From the day that Rocksteady first announced Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League back in 2020, the odds seemed stacked against the game.
Not just because the first impressions of the game didn’t hit home for many fans of the gritty Batman: Arkham series but also because the theme and live-service elements seemed to offend everyone and their mothers.
In the years since, the public remained divided, with the general vibe on social media being that people were waiting for Rocksteady to crash and burn with its villainous joyride throughout Metropolis.
Yet, I’m here to tell you that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is an amusing impressive, chaotic game, both in terms of narrative and gameplay and at the end of the day, it feels so damn good to be bad.
When it comes to the game’s story, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League puts it all out there in the title. Players will be tasked with killing none other than the Justice League themselves, and for some reason, the thought of killing the Justice League seemed to offend the masses.
But let’s be honest, how many of us who grew up on a healthy dose of energy drinks and comic books haven’t thought about killing Superman? No? Just me?
But that said, if you’re one of those deeply triggered at the thought of having to exterminate the Justice League, characters that only just debuted in the Arkhamverse in this very title, try to put that aside because once you get over the superhero murder thing, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a lot of fun.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League shines in its witty and well-produced cutscenes, scattered throughout the game, that allows the personalities of the four main characters, Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark, to shine.
And if you enjoy the sometimes cringe and always quirky humour that the DC cinematic universe has become synonymous with, there is a lot to love here.
From start to finish, the humorous tone and banter never let up, which helps balance out the constant looting and killing that the game focuses on while never letting players forget about the ever-mounting tension of having to kill the Justice League and take down Earth’s invader, Brainiac at the same time.
One of the joys of playing Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is how differently each character plays, and whether you’re going at it alone or with up to three friends, it’s a blast to navigate through the open-world Metropolis taking down Brainiac’s forces as one of Arkham’s baddest and finest.
The online mode is also much more fun than you might expect from the game, especially for friends who enjoy giving each other a hard time because a considerable mechanic is stealing your friends’ hard-earned kills right out from under their noses.
This kind of backstabbery is encouraged by giving players higher scores for stealing each other’s kills, which means more XP, faster levelling and the ability to generate abilities more quickly while in battle. This system drives home the fact that even though you’re all in a squad together, you’re still anti-heroes, and it’s each to his own, a rather freeing approach to a multiplayer looter shooter game.
This level of player independence is also driven home by the game allowing you to do whatever catches your fancy while in combat. You want to steal all the kills? Go for it. You want to play nice and be there to support and revive your foe friends? That’s cool, too – even if that’s not the way I approached things, being more of a lie-there-and-suffer-in-silence type player.
Still, I’d be remiss to only focus on everything I enjoyed about the game without mentioning the things that don’t exactly hit home the way they should. The biggest of these issues is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League falling into the same trap many live-service games can and often do.
For example, many of the game’s missions can start to feel repetitive quickly, and a lot of them follow a rather tired formula of go-here-kill-that or go-here-defend-this-from-that. While the repetitiveness is hard to ignore, it’s not like I didn’t have a good time still playing the missions.
Combat in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League feels fast, fluid and good, which means these missions feel good, even if I found myself wanting more from them.
Another part of the game that didn’t shine like I wanted it to was the boss battles. For starters, there aren’t many of them, and when they do pop up, they, too, follow the same template, use countershots, and then do damage. And while all these boss fights look cinematically great, they never really feel epic because you feel like you’re doing the same stuff you do with smaller mobs, just on a bigger target.
The final point of contention isn’t one that I had with the game. Still, it has been running rampant on social media, so it needs to be discussed: killing Justice League.
A lot of the narrative online is that the game is somehow disrespectful because people’s favourite heroes are getting slaughtered, one by one, by a misfit group of Arkham inmates.
However, I want to say, without spoilers, that the game is filled to the brim with little tidbits of information that could be vital in going forward, and context truly is everything, so when you see a few cutscenes online that have you clutching your pearls, just know it will all make sense when you play the game. Trust.
