Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Preview: Return to the Arkhamverse

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League may not be the game Rocksteady Studios fans want, but it does look to be one with redeeming qualities. Rocksteady Studios set the tone for what modern superhero games should be with its Arkham trilogy, showing what a developer could do if these licensed characters could be unshackled from movie tie-in games or mid-budget releases. Without this team, we probably wouldn't have things like Marvel's Spider-Man. Now, almost a decade after its last Batman game, the industry is in a much different place. Live-service games are all the rage and Rocksteady has opted to lean into this trend and break away from the thing everyone fell in love with them for.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a four-player shooter (with the option to play solo) with loo and RPG elements that make it the polar opposite of the studio's Batman games, even though they are in the same universe. I got to spend about five hours with the game at the end of 2023, and going into it, I was very nervous. Even when I was listening to the developers introduce the game to us, I couldn't shake an anxious feeling that this game may be rocky. As they stood in front of a room of press, they noted how it was hard to make people understand Kill the Justice League without letting them play hours of it. If a game about playing DC's iconic villains on a mission to kill DC's greatest heroes isn't immediately understandable, is that really a good thing?

Nevertheless, I sat down at a PS5 with some hopes that this would pan out. I was allowed the opportunity to play some of the game by myself, getting a feel for the controls and how each character played. During this time, some of my worries began to subside. I was able to see how funny the game was as the Squad's contentious banter and all of their personalities clashing together was genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. 

Comedy in gaming is really hard to pull off compared to movies or television. There's a reason stand-up comedy specials are about an hour long, comedy movies are 90 minutes, and sitcoms are 30 minutes or less. It's really difficult to keep people laughing and not annoyed for long stretches of time and in a game, you have to maintain that tone for many, many hours. Throughout my time with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, I was continuously laughing and had a smile on my face. The inherent comedy that comes with a character like Harley Quinn is perfectly implemented, and that may be my biggest surprise with the whole game.

I was also able to get a taste of the story for Kill the Justice League. That high-level cinematic storytelling we've come to know and love from Rocksteady is still very much here. Seeing characters like Green Lantern toss the Squad around in a big set piece was really fun and shows that Rocksteady has been able to keep some of those important staples of their games in-tact despite largely changing the genre they're operating in.

When it came to the actual gameplay, there were some learning curves, particularly with some of the traversal mechanics, but once I got into the swing of things, it felt like Rocksteady's combat team was working its magic once again, but in a new light. Everyone points to the Batman games as how you bring a character to life through gameplay, and Suicide Squad is no exception; it's just very different from Batman.

Batman is almost always touching the ground while in combat, but Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League actively encourages movement. If you stand still, you will almost certainly die. If you're playing a character like Deadshot who is equipped with a jetpack, you'll be flying around, hovering, or sliding. Mobility is a core pillar of the gameplay and makes it feel more akin to something like Sunset Overdrive which took me by surprise. 

However, particularly in co-op, things can get very overwhelming. There are a lot of colors on the screen from each characters' weapons/powers, enemy attacks, and the amount of verticality can sometimes make it easy to get lost in the chaos. It's overstimulating at times, and given how a lot of the enemies are gray/black alien blobs, it's sometimes hard to see them through the explosion of rainbows. There were times where I would just sit and hover in the air for a moment, trying to make sense of the insanity. Perhaps this will get easier the more you play and understand enemy patterns and can distinguish what's actually happening within the action, but from my experience, it was an obstacle.

It's also worth noting that Rocksteady had us skipping through entire chapters of the game to get us to a place with more features such as certain skills and certain story moments, so it's possible the game will ease you into certain elements more when you play everything in order, making it less overwhelming. 

Perhaps my biggest frustration with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is its missions. For every mission that feels like the typical linear, cinematic mission Rocksteady fans want, there are a handful of missions that reminded me of Marvel's Avengers. There are a number of missions that are simple, generic "defend the objective" missions or something that feels mindless. I want something with more stakes, urgency, and heart in my superhero games, not defending points A, B, and C. 

There were quite a few of these that it began to feel like it was disrupting the typical structure that fans want from these games. One of Marvel's Avengers greatest flaws was that it felt like two different games (a story-driven game and a live-service game) merged in one, both of which were competing against each other. From what I played, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League feels like it's in a much better position to overcome this issue, but it's not totally in the clear, and it could easily be consumed by its peskier live-service elements. For those not aware, Rocksteady plans to support the game with post-launch updates that will add new playable characters, battle passes, and other additional content, however the developer didn't go too deep into this side of the game during our preview.

Is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League the ideal follow-up to the Batman Arkham trilogy? Probably not. However, it is a fun game and one that will ensure Rocksteady Studios' last eight and a half years without a game wasn't a waste of time.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will release for early access pre-orders on January 30th and everyone else on February 2nd. This preview was conducted on a PS5, but the game will also be available on Xbox Series X|S and PC. Warner Bros. provided travel and lodging for the purposes of this preview.