‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’ Review — Bye Bye Batman

What makes for a great superhero game?

Is it the graphics? The gameplay? The main story? The little side quests where you rescue civilians? The immersion? Some combination of it all?

Rocksteady Studios’ Arkham trilogy is without a doubt one of the best (if not the best) series of games that really make you feel as though you’ve donned the cowl and taken the mantle of the caped crusader.

Perhaps I’m biased or perhaps because he’s Batman and he’s human like the rest of us, that no other game based on a superhero has really made you feel like a superhero, or a vigilante in this case. So, when Rocksteady announced a new game set in the Arkham universe, there was a buzz of excitement in the community.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was to take place after the events of Arkham Knight, in the same universe. This time you don’t take control of the World’s Greatest Detective but instead the criminals he had apprehended. You are a member of Task Force X, aka the Suicide Squad.

Alright, fair enough, it’s not like one hadn’t taken control of Harley Quinn in her Arkham Knight DLC. Batman operates in shades of very dark grey anyway, how different could it be?

The answer is very very different.

For one, KTJL, is a live service game (incoming microtransactions). You have to be online to play it, which if you’re in coop mode, makes sense but not for solo players. It’s a looter-shooter game. No longer are you skulking around the shadows of Gotham; instead, you trapeze across the vibrant city ruins of Metropolis.

Before going to where the issues start, let’s get what works for the game out of the way.

The game runs very smooth on the PlayStation 5 and is very responsive. The graphics are really good. Arkham’s graphics of course still hold up but because this game is bright and colorful, it does sort of ironically pale in comparison to the dark gothic aesthetic of the previous titles.

Metropolis is infested and overrun by alien invader Brainiac’s aliens. The Justice League have become his minions. The city is in a state of chaos, there’s a giant floating skull in the sky. But in the broken, ruined Metropolis, the cries for help from the brainwashed heroes are everywhere: Superman where are you? is graffiti-ed on the walls. The statues of the members themselves tower over the city, silent sentinels watching their living counterparts working hard to tear down what they built. Task Force X is now the only hope of the survivors.

The members of Task Force X are Harley Quinn, King Shark, Deadshot and Captain Boomerang, controlled by Amanda Waller. The Suicide Squad is also backed up by familiar faces in Batman’s rogues gallery — Penguin, the newly resurrected Poison Ivy and Gizmo. With the arsenal available at your disposal, you get to play hero.

Amanda Waller may be controlling them in-game, but obviously you, the player actually controls the characters. You can switch between characters anytime you want, sometimes you need to, when the mission has a particular character excited. They all have their individual styles of fighting, boosts and upgrades. Their unique traversals are where this really comes into play. Harley with the Bat Drone, Deadshot with his jetpack, Captain Boomerang with his Speed Force Gauntlet, King Shark and his Apex Jump.  

Traversal is a bit tricky initially, in the first five minutes of the game, Deadshot meets an unfortunate end as his jetpack runs out of fuel.

While playing solo, you can only control one character at a given time. Everyone likes to play favorites but it’s best to keep switching them out if you want the team to all be at the same level. You can get XP boosts for certain characters by playing missions that get them pumped. The loot you get from a quest is not universal or random but depends on the character you’re using at the time.

The fighting aspect however essentially feels the same with cosmetic changes.

Everyone just goes bang! Guns for Deadshot and Harley make sense, but not so much for Boomerang and King Shark. Grenades are the same, the shield mods are the same. Melee plays out the same with different animations. There’s nothing that particularly stands out for each character. Especially in the beginning, despite doing a surprising amount of damage, the melee combat itself feels very weak. The range is also short so it’s better to shoot; the aiming, however, does take a while to get used to.

There’s something reminiscent of DOOM Eternal and Sunset Overdrive; you have to kill your enemies in a certain way to get your health back and when you scale up walls and start fighting the enemy mid-air.  

Guns, grenades and melee aren’t the only weapons at your disposal, the dreaded vehicle mechanics of Arkham Knight are back. Task Force X can get vehicles air-dropped to gun down targets. It is a step up from Arkham Knight’s Batmobile and these flying cars are definitely easier to control.   

There are other things in this game that hit you with a sense of familiarity as you play. The Riddler is still alive and kicking. When he makes his appearance, you’re filled with a cocktail of exasperation, dread and comfort. It’s like being in an unfamiliar, slightly hostile environment and coming across a familiar face, even if it belongs to the most annoying person you know. The Riddler is probably the true antagonist of the Arkhamverse with how taxing collecting his trophies are and that holds true even for this game.  

Batman’s famed explosive gel makes a comeback as well. This time you don’t get to detonate it. Rather, you fall victim to it. The Batman boss fight (where you knock him out) is also very reminiscent of the Scarecrow battles in Arkham Asylum where you’re running around and trying to take down a giant, nightmarish Scarecrow, only now you’re running to take down a giant, nightmarish Batman.

