Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Review

It’s been longer than you think – development studio Rocksteady gave us the last part of its Batman: Arkham trilogy nine years ago. Since then, they have worked to develop their story-driven single-player games into a much more dynamic online co-op shooter that will follow the story and atmosphere of their original series. We can probably agree that, after Redfall, we have yet another case where an attempt to turn great single-player games into a games-as-a-service business model didn’t pan out. On the other hand, Suicide Squad is not as bad a game as some make it out to be, as evidenced by, among other things, relatively high user ratings on platforms that require ownership of the game to be rated.

• Platform: PS5 (review) XSX|S, PC
• Publication date: 02/02/2024
• Manufacturer: Rocksteady Studios (England)
• Genre: Online shooter with looting
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: yes, 4 players
• Download data: 45 GB
• Game time: 15+ hours
• Price: 1765 CZK (steam)

Story campaign

Five years after the events of Batman: Arkham Knight, Metropolis is invaded by the alien villain Brainiac, who gradually turns the city’s inhabitants into “puppets”, which he then uses to further advance his invasion to eventually seize power. the entire planet and change it in your image. Unfortunately, among the controlled puppets there are also superheroes from the Justice League team. So Amanda Waller sends Akram’s quartet of captives (Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark) into a war zone on the streets of a conquered city to help stop Brainiac – which first means eliminating the former superheads who now serve him.

Unfortunately, the game starts out with a rather dry tutorial that forces you to try out the controls and abilities of all four playable characters. In my opinion, this is a poor choice, since the learning takes place in a rather empty environment without context and does not make any sense. are more likely to draw you into the game world and its atmosphere. But what follows is a much better sequence of cinematic scenes and carefully crafted introductory missions, which certainly does not deny the creators of the Arkham series – the atmosphere is great, the music is perfect and, for example, the appearance on the stage of Batman. really great. The game sometimes surprises you with how impressive and bombastic its serious storylines are. Even the humorous ones are not so bad if you like the local peculiar sarcastic and black humor.

The creators of the Arkham series will not refuse some missions.

Depending on how you set the difficulty of the game, you will be able to complete the story campaign without being distracted by side missions or actions in the open world (city) of the game. As it is, it’s a pretty good story ride, although even here it can feel like almost all the missions are about some kind of destruction of enemies in this location, or protecting this location from enemy waves, etc. Luckily, the boss fights. relatively successful due to the emergence of unique mechanics. Like most people, I’m tired of ruining superhero stories after all these years of Hollywood trying, and maybe that’s why I liked the plot of this game, in fact, the fact that it treats some beloved characters so cruelly.

The final

So I quite liked the campaign and I think some of its passages are really successful, as are the statements of the main characters, although they often copy templates not only from their own originals, but also from Guardians of the Galaxy (King Shark behaves exactly like Drax) . The campaign does not have time to resist, partly due to the fact that it is relatively short – about ten hours. However, this is not a single-player story game, but a “game as a service” that you and your friends will return to regularly to continue the story in other multiverses, with additional playable characters and so on. To that end, the base game already includes an endgame where you can further level up your characters and collect, upgrade, and optimize your gear, similar to The Division or Destiny games.

This is probably why the entire game actually feels more like a shooter than an action-adventure game. The playable characters vary in their method of movement (Harley swings on a rope, Boomerang teleports by throwing a boomerang, Shark jumps like the Hulk, and Deadshot flies on a jetpack), but they all use firearms to fight, even if some specialize in firearms. a certain type (snipers vs machine guns, etc.). The loot itself is quite interesting, the weapons not only have different statistics, but also mostly funny abilities like “explosion after three shots to the head”, etc. In addition, you have the opportunity to significantly modify it, and gradually increase the difficulty in spirit. The World Level setting is also handled quite well, as we know from Diablo for example.

This is probably why the game feels more like a shooter than an action-adventure game.

The problem is that the relatively impressive city is filled with the already mentioned stereotypical activities, which almost always involve conquering or defending a certain territory or destroying a certain number of enemies within it. The modifiers are completely crazy in those places where, for example, enemies can only be wounded by getting into the “critical zone”, and a shot at another part of their body not only does nothing to them, but even heals them. The game is not designed for this kind of precision, the action is too fast and furious. But there are many more design errors, for example when you are given the task of killing enemies only with grenades, but among these enemies there are snipers who teleport if you get close enough to them. Games as a service can change significantly, for better or worse, as developers continually work on them in response to player feedback. However, the building blocks in this case do not look very promising.