Suicide Squad

We sit down and review Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. A co-op looter shooter with the core plot in the title. Here is our review of this Suicide Squad title

After a lot of waiting, a few delays, and many other hurdles to get out there, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is out there for us all to experience on the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. A title that seems to carry on the story and setting that placed Rocksteady on a solid pedestal for a while now. This time in a co-op looter shooter instead of the detective action titles that the Arkham titles gave us. So, there is a bit of worry from many out there and now we are here to see if the Suicide Squad is going to carry it all forward more. Also, if we needed to have a new live service title to keep us back in for the DC characters and shooting all of the aliens out there. Yes, that might be a bit of a spoiler to the story we have. Nonetheless, here we go with our full review of how this title handles and if you should be joining the world in the game or not.

Story

It has been five years since Batman was thought to be dead but joined the Justice League in saving the world again. But this is not a Batman story as it is all about the Suicide Squad. A story that picks up shortly after Brainiac has invaded the Earth, taken over the minds of the Justice League, and has set sights on converting the rest of the Earth to his slaves. A.R.G.U.S. being a bit ahead of things and always trying to plan ahead, has opted to send out Task Force X to bring these gods down so that humanity might have a chance to survive. Now we find ourselves taking on the role of one of the members of the Suicide Squad to head out, kill the Justice League, and maybe save our reality.

Hated

To kick things off here for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, as it is part of the reason it has taken us a bit to get the review out there, the fact that it is a live service game that requires you to be online all the time is one of the worst parts of it all. While it would be nice to hop on and have other players take up one of the four (current) characters in the roster, I was out here playing it solo. Something that is an option but still requires you to be online. Online and if the game loses any connection will lead to you losing a good portion of your progress. This is something that only seemed to come up in the game when I was fighting the Justice League directly or during an important mission. Due to servers going up and down, which is still happening as of this writing, I found myself on the verge of bringing down many of the bosses or completing harder tasks in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League on to get booted out, losing all progress, and having to completely restart the game to be able to get back in. Only to find hours of work or that all of my trials were for nothing and had to be redone. SINGLE PLAYER DOES NOT NEED TO BE ONLINE is all I am saying, since this destroys any fun in the game.

Once I was able to get past the connection issues in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, we then move on to the traversal and basic combat for the game. If I did not know that Rocksteady had a great knowledge of the DC comics already from their other work, I would swear the developers got all of their ideas for these mechanics for the characters just from internet image searches and no other research. For Harley and Boomerang, the characters were unplayable when it came to getting around the map. Harley swinging and grappling with mechanics that feel like they came out of an early alpha build of Arkham Asylum and Boomerang teleporting to wherever he throws his boomerang. I had to stop playing with these characters as they were not fun. Leaving only King Shark (who leaps and dashes) and Deadshot (who has a jet pack) as my only options because they worked to an extent while not perfect. I get that the team wanted them to all feel unique and not just reskinned clones, but I could never get the hang of it and could never find any fun getting around the game's map. I had to default to always using the jetpack and then swapping characters once I was at the mission location. I have no idea how this made it out of the QA phase of things.

Then we have the combat and abilities of the Suicide Squad in the game to look at. Except for Deadshot, it does not make any sense that all of these characters are defaulted to using guns only. Guns that are mostly rendered useless by how quickly many of the enemies and bosses move about the game map. Mix in the fact that it is required to shoot enemies in specific locations to build up shields or even damage in some cases, and this all leads to a lot of frustration and leaning on the over-the-top Traversal Attack or Suicide Strike mechanics. These are more of a one-hit-kill after building up a bit of a combo while shooting wildly. These felt like what should have been the basic attacks for all of the characters but instead, they leaned into the guns and not much else. Of course, this is to make sure you are out there grinding and trying to find the next bit of gear that will give one more percentage to damage on whatever weapon you are using with your Suicide Squad. This will lead us right into the last major gripe if have and that is the grind of the game for no reason.

I made the joke about it above about shooting random aliens out there in the world of Suicide Squad, and you are going to do a whole lot of that and not in any real productive way. Also, for no real bonus to any of your characters you might be going with. In a universe filled with all kinds of villains and other henchmen to use, the game only gives us the same generic purple aliens to shoot over and over, sometimes in different sizes, and you will need to do this a lot. To the point that it becomes boring very fast and will want to skip through the story of the game as fast as possible. More so, as the rewards given to the Suicide Squad for doing all of the grinding are never better than anything you get in the main story. Those thinking it could be for resources in the game too, the grind never leads to anything in that area either. Not once in playing the game did purchase something that was better than what I already had. Maybe this will change as we wait for the other 12 Brainiacs to be released via DLC and we can complete the full story. Oh, yeah, this grind does not even let you finish the full story and offers up nothing great in return. Take a minute to think about all of that.

Loved

Whoever is in charge of the writing for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League needs to be given all manner of raises and praises out there. The writing team knocked this one right out of the park. Not only with the core story and how certain elements are handled, but even the dialogue between the various members of the Suicide Squad too. Part of that goes to the voice actors as well, but these two things were the shining point of the entire game and the reason I put up with all of the other terrible aspects of the game. That was the only part of the grind I enjoyed and needed to see through in this whole game. There are reasons for everything, the characters are a unique version but also fit the world it is set in, and the banter never becomes boring. It is hard to say that for any game out there and it shows that there were some master talents in the process of this game, which only helps highlight the faults more. Especially when it is painfully obvious through this amazing part of the work that there were some who knew the IP. The story and banter are going to be why I even come back as I do want to see how it all concludes once the money-grubbing side has run its course.

To this end, there was another shining example in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League where the gameplay had me in love. Not a huge shocker, but the parts of the game where it was all about Batman and no longer the looter shooter were done so well. These were parts where we finally were able to see the perspective of the criminal as Batman stalked us about the game map. The characters know they are outgunned and out-classed but still need to get the job done. These were not short segments and the game took its time with each of the members of the Suicide Squad too. This by itself could have been an amazing game to have played if fleshed out more and it was something I craved more of in the bigger story. It was a tonal shift but it was so much fun to play. Even if it boiled down to trying to spot Batman's traps before walking into them or trying to get the drop on Batman before he took us out. Even when failing these missions in the game, they were so well done that you felt like you needed to blame yourself instead of the core mechanics of the rest of the game. Why could we not just get a full title in this vein instead?

Overview

No sugar-coating it here, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is not a great game unless you like killing the same basic aliens over and over with little reward for doing so. Mix in the connection issues and the very poor traversal and movement mechanics in the game, it is a massive blemish on the pedigree that Rocksteady had going for them. The story is top-tier and the Batman sections were great, but nothing that could not be watched in a video form instead of struggling through some poor gameplay that is on the verge of forcing microtransactions all the time. Even if we are not able to get the full story in the game's current form too. So, there might be a reason to wait a bit longer on Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League with each new Brainiac dimension and Earth being part of the slow release, it will easily be over a year before we get the full story and that is if they release a new bit every month so we can kill all of those things too. So, I am not able to place this on any kind of recommendation list yet and I would hold off. Maybe down the line things will change but that could be months from the writing of this review.

I give Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League 2 Inflictions on the Infliction scale.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was developed by Rocksteady and published by Warner Bros. Games for the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on February 2^nd, 2024. A PlayStation copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.