Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Review

Going into Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League I was excited to play this game. Despite all the drama and controversy surrounding the game, I asked myself “How bad can a Rocksteady Games game be?”. Besides, this team developed one of the greatest games of all time (in my opinion) Batman: Arkham Knight.

Of course, leading up to the launch of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League came with its own drama too. I was unfortunately denied a review code by WB Games. Regardless, I purchased the game myself as most other media sites have done.

After spending a week with the game, all the issues I had with WB Games made sense. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a bad game and they clearly wanted to control the “excitement and hype” message as much as possible.

There’s absolutely no way around it. This game has been created following a checklist from some overpaid executive who thinks these experiences are what gamers want. He probably sat down with his Fortnite-playing 13-year-old and asked “What do you like in games”. The child replied, “Bounties, mindless shooting, superheroes and battle passes”. The result is Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.

There is one glimmer of hope in this game, the story holds up most of the time. It follows Harley Quin, Boomerang, King Shark and Deadshot as they get roped into killing the Justice League in order to save Earth from Brainiac. As a result, they run around bland open-world Metropolis shooting aliens, completing tedious objectives and gathering loot that doesn’t matter much during the main game.

There are some strong story points in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Most of the game’s cutscenes are rather impressive and the writing is top-notch. Harley is no doubt a standout with her comical quips and King Shark is as dumb as a log. These dialogue moments combined with the overly-serious overarching narrative create some scenarios that Rocksteady no doubt had fun writing.

It also carries throughout the story. While the pacing gets a bit tired after a while, there was not a funny joke thrown in somewhere. From the squad admiring Boomberang’s well-endowed nature to Poison Ivy being called a Ranger – Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s story alone is worth watching some YouTube edits of only the cutscenes.

I say YouTube edit because I don’t recommend buying this game for the story. The thing is, if you think you can just play through the story you’re wrong. The game relies on horrible side-missions padded with pointless objectives and broken mechanics to fill the adventure. So every “great” cutscene was met by yet another escort mission. In 2024, how in the world can you release a game where escorting a vehicle from one point to the next at a snail’s pace while fighting off a trickle of enemies is regarded as fun?

There’s even one mission where I was trying to find the Batcave by scanning tunnel exits. I thought perhaps it would bring some variety to the table but did it? Nope – you guessed it. The mission was just a copy-and-paste of yet another boring “protect Poison Ivy’s plants while they scan the area” nonsense. One of four mission types slapped across the game.

But that isn’t even the worst of it. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s entire gameplay structure is horrid. The game’s missions rely on various objectives that lock you into using a specific damage type. So you can’t deal damage to enemies with anything but grenades. Or you can only deal counter-attack damage (the game really loves this counter-nonsense).

So while you have cool guns, abilities and gear, you can’t use them the way you want to. Instead, the majority of the time I was forced into a box where I was limited to stuff I didn’t want to use. To make matters worse, these objectives slow down the fight. Melee-only kills meant standing around waiting for my melee charge to refill. Grenade-only kills meant running around painfully trying to find a damn grenade drop.

The counter-kills are the absolute worst. Here, I had to stand around like a complete moron waiting for enemies to initiate a counterattack. The thing is, counterattacks only happen at certain times when enemies initiate certain attacks. A sniper, for example, can only be countered right before it is about to shoot you.

This meant standing in the open looking at a sniper while it aimed its attack only to have fifty other snipers hitting me from every angle. Or standing in one spot being hammered by a mortar enemy because I was waiting for a sniper to aim down its sights so I could counter the shot.

I don’t know how this even passed QA. Who sat down and thought this was fun? You spend so much time gathering loot and gear only to have the game restrict you to certain abilities which take forever to recharge or simply don’t work with the current objective. It is one of the most basic, thoughtless system I have encountered in a game.

To make matters worse, the same counterattack nonsense is then rinsed and repeated for every boss fight and it all becomes a real snoozefest. Countering Superman while he dashes around the map throwing buses at you while trying to swing around, running up walls and avoiding blasting laser beams from the sky at the same time. This isn’t fun. I was just being hit around, knocked through the air and killed over and over again because again, the game throws everything else away and wants you to only play the way it wants.

