Rocksteady are perhaps best known for their Arkham series, and less so for live-service-style offerings such as Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. This is never more evident than the first time you are hit with the pause screen. With its busy UI overflowing with ‘materials’ to collect’ outfits to craft’ and ‘multiplayer’ options, one would be forgiven for thinking that they have fallen into a DC-skinning of the Marvel’s Avengers game. A live-service game with the Suicide Squad at front and centre was not what anyone wanted for Christmas and this game proves it.
The combat in the Arkham series is unparalleled, and copied often, with games like Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor and Shadow of War respectively, both borrowing heavily from the series. It always felt fluid, exciting and varied. Every hit is punctuated with a wonderful flourish and it really made you feel like Batman – yeah, I went there.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League on the other hand, does not. The combat is clunky, boring and repetitive. More often than not, when landing a combo and feeling pretty good about oneself, the game can encounter a combo-breaking glitch for no apparent reason, which subsequently – and with no warning – will catapult you across the playing area. This can often lead to you failing, one of the game mission types, which require you to stay within an area and defeat a set-number of enemies to secure a ‘thingymajig’ to progress further in the story – more on the mission types later.
‘Diluted’ Story
Now for the story. The story in this game is rather more diluted than previous Arkham offerings. There are no huge mysteries to uncover, the lack of Batman as a playable character means there is very little in the way of puzzle-solving, and all the missions feel very flat. Almost as if they exist merely as a vehicle to move the plot forwards. Such as it is.
Basically, Brainiac – of whom most non-comic fans will have no concept – has brainwashed the Justice League of America, and now they are all committing crimes instead of solving them. Pretty simple, pretty easy to follow. The narrative itself may be thin on the ground, but the character development isn’t.
Eye-Rolling Humour
Throughout play, you interact with some of Gotham’s finest and meanest, and a number of humour-filled, sardonic and – often – mean-spirited interactions leave you breathless or laughing your proverbial behind off. But these are few and far between and more-often-than-not, you find yourself rolling your eyes at the attempts at humour. Honestly, these are so badly written/delivered that it would not be surprising, if they are AI-generated.
Speaking of AI, the enemies in this game bounce binarily from “let’s kill everything on screen with no regard for our own lives” to “who cares if they just killed twenty of my team-mates, they are too far away now so not worth the hassle”. It is infuriating that this is the case, especially when one of the characters of whom you can play, uses a sniper rifle. The sniper rifle is only really effective if it can actually hit your enemy, and when the enemy loses interest, apparently so too does the range at which you can eliminate your target. The combat is certainly meant to be hectic, up-close-and-personal and the game only includes the sniper rifle as a means to satisfy a criteria. The whole affair feels very ‘tried-and-tested’
By-the-Numbers Side Missions
This continues long into the moment-to-moment gameplay. The side-missions follow a ‘by-the-numbers’ format, and are limited in their variety to the standard open-world mission fodder we have seen time and time again. This is when the game is actually delivering missions. So often, the filler will be pre-filled with dialogue between characters who are neither on-screen, or available to interact with in any meaningful way. This makes the whole experience of listening to their banter entirely superfluous.
The main missions are no better and very often can lead to you wandering around looking for something to do while you get berated for something that you either; didn’t do, or that you did do but didn’t do in the right way because there was no way to know that you needed to until you failed those conditions – it can be very exhausting.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League ‘Gets in its Own Way So Often’
And that, in a nutshell, is the game. It has so many good ideas, some wonderful voice performances and brilliant set-designs. But it gets in its own way so often, trying to become the ‘next big thing’ rather than just being happy with its position. Everything meshes together, but not in a cohesive and understandable way, more like a Picasso-esque Eldritch horror.
So many great ideas should have made this game a GOTY contender; instead, it resulted in a montage of ‘what-could-have-beens’ and an exhausting experience that will make you yearn for another Arkham game. This either should have been released last year to die with games like Gollum. Or left in a little longer, and made less of a trend-chaser. Sad to see Rocksteady put this out, but hopeful that they might be able to repair it before any lasting-damage is done. If Hello Games can turn No Man’s Sky around, then anything is possible.
