Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Review Roundup — Hype Train Fails To Deliver (Yet Again)

Let's face it, folks. A DC game where you cannot play as Batman is simply not going to work. The question is: when will Rocksteady understand that?

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is available to play on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Source : Warner Bros. Games

What’s with games that make a big splash on the hype train before release? Just like Gotham Knights, yet another top-draw AAA game based in the DC world but not featuring Batman as a playable character has fallen flat on its superhero face. 

While early teasers and trailers for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League made lofty promises, offering an apparently new run-and-gun gameplay (which looked too much of a ripoff of Sunset Overdrive) combined with a deeply engaging storyline that will make even Batman sit up and take notice, it turns out that the game simply turned out to be ‘generally unfavourable’ — if Metacritic’s user score is anything to go by. 

If you were wondering what leading critics are saying about the new Suicide Squad game, here’s a quick roundup:

“Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a thoroughly frustrating game to play. There are things to enjoy here, with combat that’s snappy enough to carry it through a genuinely good DC comics story artfully dressed in high production values. But everything else just falls down around it. Engaging mission design is nearly non-existent, the looter-shooter mechanics are tired and dull, and the grotesquely-repetitive postgame leaves little-to-nothing to do of interest. The result is a bit of a mess that doesn't ever impress with any of its numerous ill-conceived ideas. It's not bad, it's just disappointing from Rocksteady - pioneers of single-player story action chasing already outdated multiplayer trends. A City of Tomorrow built on the unstable foundations of yesterday.” - Simon Cardy, IGN (5/10)

“In the nine years since Rocksteady's last game, the superhero genre in video games has shifted dramatically, from a story-driven solo experience evocative of comic books to the multiplayer loot-obsessed open worlds of the current day. Returning to tell a new story in the superhero world meant adapting to that landscape, and Rocksteady does better than its predecessors in this endeavour. And yet, thanks to repetitive mission structure, wildly messy visual noise, server issues, frequent combat and movement hindrances, and a setting void of personality, it's still well below the quality this studio has shown it's capable of. I consider Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League to be the best this melding of heroes and loot grinds has produced so far, but it's a low bar and proof that 'best' doesn't necessarily mean 'good.'” - Mark Delaney, Gamespot (5/10)

“The problem is for most of the main story, and in fact, into the post-game itself, you're still acquiring new systems on top of the ones you already have. Many players' experience will be of a 10 to 12-hour narrative that could effectively be a 10 to 12-hour combat tutorial, with each introduction of a new mechanic necessarily delayed in order to let you understand the last. And this manifests itself on-screen, too, with combat actually a deeply reactive experience, responding to prompts to counter, harvest, execute, counter, harvest ad nauseum. It's only once you punch through this excessively long learning curve that you gain the freedom to take the initiative.” - Chris Tapsell, EuroGamer (3/5) 

“In the end, Suicide Squad is just…okay. Fine. Not amazing. Not a trainwreck. Folks wanting this game to be a complete disaster will be disappointed to discover a totally fine shooter that only succumbs to live-service corruption at the end. And for folks wanting something they can play for years, well, I hope you like shooting purple crystals over and over. Suicide Squad is a poster child for the kind of games that live between great and awful. While that might be enough for some, I can’t imagine the devs who worked hard on Suicide Squad (or publisher WB, who footed the bill for the game) wanted it all to end with what amounts to a shrug emoji. Yet, here we are. At least the shotguns are cool.” - Zack Zwiezen, Kotaku

“SS: KTJL is not a live service game, but it has enough of the features associated with the genre to be confused for one. Endgame activities promise to add more difficult missions, more effective weapons, and additional playable characters, with a version of the Joker coming in a free update in March. Brainiac is still at large, and a proper ending to the story will likely arrive after a series of seasonal updates. However, when players reach the game's currently disjointed ending, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League's stale gameplay loop may fail to keep them from wanting to participate.” - Jason Hon, Screen Rant (3/5)