Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Playing, analysing, and ultimately reviewing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been a little exhausting to say the least, maybe even downright exhausting. It's not because the game is one of the worst I've played. In fact, I think many media outlets and so-called 'content creators' use too many words when criticising the game. They risk mistaking disappointment for something that is objectively poor, and it's perhaps crucial to state early on that there are aspects of the overall Suicide Squad experience that impress - it would be outright foolish to say otherwise. We can and should get into those things, because it's through the lens of the things the studio manages to nail that we arrive at the simply gigantic disappointment, the rotten core, the corrupted heart that rests at the soft centre of Suicide Squad.

It's not just disappointing because parts of the studio (minus the creative heads at the end) gave us one of the best game trilogies in recent memory. It's disappointing because Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League arrives as a sad end to a generally annoying trend where single-player studios either choose or are encouraged to pursue the frustrating live service trend. This happens even though the games produced are categorically worse and help to destroy the studios' reputations. Anthem, Redfall, Babylon's Fall, the cancelled The Last of Us Multiplayer, Marvel's Avengers - the examples are simply too numerous and it's mostly sad and draining. We don't know each and every one of these stories, but Jason Schreier has taken us behind the scenes at both BioWare and Arkane, and it's funny how it's not just the games that end up disappointing when dedicated, experienced single-player studios go for the so-called "live service gold rush", but the conditions while working on these controversial projects are just as bad. So where does that leave Suicide Squad?

After completing roughly half of the campaign, I delivered my first impressions of the game in an article (which you can read here), where I did start by pointing out that there are parts of this experience worth mentioning, highlighting and praising. I still feel that way, and it's worth reiterating that Rocksteady is one of the best studios in the world when it comes to set design, narrative building, motion capture, facial animation and scene construction. It's not just about technique; it's about understanding the visual language behind each character, each area and positioning the characters in the scene in a way that makes it exciting to watch the action. They certainly manage to do that.

But from here, we just go deeper and deeper into a depressing pit of grievance, anger, disappointment and resigned hyperbole. I get no joy from ripping apart a game that on the surface could have appealed to me and that I really wanted to love. While the live service model has generally proven to be detrimental to the industry, as the money men at the top are simply unable to exercise any restraint or even more critical judgement as to which studios should take on such a project and which should categorically not, I'm not against the concept. There are good live service games, there just are. But Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is an example of everything that's wrong with the premise.

Every critical part of Suicide Squad's central loop, from interface design to enemy variety, from boss fights to side content, from ability selection to loot design, is hopelessly, hopelessly compromised to the point where it's really hard to keep track of it all. Therefore, I'm going to have to surrender parts of the traditional review structure to the higher powers and give in to the desire to transform parts of this text into a more loose rant.

In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, there are four playable characters, but aside from offering slightly different movement patterns, all four are the same. They can use the same weapons, and while their respective talent trees can take them in different directions, there's no high-level buildcrafting here. Why Rocksteady decided that the only differentiating factor was the loot you choose to use, which in itself only offers rather superficial stat modifiers and effects, is beyond me. Aside from a few examples found in the game's so-called 'Infamy Sets,' which are sets of various pieces of gear that act as holy grails, this is Anthem-level loot. An anonymous heap of shotguns, miniguns and shields that have no unique recoil patterns, special side effects or gameplay-modifying distinctive options. They're thrown at you willy-nilly, and not once during my 30 hours with the game did the game's loot change the way I accessed my character, nor did switching characters, for that matter. There are a few effects that come close to offering more extensive gameplay modification, but they are few and far between.

There are several deep-seated problems with the game's central loop. The entire game features just one enemy faction of boring, anonymous purple space monsters, and they themselves only come in three flavours: a basic grunt, a sniper and a slightly heavier cousin. There are also tanks and helicopters, but they're far rarer and none of these require a significantly different approach. Some enemies undergo a very superficial transformation during the campaign, but aside from the fact that some grunts can move quickly and some snipers can turn invisible, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn't really play with difficulty or enemy variation, and it doesn't matter if you just want to get through the campaign or spend hundreds of hours on the game's endgame as it stands right now.

