Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League review – an idea destined to fail

If there’s a sense of burning injustice at Rocksteady Studios, it’s probably understandable. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is filled with little moments of brilliance: humour, style, expression, that signature rhythmic, flow-state approach to combat. There’s no question – as there rarely is with any video game – that its team was remarkably dedicated to making it as good as it could be. It’s just that for each upshot there’s a matching, crashing downturn, and in looking for a cause it’s difficult to see beyond the ambitions that this game has been asked to juggle.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League reviewDeveloper: RocksteadyPublisher: Warner Bros.Platform: Played on Xbox Series X/SAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S

All at once, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League must be a live service game that pays for its extraordinary, almost nine-year run-up time after 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight, plus the support of those live services beyond launch. It must feature multiple main characters that not one, but two distinct Hollywood films – plus Birds of Prey – have failed to generate any kind of public good will towards (or even mild interest in). And it must deliver, or at least seem to deliver, on its promise of making antagonists out of and subsequently killing the Justice League – a group of beloved, decades-old icons that have in part earned their iconic status from (And which come with a subsection of fans – emphasis on the subsection – known to be as toxic as they are dedicated). All together, it means the question that arose for most onlookers the moment Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was revealed in 2020 remains the same now, and even well into its perpetual grind of an endgame: why?

So, the sense of injustice: with all that to try and pull off, Rocksteady has done a remarkably good job. The problem is a remarkable job in this case equates to a game that wildly oscillates between brilliant and poor, and ultimately lands perfectly square on average. Average, by Rocksteady’s standards, is a disaster. And setting up a studio of that pedigree, that wonderful ability to capture every angle of a character, and that genuine dedication to its craft, to fail in this way is about as close as video games can get to an act of cultural vandalism.

For those who haven’t read the comics and also managed to dodge those Hollywood attempts, the premise of the Suicide Squad is simple. Four mid-tier villains, Deadshot, King Shark, Captain Boomerang and Harley Quinn, are busted out of jail by Commander Waller, head of a shadowy organisation called ARGUS. Waller injects a remote-activated bomb into the back of each of their heads and now this group, officially called Task Force X, have to do whatever they’re told. In this case, that’s defeating a very ominous invasion from supervillain Brainiac, who’s also managed to take over most of the Justice League – the Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, and Superman, but not Wonder Woman – with mind control.