Vidjama Gmaes Work

So it’s time for me to do my thingamajig about Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League because I rented it, I played it, and I beat it. From Gamefly #notsponsored. And now I’m ready to talk about it, or at least I’m as ready as I’m going to be. I played this on the Xbox Series X by the way. Let’s dive in.

If you read user reviews for Suicide Squad on Steam you’ll notice two things; first that the game pretty consistently keeps over an 80% positive review score, which might be shocking given the reactions you’ve seen online from YouTubers. Second, that many of those positive reviews say to wait until the game is like $30-40 before you buy it despite giving it a positive review. I’m admittedly biased because I only figure I paid about $10 for how long I rented this, but I’m going to agree with the reviews. Wait until it’s about half price on sale, or rent it like I did.

Suicide Squad is a cooperative shooter put out by Rocksteady, it takes place in the Arkhamverse and that’s a big source of problems for some gamers. By the start of the game, Brainiac has taken over Metropolis and used his powers to overwhelm and mind-enslave most of the members of the Justice League. And here’s where we get into the crux of the story; Task Force X made up of Harley Quinn, King Shark, Boomerang Man, and Deadshot are sent into the city to gear up and hopefully kill the Justice League. You’ll control the four of them over the course of the game and complete missions, shoot up thousands of bad guys, and level up and unlock better gear and bigger superpowers.

You can switch characters at pretty much any point, and missions encourage you to swap characters by giving them an amped up status, offering better rewards and more experience, as well as buffs to that character for that mission. Each character has their own style of play while not being completely unique, like Harley being more up-close and personal and Deadshot being better used as a sniper. As you progress you get access to neater weapons with status effects and other boosts and buffs.

Suicide Squad is a looter shooter, which means the game is tailor-made for repetitive tasks and grinding. You’ll be finishing a line of tasks that require you to kill waves of baddies, kill waves of baddies under certain conditions, and occasionally have a boss battle or two her and there. The pacing of the game is kind of interesting because there’s a long buildup to the first fight against The Flash, after which the boss battles against the other members of the Justice League seem to come along pretty quickly. Like the story takes a while to warm up but once it does it goes into a full sprint.

If you’re a big DC nerd you’re probably going to take umbrage with how the game kills off the Justice League, being that it’s neither climactic or particularly dignified. But it’s okay because this is Rocksteady and also a comic book property, and deaths are never treated with much gravitas. There’s a lot of theories flying around the internet that the Justice League we kill aren’t actually the real people, or that they might come back in some fashion.

For what it’s worth I did find the story mode interesting. Your main goal is to figure out how to beat all of the Justice League members using their own weaknesses against them. If you know your DC lore, you already know roughly how this is going to happen. Kinda like what Batman had always done, and there’s a funny moment near the end where you find Batman’s hidden lair and he just explains every weakness you figured out along the way for someone to point out maybe we should have gone here first. I do like the comedy in this game, even if the quips get annoying the more they get re-used.

My biggest gripe with Suicide Squad is that the game tends to break from time to time. Being an open-world game, shit just tends to not work randomly and for no reason. For instance I failed a mission where you have to protect checkpoints from groups of enemies, and despite clearing everyone the game refused to acknowledge I did so. There was probably some guy who spawned under the map somewhere. I had three straight crashes to home screen while I played, usually at really frustrating points.

Other missions are just disgustingly annoying, particularly ones where you have to do specific forms of damage to enemies to damage them at all. In one side-mission the game would only let me do shield-breaker damage. The screen specifically says you can do leg damage to generate shield-breaker status but it never worked for me. Neither did grenade damage so that was just broken overall. The game also loves to just randomly blast you with combined damage and kill you immediately. A few enemies can aim at you and kill you through the environment which will never not be lazy, shitty game design to me.

Also whoever designed the helicopters in this game can go to hell. They are ridiculously frustrating to fight against and often there are far too many of them shooting bullets that freeze your character solid and are also just spam over actual strategy.

Now that being said, I did enjoy Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League, and I’m willing to buy the game back at some point once it’s in the $30-40 range to play the post-launch updates. I do feel like it’s almost a given that the game will bring back the Justice League in some form, both because comic books are spineless when it comes to killing off heroes and because of all the hints already in-game pointing to that.