Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Captivating, but where's the focus and refinement?

- JOSH WEST

YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE Rocksteady Studios for committing so thoroughly to the bit; for the ruthless efficiency with which the developer has burned down a corner of the DC Comics universe that it had spent a decade building up. The Arkhamverse has been torn asunder, its greatest heroes are gone, and its most memorable surviving villains locked inside the Hall of Justice as weapons vendors. A Crisis on Infinite Earths leaves surprisingly little room for the carnage to be undone in a Lazarus Pit as part of the ongoing live service story, or whatever new adventures may eventually lay beyond it.

It’s captivating to see a prominent studio take such a wild swing with a licensed intellectual property. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League tasks you with completing an impossible mission: to assassinate Earth’s mightiest heroes with little reflection or remorse, or die trying. But despite all of its promise and potential, Suicide Squad lacks the ambition or imagination to execute such a creative concept with any real confidence.

At the core of the problem is the gameplay. The cooperative framework forces a homogenized approach to action, progression, and character definition. Repeating enemy encounters are the only real point of interest across an otherwise empty, sprawling open-world Metropolis, with checklist challenges fuelling trips to a single instanced hub—a claustrophobic space where you’re free to catalog mountains of looted items, while static NPCs bark empty platitudes back in your direction.