At the end of the battle, Harley carries Batman the same way he carried her when she was knocked out. “Bat shoe’s on the other Bat Foot ain’t it Bats?” She remarks.

Gameplay does get repetitive after a while. With combat for characters being the same, it hardly matters who you play as after a while, there is no difference. Characters don’t really have their own unique powers for a live service game and that’s a bit of let-down. Why should one bother playing as the Joker or Killer Croc when Harley Quinn or King Shark are pretty much the same?

The missions suffer the same problem. You’re either decimating the enemies, rescuing the civilians and dropping them off into Rick Flag’s Magic School Bus or protecting a control tower. You scale the walls, leap into the air, fill the targets with lead and you’re done. Between this and combat, by the end of the campaign, it feels unlikely that you’d pick it up again unlike the Arkham trilogy.

It’s also strange that offline mode was not made available at launch. If you’re playing solo, why do you need the Internet? Less than an hour in, when you initially bump into The Flash, the game crashes because of a connection error. For a group yes, it makes sense. For playing alone, it really does get on your nerves.

As the title suggests, you end up killing the brainwashed Justice League but the way you go about doing it is the same. The Flash? Gunned down. The Green Lantern? Shot. Wonder Woman? A bullet to the head. Brainiac, the final boss? What a surprise! He gets shot. Brainiac uses The Flash’s skill set and goes down the exact same way. You would think that he would have learned from the Flash’s folly. For a guy called Brainiac, he sure didn’t act like one.

Even Batman is seen wielding a gun. Something about Batman wielding a gun feels objectively wrong, even if he’s brainwashed. Sure, he’d been known to use a gun back in the Golden Age but in the Arkham Knight, Batman goes out of his way and uses non-lethal rounds for taking out the criminals.

The crux of Kill The Justice League’s problem lies in the fact that it attempts to both rewrite and destroy the Arkham Trilogy’s legacy. This probably has more to do with streamlining the game with the recent Suicide Squad films than anything else. The playable characters are the same as the major characters in the films. The aesthetic of The Suicide Squad (2021) and Kill The Justice League are very similar. Harley’s new look seems to be a mix of The Suicide Squad (2021) and Suicide Squad (2016), a shame because her Arkham Knight and Arkham City looks are so memorable.

The Deadshot that we knew before, was apparently an imposter as claimed by the one in this game. We have a new, race-changed Floyd Lawton that seems to be based on Will Smith’s portrayal of the same character in 2016. The controversial part is that there isn’t much explanation as it why there was an imposter and where the supposed original was. Rather than admitting that the villain we knew was a fake, it would have been better to set this game in an entirely new continuity instead of setting it in the exact same continuity.

But let’s leave Deadshot aside and tackle what really is a bullet to the head.

Batman’s assassination by Harley Quinn.

This brainwashed Batman is the Batman we know and have loved since 2009. We’ve played as him, lived as him and breathed as him for over a decade. He’s tying up goons, using detective mode to find out the details, putting the criminals in prison, revealing the face beneath the cowl, collecting all the Riddler Trophies in order to get the true Knightfall ending. The Batman in Kill The Justice League is also the late Kevin Conroy’s final performance as this Batman. So, this punch in the gut hurts way worse than whatever Batman dishes out at criminal scum.

Getting shot by the crazy clown girl in a raining Metropolis on a park bench right in the head after a bad monologue, is a terrible, terrible send-off for the Batman we’ve grown to love. That scene makes your skin crawl and feels like something died along with Batman. It would have been fine if it wasn’t the Arkham Batman but a random Batman we’ve never played as, but no. It’s the Batman you know, the Batman you’ve loved and the Batman you’ve been. It’s suicide in a way.

The Arkham community’s sanity has been dwindling for a while anyhow. With no new Batman games coming out, the community itself has become the Arkham Asylum (sorry Aslume) inmates. A plague on the internet’s mind that spreads madness. Ironically this game has answered one of their longstanding questions.

Why didn’t Batman call the Justice League for help? Is he stupid?

Denizens of Arkham Aslume, Batman didn’t call the Justice League for help because it didn’t exist as yet. So he’s not stupid.

If you’re a fan of the Arkham trilogy, then it’s best not to play this game. The Arkham Batman’s story ends at Arkham Knight. Kill The Justice League kills what you loved and dances upon its grave.

However, if you really must play this game, treat it as an Elseworlds deal, a continuity separated from the Arkhamverse.

It is strange that they didn’t just begin with a new universe. It certainly would have been so much easier to start with a blank slate.

If you aren’t a fan of the Arkham trilogy and enjoy looter-shooter games, then by all means play.

On the whole, it’s best to just return to the Arkham trilogy and play through them once again. Perhaps that’s what the game itself was telling me when it crashed in the first hour.

Quick Robin! To the Batcave!