Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League is the game that, for better or worse, you wouldn’t have expected from the creators of Batman Arkham.
We spent about 13 hours in the main story and in some secondary missions of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, trying to understand why this project earned the right to exist and if there was something salvageable within it, against all odds expectations of Rocksteady fans and gaming enthusiasts more broadly.
The good news is that there is some positivity, that it is also playable in single-player without wasting too much time on an online team composition, and it is to a certain extent even enjoyable, which automatically makes it something less than to the announced disaster that everyone was expecting.
The bitterness for an evident case of mismanagement (perhaps even worse than BioWare with Anthem) remains, with a studio like Rocksteady clearly diverted to an IP which has been the subject of inexplicable therapeutic fury in recent years and to a segment which has long passed away such as that of service games.
The good of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League —
For all the efforts made, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League – far be it from us to be the Nostradamus of the moment, given the randomness of (many, but not all) phenomena that are born, die and perhaps proliferate for a while – risks detaching the plug in the space of a few months, when, and the narrative parts and Batman’s experiences are there to prove it, he could still have had his say at excellent levels on a title out of the stale excesses of GaaS.
For example, the writing is good: apart from the hasty premise, the parodic and humorous tone of the Suicide Squad was fully achieved, with more successful comic timing and sketches than the film counterpart (not that much was needed, of course). The game is well acted, with the exception of some lameness in the Italian dubbing, and references to the Arkhamverse are scattered here and there, of which it is in all respects a sequel and for some nuances a retcon.
The cutscenes suggest a love for the characters which clearly indicates how, no one knows why, Rocksteady really wanted to make a game about Task Force time from a trend that worked for a few years ago, and has now vanished. It happens when you take 9 years to launch your next title and you chase, rather than create.
It’s really Batman –
The boss fights are inventive, and the fact that the best sequences are those with Batman – the house specialty – says a lot. Most of the time they follow similar plots (a “counterattack” with LT + RB before being able to reduce the boss sequence), which work but are repeated profusely and, by the fourth time, become predictable. Except, again, for the Dark Knight, treated almost like the boss of a JRPG or a stylish action. It is also appreciable how the game does not shy away from the promise of actually making you kill the Justice League, without ending everything with tarallucci and wine, producing some scenes of great impact to the detriment of heroes consolidated in the collective imagination.
The crossing is generally discreet (better, at least, than in Gotham Knights), but with Deadshot it is much more comfortable than the rest of the team – net of the jetpack cooldown which, for some reason, only works if you touch the ground. With other team members it is fragmented and slow, inconsistent with a distinctly vertical open world, and this, with fast travel available to only one destination, can be a problem.
Beyond the crossing, when it comes to feeling, the differences between the different characters are not particularly marked, even if the game does a good job of trying to make you use them all with the adrenaline mechanic, which gives a given member more power and XP. The fact that some weapon types are not compatible with certain characters, as well as the better traversal options with one rather than another, only contributes to making them seem even more like Serie B protagonists, and we never really felt incentivized to level them too outside of our main.
The open world of Metropolis —
The shooting is solid and crisp enough if you want some brain-dead looter shooter fun: sometimes we found ourselves holding our finger down on the trigger for so long that we forgot why we were doing it, and ultimately the premise of the sub-genre is a bit like this. Compared to the various Destiny and The Division often brought up (along with the artistic direction à la Sunset Overdrive), if nothing else, the bullet sponge tone of the enemies has been lowered, more often than not.
The big problem is that there is no mission design: apart from the moments with Batman, which rely on the character’s darker lore, it’s all a generic escort this vehicle or knock down crystals to reach a central core and knock that down as well. And this, by depriving the experience of memorable playful passages, quickly tires you, even though most of the missions are quite short.
The open world is pleasant to look at, and it is especially appreciable how Rocksteady has overturned expectations by going from a dark and rainy Gotham to a light and sunny Metropolis. However, thanks to the need to make it run properly in an always online and cooperative context for four users, it is very empty, with just a few enemies here and there, mild activities for the countless tasks (the classic bounties of service games), and all the plethora of side quests from the base’s NPCs. Even the Riddler’s challenges are classified as timed races, and there are no landmarks or collectibles other than the meager audio logs that could have given some three-dimensionality to the city.
Looter shooter —
The RPG component seemed similarly poor to us. Talents never add anything significant to the character’s characteristics, only incremental changes that are difficult to notice, and in fact we quickly lost interest in the skills and ended up leaving the accumulated points to gather dust.
The same goes for the loot, which does not present (if not rarely) real improvements or variables worthy of note, both among the craftable with the thousand resources recovered around and among those obtained randomly at the end of missions. And this can be an important wake-up call, if we think that the looter shooter/service game cycle is usually triggered by the loot that you can recover with high-level challenges. The removal of the much-hated gear level by popular acclaim was perhaps the coup de grace, given that at least it could have given a reason to change equipment from time to time.
In terms of story, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League becomes much shorter in the second half, when it is reduced to a sort of boss rush, probably to leave room for the endgame and live service. A little more breathing room between the various main missions would have been welcome and, after all, looking at the map, the material would have been more than sufficient to achieve this.
Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, the conclusions —
The endgame is aimed at eliminating all the Brainiacs scattered across the DC multiverse and making you continue until the arrival of the seasons (the first in March with Joker): the plan is quite concrete, considering that the contents and modes that are unlocked in end story are already quite extensive, but it remains to be seen whether the starting point will be good enough to convince players to stay involved for so long.
As far as we’re concerned, as soon as we finished the story in 12-13 hours, we felt we’d had enough and we didn’t have that spark, not that we were that surprised, to commit ourselves further. The Justice League is dead, long live the Justice League.