Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
Review
A well-told narrative held back by lack of gameplay polish...
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
For the purposes of adequately covering both the main game and its endgame content, review responsibilities here have been split, with Daniel Lenois critiquing the main campaign, and Jordan Helsley focusing on side missions and endgame content.
A world worth killing for...
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League wastes no time. In classic Suicide Squad storytelling fashion, Amanda Waller assembles a team of cutthroat criminals to see through a seemingly-impossible mission. Something so absurd in concept that to even attempt it would be akin to suicide...
Here of course, the mission is simple, but all the more deadly for it: You have to track down and kill almost every member of the Justice League, as they have seemingly been taken over by Brainiac, the technologically-driven alien invader.
Visually, the world design here is nothing short of spectacular. Seeing an enormous death machine floating up in the sky, constantly moving and interacting with the rest of the environment, might in other games easily look silly, but here successfully manages to look imposing and ominous.
One significant drawback, however, is the world design from a strictly gameplay perspective. Having decently-impressive production quality won't matter if the world itself is lifeless and hollow. The complete absence of regular civilian NPCs often makes this game feel more like an internal alpha build that was accidently leaked to the public, rather than a paid game costing you at least $70.
Almost the entire game exclusively consists of jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Hardly any of the buildings you'll encounter, save for a handful serving as set pieces for story campaign missions, can be entered and explored. If this is Rocksteady's idea of a meaningful open-world city, utilizing next-gen development technology throughout its production, maybe they should go back to smaller-scale projects, ala the original Batman: Arkham Asylum, rather than focusing on these ambitious projects of a broader scope.
The Flash may run at super-speed, but this game doesn't...
While console versions of this game might perform fine, Suicide Squade: Kill the Justice League's PC performance is inexcusably terrible, even despite dedicated driver updates for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. This game was played on a high-end intel i7 processor, a Nvidia 3070 RTX gpu, 16 GBs RAM, and a 2 TB SSD, more than a match for the listed minimum and recommended specs, being a Nvidia 1070 or Nvidia 2080 respectively, an intel i5/i7 processor, 16 GBs RAM, and 65 GBs of SSD space. Despite this, the game's PC performance was so subpar that almost all graphical settings had to be reduced to medium, and both Vsync and Nvidia DLSS had to be enabled in order to stabilize framerate to a semi-consistent 60 fps.
Despite the game having been released nearly two weeks ago, Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Games have produced zero public updates since launch to actively remedy this disgraceful performance atrocity. While the promise of future seasonal content updates is something, this matters little if the game itself runs so poorly that one can't even enjoy said additions without developing a headache from all the stuttering and screen tearing.
Time's ticking...and so is the bomb in your skull...
While this is intended as a mostly spoiler-free review, suffice it to say that the story here is very well-told, although it doesn't really try to be anything more than what it is: A silly action-driven B-movie. More pretentious critics might protest that Suicide Squad lacks a more soul-searching introspective core that "subverts expectations" or otherwise goes out of its way to alienate existing diehard fans. But unless you're looking for an excuse to farm outrage for clicks, you'll probably find the story here serviceable enough.
The cutscenes featured here are a pleasure to watch. The animation quality, while not mind-blowing, (poor word choice, perhaps,) is still quite decent. Every character has their own moments to shine in the spotlight, with no one feeling overlooked or ignored, which is no easy feat in any ensemble story.
One notable criticism is the extremely short campaign length, particularly given the disproportionate $70 minimum price tag. When checking my Steam stats, a full playthrough, consisting of the entire story campaign and a few side quests, added up to just under 12 hours total.
Were I to exclusively stick to the campaign itself, I could've probably completed it in just under 11 hours. $70 for only 10-11 hours of content is not a great value offering. The addition of new seasonal endgame content at some point down the road, if it ever releases, should be intended to improve an already-substantial content offering, not as an excuse for a lacklustre one.
Showing everyone who's boss...
The boss battles in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League are the lynchpin that holds this game together. Luckily, they (for the most part) deliver on every front. Each one feels dynamically different to one another, and accurately reflects the core themes and personality of said corrupted hero. The Flash and Batman boss battles particularly stand out above the rest as being especially enjoyable.
While each of the boss fights, just like the rest of the game, can be completed exclusively solo, there nevertheless is a keen emphasis on multiplayer coordination and cooperation. The multiple phases involved in each boss fight sufficiently up the stakes and will definitely keep the player on their toes, building to a satisfying conclusion.
A Dark Knight Falls...
It would be difficult, in any conversation surrounding this game and its portrayal of the Justice League, to not at least briefly mention Kevin Conroy's vocal contributions here in his presumptive final performance as vengeance, as the night, as Batman.
As someone who had the good fortune to meet and speak with Conroy on a number of occasions in the years leading up to his premature death, and always fixed him in my mind as the ultimate representation of the comic book character, I cannot pretend to be at all unbiased in my concern over how his contributions to this game would be utilized by Rocksteady, and subsequently how it would be received by fans.
I was greatly moved to experience the evident respect Rocksteady clearly seeped into every aspect of the character's portrayal throughout the campaign. Conroy's take on an evil possessed Batman is nothing short of terrifying. By placing the player into the shoes of the criminals that Batman hunts down and attempts to systematically eliminate in classic Arkham fashion, turning said boss encounters into essentially prolonged horror sequences, complete with flashlights and limited line-of-sight, players will finally understand the escalating terror felt by every thug you've ever beaten up in prior Arkham games.
Players would also do well to visit the in-game memorials dedicated to Conroy, as well as Arleen Sorkin, (original voice actor and inspiration for Harley Quinn,) found, fittingly enough, in the Hall of Justice, the building that ultimately serves as the player's central hub.
The End is only the Beginning...
No matter the quality of the story, a live-service or adjacent game's worth will always be measured on the majority of its action: side missions and endgame content. Side missions throughout the campaign come across as impactful. There are important upgrades to be obtained and a decent amount of characterizations for tertiary squad members, not to mention the standard mission end loot drops. In completing all of them you come away with an incredibly customizable experience that impacts not just your character skills, but weapon stats, buffs, debuffs, and so much more in ways that are exciting to experience and learn to min-max.
The true endgame here is capital-D Deep. There's so much going on that I gave me flashbacks to trying to jump back into Warframe after far too long. That said, Suicide Squad skews closer to something like Borderlands than it does to the former. It's easy to see a dozen different currencies and take pause, but the resource collection is something I never considered; resources are plentiful. There was never a specific grind, and each mission provides a sense that you’re actively progressing towards a goal, as well as completing one each time.
While I found that the core campaign was best enjoyed solo, the endgame necessitates co-operative play with both increasing difficulty and the inevitable repetition. There remain a handful of ways to break up the monotony, but the core endgame progression is a seemingly endless cycle of just three different mission types. They clearly want to incentivize being the best at them (live leaderboards and new world record pop ups included), but engagement with the endgame systems depends almost entirely on how satisfying you find the combat. As someone who enjoys the high level of frantic chaos that Suicide Squad specializes in, and the ways it encourages you to try different characters and builds, it’s easy for me to look forward to additional content, but for the average player to be able to overcome the same repetitive structure featured in every other game of this ilk, the developers will have to unleash the same creativity they mustered for the movement on the mission design moving forward.
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7.0
fun score
Pros
Decent story, high-quality cinematic cutscenes, distinct playstyles for each character.
Cons
Repetitive, bland objectives, not enough enemy variety, abysmal technical performance
