Ignoring reviews and playing ‘Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’

One of many team shot moments where we are all supposed to say, “They look so cool!”

If you have any knowledge of new video game releases, you probably heard about Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League when it released in January of 2024. If you’re one of those little freaks who watches reviews of games on release to see if anything new worth playing - like me - then you probably heard that it was awful, unfunny, never-ending live service gameplay that ruins the legacy of the Arkham games that came before it. Going in, I knew all of this. I had seen the reviews, watched the trailers. I loved the studio because I loved the Batman games, and I knew that this was going to be depressing. And I let it go, like Nancy destroying Freddy at the end of the first Nightmare on Elm Street film.

But by the grace of Sony, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League found its way onto the free games list of the monthly PlayStation subscription, after not even a year. What choice did I have? It was free after all. I decided to plunge in, with the plan being to really try to find the fun, beat the game and then get the hell out to play something better. Beating the game is a little more complicated than that, though.

Starting Out…

The prologue is tedious, giving you a tutorial with each character to master their movement and then flashing back to show you how these misfits ended up lumped together. The cut scene is fun enough and gives us a nice introduction to each of the characters - Harley Quinn, famed assassin Deadshot, hulking monstrosity King Shark and terrible comic relief Captain Boomerang. The difference between each of the characters, though, is minuscule. Each one has a unique movement method to get them in the air, which is quite interesting, and each of them has its own fun quirks, but that is where any distinction other than primary colour comes to an end. After the tutorial, I was pretty sure the only person who had movement mechanics I gelled with was Harley with her wild trapezing so I selected her and then had to watch her find the trapeze again in the flashback and get yelled at by Amanda Waller until eventually, finally, I could play.

I was actually having fun when it let me loose on the city of Metropolis. Swinging around rooftops amid the destruction caused by the games big bad, Brainiac, was tight and felt really good. So I made my way over to the first couple of missions to see what was what.

First, they make sure to establish that each member of the Justice League has been corrupted and is helping to kill innocents all over the city to turn Earth into Brainiac’s world. Okay, cool. We can all get on board with evil Superman, even if the idea is a bit overdone after the Snyder films, Injustice, The Boys and any number of other dark takes on superheroes.

Next, they throw us into missions where we either have a set number of people to kill, we protect some control points, or we protect a moving point. Each one unlocks a new little friend who can give our gear bigger scores, but playing on the hardest difficulty I had to pay very little attention to the gear system at all.

Playing the ‘Story’

And that’s it. Give the Penguin new blueprints for new gear. Help baby Poison Ivy (weird) to test new elemental effects that you can then add to your weapons. Chase the bigger number. Do it enough and you can fight the next member of the Justice League. There are moments of actual excitement here; one of the first missions had the gang travelling through the Batman Museum that covers the events of each Arkham game and the gap between Batman faking his death and returning to join the League. Batman arrives with a new deadly approach and takes out our Squad one by one in genuinely spooky sequences. The game makes us swap between characters and it is dynamic and interesting and we see each person grappling with their place in this anti-hero group that are saving the world against their will. And then it never happens again. When Batman is eventually defeated, the character I spent time getting to know in the previous games who I would rank as one of my favourite protagonists by the end of the original series, gets shot in the head execution style by Harley Quinn.

The End Game, which is to say, the Game

Then we defeat Superman, and are told we have beat the game for the most part but can do post game missions that are identical to those that made up the bulk of the main game. This is where I found myself. Brainiac is still here, the world is still ending. Harley is max level, and I chose between incredibly uninspired skills that increase health bonuses by 2% or make her melee attacks more likely to drop ammo. Now we have three missions that we have to complete at least 8 times each to access harder difficulties that will increase an arbitrary rank and give us weapons with bigger numbers so we can go and fight Brainiac. Then we can travel to the next world, where there are three new missions to do 8 times to access Brainiac. This repeats for about a dozen ‘episodes’ that are spruced up by occasional extra characters that we can play. I never reached the first one.

For me, it wasn’t good enough. I made it through the early game because the movement was nice, combat was fast enough that it never really got dull, and new weapons with big numbers engaged my lizard brain looking to get better. When I had capped levels, had nowhere new to go and combat was dragging into 20 minute unexciting ordeals with endless waves of enemies with countless modifiers, I realised that this was the game. The opening, with cutscenes that had some genuinely funny moments - mainly with King Shark - was gone. All that was left was the same voice lines, the same 4 enemy types, the same gear with higher numbers, the same missions. It feels lazy and slow and inarticulate.

This is, I think, the biggest issue here. Hidden underneath the long prologue to the live-service nothing game is a story with some promise. Beneath the dull combat and objectives is exciting movement that could have been utilised beautifully in another game. And the people who made the genre-defining Arkham games deserved to make something bigger and better. Instead, it is all just a ploy to get you locked in so that you will spend time and money to keep trekking through nothing content. I was reminded, weirdly, as I played through what little of the post-game content I went through (despite it being the main bulk of the actual game), of the Borderlands series. I love those games, and they do fall into the grindy looter shooter genre here and there. But they are focused on the story, on making every character feel unique and overpowered in their own way. The weapons are either terrible and can be tossed or they are ludicrously powerful and goofy. The story finishes and the question is whether you will play again with a new character to see what they offer, not will you keep playing the second mission ten times to see the real ending. Maybe I’ll keep playing to unlock the Joker, dipping in when I’m having a drink and looking to turn my brain off. Maybe I won’t. But the over-the-top negative reviews of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League never covered the sadness this game left me with as I saw how good things could have been. I’ll just play Borderlands again, though. I hope Borderlands 4 is good…

Thanks for reading another Chogg.Blog! This one was exhausting, but I’ve been trying to get something I can write about for every week so that I can stay consistent and keep on putting together content for the blog. I’m really enjoying putting things up here, so let me know what your favourite stuff is and I’ll keep making stuff like that! At the moment I’m planning some special spooky stuff for Spooktober as it quickly approaches so make sure to check in often, share this with anyone who would like it and sign up with your email below to get regular updates. Thanks again <3