could’ve been when it was never meant to be these better things. Its heart is unfortunately in all the wrong places instead of realizing the areas that it did succeed in and it won’t stop cramming all the bad ideas together and shoving them in your face until you step away from it for good. Warner Bros. wanted to design this game to make bank without focusing on making something likeable first, and while there are parts you can point at as not being necessarily terrible, the complete bombardment of bad ideas makes this game worse because it is a sum of all those parts. There are live service games and solo adventures that will treat you better, so settling for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is not something anyone needs to do.