How Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Addresses Its Biggest Plot Mystery

16.11.2023 - 01:33 / ign.com / Harley Quinn

The long-delayed Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is finally seeing release in February 2024, and fans just got another look at the game via the first in a series of developer diaries. That new video not only reveals new gameplay footage and the fact that Metropolis will be twice the size of Arkham City’s Gotham map, it also addresses perhaps the single biggest mystery surrounding the plot of the game. Namely, how exactly can a team this small and underpowered hope to defeat the entire Justice League?

Let’s take a closer look at how the new Suicide Squad footage addresses this mystery and opens the door to the wider DC Universe in the process.

The main character roster in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is both sensible and slightly head-scratching, depending on how you look at things. On the one hand, Rocksteady has gone with a pretty traditional lineup in Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang and King Shark. These are characters with a deep association with the Suicide Squad franchise. They’ve appeared not just in the comics, but in DC’s Suicide Squad films and animated projects. Alongside Amanda Waller herself, they’re arguably the characters that immediately come to mind when casual DC fans think of the Suicide Squad.

But while the roster may be a natural fit in terms of DC synergy, it doesn’t necessarily make sense in the context of a game where the whole point is to murder the Justice League. Task Force X is going up against the most powerful superheroes in the world, including an invulnerable Amazonian warrior, a godlike Kryptonian and a guy who can run faster than the speed of thought. And let’s not forget Batman, the guy who already took down two of the four Suicide Squad members himself in the Arkham games.

Against a team that strong, what exactly does the Squad have to offer? Neither Deadshot nor Harley Quinn have any real powers to speak of. They’re just very good at killing ordinary humans. Captain Boomerang has his trick boomerangs, but that’s never done much to move him up the supervillain ladder in the DCU. Of the four, only King Shark has a truly impressive powerset, with the superhuman strength and durability the rest of the team lacks.

From the beginning, it was always a mystery as to how this specific team would be able to carry out its mission. Compared to some of the heavy hitters that have served on the Suicide Squad in the past (General Zod, Solomon Grundy, Enchantress), this team is looking fairly puny by comparison.

Granted, the Suicide Squad are usually the underdogs in any given storyline. They get by on a combination of tenacity and luck, and not everyone always makes it home alive. But the conflict in this game is on a whole other level compared to most