Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League by Rocksteady Studios can be described as a The Division with superheroes, a concept that has its own charm but might cater to a specific audience. However, coming from the same producer as the Batman: Arkham trilogy, it’s safe to say that it falls short of fans’ expectations. Despite this, every creative endeavor deserves recognition for exploring new ideas, even if the result may vary in its appeal.
In this game, Rocksteady attempts to create a cooperative action experience with superheroes on a grand scale, featuring a medium-sized open world, stunning graphics, and epic superhero-worthy scenes. The goal is to evolve the design of the Arkham trilogy into a cooperative gameplay format without neglecting the cinematic campaign. In the initial hours of gameplay, the game manages to strike a balance between these elements quite effectively.
The narrative of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League follows Harley Quinn, Killer Shark, Boomerang, and Deadshot as they embark on a mission to save the Justice League members from Brainiac’s control and avert Earth’s destruction. The idea of having to face off against the Justice League in boss battles sounds intriguing, but the game’s pacing suffers due to repetitive and mundane tasks that precede these epic showdowns.
Rocksteady’s attempt to merge elements from Batman: Arkham with cooperative gameplay and live-service mechanics like XP progression and customizable abilities falls short of its potential. The game forces players to slog through repetitive missions to reach the more engaging parts of the story, ultimately detracting from the overall experience. Despite its strong moments, the lack of innovation in creating an engaging gameplay loop hampers the game’s enjoyment.
Missions in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League mostly revolve around defeating enemies in various scenarios to unlock rewards and progress in the game’s economy. While this formula is standard in live-service games, the lack of diversity and the repetitive nature of these tasks can lead to frustration among players. The introduction of challenging modifiers does little to alleviate the monotony, making the overall experience more tedious than exciting.
The ability to choose between various abilities in each tier of 3 skill trees is a positive aspect, allowing you to create a version of the character that suits your interpretation of gameplay. For example, I liked the physical attacks that allow applying statuses to enemies (such as freezing them) and I liked the mechanic of the physical attack sending opponents flying in the air to follow up with a precise shot. I focused my build on making the most of these physical attacks to quickly increase the combo multiplier and activate buffs, like extra shield protection. Balancing gameplay with my customized fun and taking advantage of it through the build is a very positive point.
Rocksteady has managed to create a fun gunplay and gameplay experience, and if I imagine myself eventually going back to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to enjoy the endgame, it will be for that reason. However, for every positive point, there seems to be a negative one to counteract it. While the gunplay and combat mechanics are enjoyable, the mechanics for traversing Metropolis can be a bit clunky and require some getting used to. It can be a literal headache trying to combat and use these movement mechanics when the game struggles to show the action effectively. Moreover, the worst part is the use of modifiers in an attempt to introduce diversity in the gameplay loop.
Rocksteady chose to create modifiers for the missions, branching out the interpretations of the same repetitive gameplay throughout all of them. Examples include missions modified to only cause damage in a certain way, like with grenades, shield breaking, or enemies afflicted with a particular ailment, such as ice or fire. This forces you to play in a specific manner and sometimes only intensifies the frustration. In theory, it’s a good idea, but combined with performance issues, overly cluttered HUD, camera problems, and Bots that don’t always help (they don’t even do anything in boss fights), it becomes a much less enjoyable experience than one would hope for.
There’s no way around it, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is one of those games where the credits are just the beginning, where Rocksteady wants to convince you to stay after the campaign to repeat the same activities and unlock more weapons. As you progress through the campaign, you are prepared for this phase, where you’ll have to traverse alternate dimensions to obtain better equipment, undertake more challenging missions – with modifiers remaining a key feature – and where playing alongside other humans becomes essential.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Experience
With an attempt to poke fun at the service design and inform that the ending is not the end, but just the beginning of the grind in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the credits conclude the narrative and kick off the service experience with its true strength. Rocksteady Studios introduces you to its gameplay loop, new economies, and rewards, but essentially, this only means repeating for dozens of hours what you’ve already done so far.
Gameplay and Design
Despite rare moments of grace and fun, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the worst kind of experience you can engage with: you won’t feel particularly upset about dedicating your time to it, but you also won’t feel like you’re missing out if you don’t play it. It’s a game that elicits indifference, and that is the worst thing one can say about an interactive experience – the inability to excite and leave lasting memories.
- Overall graphic quality, especially the characters
- Boss fights
- Some fun story missions
- Well-executed gunplay
- Build customization that allows you to take advantage of combo multipliers in a fun way
The overall graphic quality, especially the characters, is well done in this game. Boss fights are engaging and there are some fun story missions. The gunplay is solid and the customization of builds allows for enjoyable combo multipliers. However, there is nothing particularly memorable here. The gameplay can become confusing and frustrating with artificial difficulty modifiers. The design that forces repetitive and unenjoyable missions can become tiresome. There are also significant drops in performance during some boss fights.
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