Metropolis is also horribly dull. The city, while having some attractive sectors, is an empty wasteland with nothing to do. There are a few Riddler trophies here and there and some generic parkour objectives but they don’t offer anything rewarding.

Even the Riddler Riddle scans have been cooked up by a preschooler. One mentioned a “towering gold man who watches over Metropolis”. No duh – it was obviously the giant gold Superman statue which stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of the poorly designed buildings.

Shame, Lious Lane even pretends to care about the non-existent people in Metropolis. Every now and then she would make a speech on the screens scattered around the city in an attempt to address the “survivors”. But the game makes no effort to portray the city as if there’s any life left in it. I had to laugh at how desperate the game gets to tell a story through all the junk it has scattered across the surface.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League does have four playable characters but again, they feel generic. Besides different parkour moves, they have the same copy-and-paste attacks and unless you’re ready to spend dozens and dozens of hours investing in their Talent Trees, feel the same to play.

There’s so much missed opportunity here. Rocksteady included some fun playable characters in the Arkham series. Remember the Harley, Catwoman and Joker challenges? Now imagine that depth in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Where Harley could use her specific skills themed around her accessories? Nope, not here. Instead, they have guns and grenades. The same copy-and-paste features across all four characters.

Sure, there are some buffs that trigger when you hit a certain combo counter in the game but they don’t do anything but grant a damage boost, grenade cooldown or some other generic and boring mechanic. It all feels so simple and not in a good way.

To think that this is what “came next” after Arkham Knight is likely the biggest disappointment here. Instead of creating something on a grander scale, Rocksteady has squandered the series into this unworthy game. Even the smaller things like how they handled Poison Ivy and Penguin by turning them into forgettable vendors are beyond my understanding.

Of course, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League relies on loot and right from the start, everything you do in the game is a build-up to the game’s real live-service mechanics – the end-game. Right up until the end, I was still unlocking new vendor mechanics and doing mindless objectives to unlock new weapon manufacturers and buffs. The entire game has been built with this live-service end-game in mind. It takes you the entire game to have “everything” available. Then the end-game kicks in.

The end game revolves around this “Nexus” system. It is a tab that contains other dimensions. Likely where we’ll see the Joker content get tacked on later down the line as an afterthought. In order to access these other dimensions, currently the main one is themed around Bane, you’ll need to complete side missions across Metropolis, put up with those horrid mechanics and earn Promethium.

This currency is then used as an entry fee into Incursion Missions where you’ll earn more XP, loot and currently, Bane Infamy Firearms. You’ll then also earn Finite Crisis ranks which will show off to the rest of the world how much time you’ve put into the game. The higher your Finite Crisis ranks you achieve, the more Mastery Levels you’ll unlock. Mastery Levels dictate how difficult you can make an Incursion Mission and the reward drops as a result of this heightened difficulty.

Everything you do in the main game is then used across this end-game content as vendors can tweak gear, and add modifiers to weapons and other stuff. Essentially, creating a robust live-service experience for players who want to spend their time grinding gear and levels. You can see why I say “The entire story is a build-up to create the live-service game”.

With so much potential, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is just a shallow supervillain game built on the foundations of a live-service looter shooter. Rocksteady can say whatever they want and try to deny it but facts are facts. The whole end-game mode pushes new content updates with 13 planned new “Bane-like worlds” coming in the future. Each world comes with new cosmetics, gear, modifiers and other content.

Not to mention the game’s horrid bounty system is the lowest form of game design on the planet and a sad attempt to get players returning daily for caches and resource drops.

I think my biggest disappointment here is realising that “this is it”. We have waited 7 years for something better, or perhaps on the same level as Batman Arkham Knight and instead, we got this. A game that doesn’t want you to have fun. A game that limits your abilities to tedious objectives. A game that thinks escort missions are enjoyable. A game where everything you do throughout the campaign is just a trick to get you pulled into the live-service model.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is what happens when greedy executives dictate what they think would be a cool game. It is a bland, tedious looter shooter built on the foundations of a live-service game. Apart from its somewhat enjoyable story, it offers very little fun to be had unless you’re into an end-game grind and ever-changing landscape.

This Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League review is based on a copy we purchased for the site.