Despite all the negativity I played Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And...I liked it?

I bought Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in a moment of weakness. I was feeling a little under the weather, I was craving a dumb turn off your brain open world action game to just plow some mindless hours into, and it was $20 for the deluxe version on PSN. I was previously curious about the game, but had planned to wait for a super deep sale, like $10, or for it to hit PS+ or another service. Instead, I caved at $20 and downloaded it immediately for some low stakes open world shooting.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Suicide Squad is kind of…good?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s no masterpiece. It’s deeply flawed and I know there were even more issues at launch. If I’d bought it for the full $70 I would have been disappointed. But at less than half price and stripped of all the discourse around its release and the expectations of it being the next big game from a studio as storied as Rocksteady…it was a decent time for the 20+ hours I played it. I certainly had more fun with it than I did with Skull & Bones, AAAA status aside, and I also enjoyed it more than Hellblade II, though Senua’s Saga is clearly the better made game in many ways. Suicide Squad gets a lot of things wrong, many of them related to its live service ambitions, but it gets enough right that if you go in with low expectations and enjoy this kind of game it’s easy to come away feeling satisfied. It’s a mid-level superhero open world third person shooter and, hey, I’ve always liked those. Turns out I still do.

The story is the first area where Suicide Squad surpasses its reputation. I think it’s generally thought of to be pretty cringe, with a lot of people actively angry about how it treats certain characters, but I think it’s actually above average. It can be hit and miss and doesn’t compare to the Arkham or Spider-Man games, but excellent facial capture and acting help elevate a so-so script, and I was consistently curious about where it would go next during my playtime.

To briefly describe the content, after a short mechanical intro for the characters it starts with the Suicide Squad members being pulled out of confinement and sent to Metropolis, where Braniac has already invaded and much of the Justice League has been mind controlled. Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern are already dominated by Braniac while only Flash and Wonder Woman are free. Amanda Waller has recruited the new Task Force X as expendable assets, controlled through bombs in their heads, in her quest to stop Brainiac and his allies at all costs. Including the squad’s lives if necessary. Braniac's ship looms over the city throughout the game, the population of Metropolis has been mostly kidnapped and replaced by Braniac goons (many of them formerly Metropolis citizens) and the overall vibe is mid-apocalyptic.

From that set up the game plays out as a sort of black comedy. It has a generally goofy tone with characters constantly quipping, but there’s a lot of blood and darkness mixed in. It mostly works, the quips coming off as gallows humor and the darkness not going so far that it spoils the atmosphere, at least for me. Then again there is a recurring joke based around corpse mutilation, so your mileage may vary.

A lot of people view Suicide Squad as being disrespectful towards the Arkham games and especially Kevin Conroy, the famed voice of Batman for whom this represented his final role before dying of cancer. I think it’s obviously intended as a side story and riff on that universe (to which there are allusions) and I think Conroy took the role, did his usual great job with it, and shouldn’t have his performance judged by the fact that he tragically passed away. It wasn’t a factor for me. Amanda Waller was a bigger issue, with Debra Wilson giving her usual great performance but with a script that made her cartoonishly vicious and just grating after awhile. It’s not fun to be berated and insulted all the time. I also found Captain Boomerang pretty grating until later in the game when I warmed to him, Regarding the other characters, Deadshot is boring, and the game has an adequate version of Harley, though she’s almost always a fun character. Wrestler Samoa Joe plays King Shark and I thought he was great, though I am generally fond of the modern takes on the character. The Squadders are definitely villainous (especially Captain Boomerang) but don't have much edge to them, and their character arcs bend towards actual heroism. These are bad guys, but they're not very bad guys. Overall if you don’t take it too seriously and focus on the individual moments and gags instead of expecting some grand or meaningful story I think it’s a pretty good time. This is a game that wants to make you chuckle and shock you a little, not one that wants to tell a grand and inspiring story, and I enjoy that kind of tone.

I was also surprised at just how many long and elaborate cut scenes were in the game, which is strange for a live service title focused on repetitive activitie. Unlike with Marvel’s Avengers this felt like a full single player story campaign to me, with an absolute ton of random dialog while you’re out in the open world and lots of references to events from random NPCs back at base. It may only have been above average but I didn’t feel shortchanged.

Gameplay is more of a mixed bag. The game is an open-world high speed traversal third person shooter. If I were to compare it to other games I’d say it resembles a mix between the Xbox Crackdown series, which I really liked, and 2017’s Agents of Mayhem, which I didn’t.

Basically you run around shooting enemies with guns, whacking them with melee weapons, and using other video game moves like throwing grenades, sliding across the ground, and firing special counter shots at enemies when they are vulnerable. There are a lot of mechanics in Suicide Squad, almost certainly too many, and it often feels like chaos, with enemies attacking from every direction, dying enemies spewing shield and ammo resources like pinatas, and your squad mates hoping around adding to the confusion. It’s an extremely vertical game, where you spend most of your time on rooftops and there’s a lot of emphasis of moving quickly through large elevation changes, and while that’s somewhat limiting for the level design it at least gives the game an identity. Even something like Spider-Man 2 feels grounded by comparison.

