Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Review - An Honest Look at Rocksteady's Latest Game

It’s been longer than you might think – development studio Rocksteady gave us the last part of their Batman: Arkham trilogy already nine years ago. Since then, they’ve been working on turning their story-driven single-player games into a much more action-packed, co-op online shooter that would follow the story and atmosphere of their original series. We can probably agree that after Redfall, we have another case where the attempt to turn great single player games into a “games as a service” business model didn’t work out so well. On the other hand, Suicide Squad is not as bad a game as some say about it, which is evidenced, among other things, by the relatively high user ratings on platforms where ownership of the game is required to rate.

Platform: PS5 (Reviewed) XSX|S, PC
Date of publication: 2. 2. 2024
Manufacturer: Rocksteady Studios (Anglie)
Genre: Online looter-shooter
Czech localization: it is
Multiplayer: yes, 4 players
Data to download: 45 GB
Game Time: 15+ hours
Cena: CZK 1,765 (Steam)

Story campaign

Five years after the events of Batman: Arkham Knight, Metropolis was attacked by the alien villain Brainiac, who gradually turns the inhabitants of the city into “puppets”, which he then uses for the further progress of his invasion in order to eventually take over the entire planet and reshape it in his own image. Unfortunately, among the controlled puppets are also superheroes from the Justice League team. So Amanda Waller sends a quartet of Akrham prisoners (Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark) into a war zone on the streets of the conquered city to help stop Brainiac—which primarily means eliminating the former superheds who now serve him.

Unfortunately, the game starts with a rather dry tutorial that forces you to try out the controls and abilities of all four playable characters – not a happy choice in my opinion, as the tutorial is set in a rather empty environment without context and doesn’t have much of a chance to draw you into the game’s world and its atmosphere. But what follows is a much better sequence of cinematic sequences and carefully designed introductory missions, which definitely do not deny the creators of the Arkham series – the atmosphere is great, the music is perfect and, for example, the arrival of Batman on the scene is really excellent. The game manages to surprise at times with how impressive and bombastic its serious story sequences are. Even the humorous ones are not so bad, if you like the local idiosyncratic sarcastic and dark humor.

Some missions will not deny the creators of the Arkham series.

Depending on how you set the difficulty of the game, you can play the story campaign without being interrupted by side missions or activities in the open world (city) of the game. In this form, it is a fairly good story ride, although even here you may start to feel that practically all missions are some kind of destroy the enemies in this location or defend this location against enemy waves, etc. Fortunately, the boss fights are relatively successful, their the advent of unique mechanics. Like most people, I’m getting tired of screwing up superhero stories after years of trying Hollywood, and maybe that’s why I liked the story of this game, actually because it treats some of my favorite characters so brutally.

Endgame

So I quite enjoyed the campaign and I consider some of its passages to be really successful, as well as the protagonists’ statements, although they often copy templates not only from their own originals, but also from Guardians of the Galaxy (King Shark behaves like Drax). The campaign does not have time to oppose, among other things, thanks to the fact that it is relatively short – about ten hours. However, this isn’t meant to be a single-player story game, but a “game as a service” that you and your friends will return to regularly to continue the story across other multiverses, with additional playable characters, and so on. For this purpose, the base game already includes an endgame, where you can further increase the levels of your characters and collect, improve and optimize your equipment, similar to the games The Division or Destiny.

This is probably also why the whole game is actually more of a shooter than an action adventure. The playable characters differ in the way they move (Harley swings on a rope, Boomerang teleports by throwing a boomerang, Shark jumps like the Hulk and Deadshot flies on a jetpack), but they all use firearms to fight, even if some specialize in a certain type (snipers versus machine guns, etc.) .). The loot itself is quite interesting, the weapons not only have different statistics, but mainly fun abilities such as “explosion after three headshots” etc. In addition, you have the opportunity to significantly modify them, and the gradual increase in difficulty in the spirit of the “World Tier” setting is also quite well resolved, as we know it for example from Diablo.

This is probably also why the game is more of a shooter than an action adventure.

The problem is that the relatively impressive city is filled with the already mentioned stereotypical activities, which practically always involve the conquest or protection of a certain territory or the elimination of a certain number of enemies in it. The modifiers are absolutely maddening in places, where, for example, you can only injure enemies by hitting the “critical area”, while shooting another part of their body not only does nothing to them, but even heals them. The game is not built for this precision, the action is too fast and furious. But there are many more design mistakes, for example, when you are given the task of killing enemies only with grenades, but among those enemies there are snipers who teleport if you get close enough to them. Games-as-a-service can change quite significantly, for better or worse, as developers constantly work on them in response to player feedback. However, the building blocks in this case do not look very promising.

Review