Topography is also an issue, because the whole of Metropolis is designed in such a way that enemies will always, if possible, spawn high up on rooftops and often behind shields as well. This means that it is quickly telegraphed to the player that verticality is everything and that jumping from rooftop to rooftop is the most efficient way to reach your opponents. And in the long run, this means that you'll never have a memorable relationship with the world you're in, as you're always moving above it, hovering and focusing your attention solely on those rooftops that rise far above all the details that are forgotten at street level. But this also means that battles always feel monotonous because the game doesn't play with locations and never sets up exciting battle arenas that challenge your understanding of your surroundings. In this way, Suicide Squad is a bit like Sonic Frontiers; there is (perhaps) an exciting world beneath you, but the gameplay loop prevents you from engaging with it because that loop is constructed on top of that world, not in it.

It also doesn't help that there are basically only four to six content types that the game repeats endlessly, never requiring or facilitating different forms of strategy or engagement. To be fair, a good 90% of the campaign is also created using these mission types, where you have to defend Poison Ivy's plants, deliver allies to a Fortnite-inspired Battle Bus or destroy specific nodes in an enemy fortress. You'll be asked to do this over and over again, both to progress through the campaign and as part of the game's endgame. You arrive, hover, jump, shoot and complete, and then get rewarded with a piece of loot you don't care about.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is so compromised that the entire game's interface language is unoptimised and messy. Have you seen real gameplay from relatively experienced players on YouTube or Twitch? Have you seen how angular, confusing and unappealing this interface is? It explodes with numbers, particle effects and colours to the point where it's impossible to keep track of what's actually going on. It's particularly detrimental to immersion since positioning is such a crucial part of the experience, and if you can't see where you're going because the screen is literally covered in colour, then the entire gameplay model of the game falls to the ground - literally.

Even the story, you know, the one that the game is praised for in some places, is downright hopeless. While there's a grace in taking the concept of 'kill your heroes' terribly seriously and really going all out to 'kill the Justice League', it's done so bluntly here, with both the boss fights themselves lacking gravitas and style, while Rocksteady never really manages to support or capitalise on the otherwise rather exciting premise. The moral compass spins all over the place, only to reset here and there, and you're never really aware of whether the Suicide Squad are villains, anti-heroes, heroes or a mix of one or more of the aforementioned categories. Of course, it may seem appealing on the surface that the game refuses to conform to a classic narrative formula, and there are points for being both brave and willing to walk the narrative plank. But neither the battles nor the way these heroes are defeated are particularly satisfying, and those are the only moments that break from the established formula. It's hard to see them as bright spots.

And by the way, there's not a single strand of side content involving other side characters from the wider DC universe, no exciting dialogue initiated by finding a specific location, no surprises. Forget the Arkham series structure where you chase a bunch of bad guys at the same time. Here you're only here to shoot purple aliens and pick up the next Legendary shotgun with a 12% increased crit chance. That's it. You bring in Penguin, Poison Ivy and more, but after their respective introductions they become nothing more than shopkeepers in the game's hub - that's what these characters are reduced to. Glorified vendors. Who thought this would either go unnoticed or be downright commendable?

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has fundamental design issues everywhere you look, and as Ralph from SkillUp says, this is a case of Rocksteady making the wrong decisions from the outset, and while they've executed their vision with technical sophistication and attention to detail, make no mistake; Suicide Squad is polished and 'gorgeous,' but scratch the surface and give it more than 30 minutes and it all falls apart. Not only does it fall apart, it actively gets worse the longer you play.

I'm sad for Rocksteady, I really am, because this is the wrong game, developed wrong, with the wrong priorities at the wrong time. But most of all, this is just not a good game. There's no good bones here, there's no good foundation to build on, and just like with Redfall, I wish for this once respected studio to stand up, brush off the dust and start again, because I can't see Suicide Squad becoming an exciting game, even with massive cuts and even with the addition of new content.