The four initial Suicide Squadders (you don’t unlock the new seasonal characters during the main campaign) all play pretty similarly except for their traversal methods. King Shark jumps around like a Crackdown character, Deadshot has a jet pack, Captain Boomerang throws and then warps to his boomerang and Harley swings off a stolen Batman drone. The movement styles all feel pretty different but they’re all fast, responsive, and able to run up buildings to get vertical, which is very important for this version of Metropolis and its many skyscrapers. Overall movement feels good with everyone, but if you’re like me you’ll pick a character and mostly stick to them (though I sampled them all multiple times.) The game encourages swapping by sometimes giving one character a big XP bonus for a particular mission, and I usually did swap for those, but otherwise I primarily played as King Shark because I like Crackdown quite a bit and I also like the character. The characters all also have different melee attacks and special abilities, but because they all use guns, and a subset of a shared pool of guns (each character can only equip certain weapon types, like King Shark can’t use sniper rifles or pistols) they all feel pretty similar to fight with. In terms of the “build” aspect, as you gain XP you level up and get additional bonuses like more damage if you build up your “combo” or healing through traversal. Often you get to select between 3 choices per level, though you can swap to a different one at any time. None of these are real game changers but they do allow you to customize for a character who is stronger at range or one who is more resilient if he wants to get up into enemies’ faces with a shotgun. I think this system is…fine.

Is it a missed opportunity to do something like Marvel’s Avengers, where the characters all felt unique and true to their comic book roots instead of just generic shooty guys? Yes, but again if you strip away the expectations the shooting is fine and the traversal is interesting enough to make the game stand out a little bit. Like with the story, if you want to enjoy it you need to approach it on its own terms.

The main gameplay issues are that the game is way too chaotic to ever feel like you have a full handle on things, with attacks constantly hitting from off screen and you frequently dealing with multiple objectives and enemies demanding your attention at one time, and the mission design is repetitive and mostly kind of bad. Apart from a few bespoke story missions where you do something interesting like explore a Batcave you’re mostly going to be doing the same things you’ve done in a million other games, like point defense, escort missions (thankfully not too painful in this game), kill enemies and collect a resource, rescue 4 hostages (over and over and over) etc… These are designed to be repeatable in many contexts because of the live service nature of the game, but it ends up making the game feel like almost every mission is filler. It’s a similar problem to the one that Marvel’s Avengers had, where games that should feature memorable set pieces and cool moments (like Spider-Man 2 does) instead mostly consist of side content repurposed as main content. There are some exceptions, but not nearly as many as there should be. Additionally, the game likes to do a very annoying thing where only one type of damage will hurt enemies, forcing you to use grenades or status effects or critical hits or whatever. Taking a game with a huge variety of mechanics and making most of them useless for many of the missions was…a choice…and if it happened once or twice it wouldn’t be so bad but it feels like in about a third of the missions the majority of your kit is useless. I would not have designed it that way.

The boss fights are problematic for a different reason. With one exception they’re all focused on long range engagement for which you need precise guns, which King Shark doesn’t have. Bosses also move around the combat arena incredibly fast and can be very hard to keep track of, especially in later phases when they are hurling hazards out and there might be adds. Some are better than others but they all feel tuned for mouse and keyboard rather than controller, or at least more than one person. Playing solo I was constantly having to chase the boss, try and whip my aim around faster than the controller would allow, and generally getting frustrated at not having access to a better sniping weapon with my character of choice. That’s not to say that the fights were overly difficult; I only ran through my stock of three lives twice in the whole game, once each on two bosses, so it wasn’t unmanageable, but it made the fights less fun than they otherwise might have been.

Also not as fun as it might have been is the open world of Metropolis. Although it’s divided into neighborhoods and there are differences, because you spend all your time on rooftops it all feels pretty samey. In one area you might be on skyscrapers and another on low slung apartment buildings but you don’t get the kind of real differences you would see in a game like inFamous where areas can feel massively different. There’s also not a ton to do in that open world other than missions. You do get rotating challenges (like kill X number of enemies with melee attacks or sniper rifles) and there are some random loot enemies that will spawn, but the Riddler challenges feel phoned in (with trophies just hidden rather than being locked behind puzzles) and some random enemies to fight, but the city feels pretty empty and kind of boring, despite looking quite nice. The game performs decently most of the time, though on PS5 the frame rate will occasionally tank when action gets too frantic.

The live service aspect of Suicide Squad makes the game less fun than it could have been. It’s not just the repetitive activities or the fact that the majority of the costumes are attached to the battle pass instead of earned in-game like in Spider-Man, it’s also the way the story resolves and the need for endless spigots of pointless loot with slightly different stats. Some of the guns and equipment in the game do change things up in significant ways, such as by inflicting status effects on critical hits, but none are particularly interesting and it’s not fun to wade through your mission rewards after a while. Overall there are just too many mechanics and I think that was intended to keep things fresher longer, but instead it just adds to the chaos. The live service aspirations are also why the missions are so monotonous and why it focuses on annoying mechanics like limiting the ways you can damage opponents, so that all these things can be endlessly remixed. It doesn’t work, and after the game’s failure the seasonal content has been halfhearted and poorly received. If this game had been designed as a co-op campaign with curated content it would have been significantly better.

But these flaws aren’t enough to ruin the experience. It's still fun to leap around the city like a Crackdown agent. The basic gunplay is solid. The story is enjoyable. It’s bright and colorful and appealing to look at. I have to admit that at least for the first dozen hours I felt “the pull” when I was not playing it. That desire to go back and play a game when you’re doing something else. I didn’t get obsessed like I did with Tears of the Kingdom, but I wanted to play more, and in a year where I’ve had a hard time wanting to play much outside of Yakuza, that says something about my reaction to the game. By the end of the game I was a little bored and ready for it to be over, but fortunately it wrapped up before it became actively painful to play. I’ve even messed around with the post-game live service stuff a little too.

I feel almost embarrassed to have enjoyed Suicide Squad as much as I did. As I’ve said it’s far from perfect and nowhere near an all time favorite, but it scratched that open world itch for me. The fact that I played both it and Skull & Bones to “completion” (as far as live service games go) this year says something about me that I don’t know how to parse, but at least with Suicide Squad I enjoyed myself. I think that if you strip away the Rocksteady pedigree and the price tag, and treat it as a single player or co-op story experience with some extra stuff instead of a true live service game, it’s a flawed but decent game.