Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a much better game than we expected

09.02.2024 - 11:38 / videogameschronicle.com / Harley Quinn / Amanda Waller / Rocksteady Studios / Axel Rydby / Jordan Middler

When you make the greatest trilogy of superhero games ever, the wait for your next game is going to be excruciating for fans.

That’s the situation Rocksteady found itself in with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. A sequel of sorts to the Arkham games, Suicide Squad is burdened by not only the expectations of those waiting a decade for a new game from Rocksteady, but also the uneasy mood following some less-than-impressive pre-release showings, and an industry-wide live service fatigue.

That’s why it came as such a surprise that not only is Kill the Justice League far more enjoyable to play than expected, but it also has a genuinely excellent story at its heart and a level of graphical quality that in some scenes is genuinely industry leading.

It’s not perfect, there are plenty of live-service skin grafts that feel implemented by C-suite suits rather than developers, and a level of repetition in mission content that’s disappointing, but it’s far from the legacy-ruining disaster that so many feared prior to launch.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is set in Metropolis, home of Superman, years after the events of the Arkham games. Not only are those games canon, but the game goes out of its way to explain why Batman is still around following his sticky end at the conclusion of Arkham Knight.

Superman’s big bad, Brainiac, is taking over the world and has enslaved several members of the Justice League. With no one to turn to, Amanda Waller (played by the always-excellent Debra Wilson) enlists Harley Quinn, King Shark, Captain Boomerang, and Deadshot to form a not-so-elite fighting team. The catch? If they disobey her, a bomb in their heads will cause their skulls to part ways with their shoulders.

An obvious question, and one that’s addressed by the game, is how are you going to make four characters, two of which have no real superpowers, take down the Justice League. And while they have a bit of help from Wonder Woman, the game is forced to come up with three fairly similar contrivances as to why Superman is taking damage from your machine gun (would you be shocked to hear it’s Kryptonite?).

This aside, the story is great, and totally fits in the Arkham universe. Rocksteady makes the smart decision to not over-explain who the Justice League is, or how the threads exactly bind the Arkham games to this. You know who Superman is. You know who Green Lantern is. Metahumans existing in the fairly grounded world of Arkham doesn’t feel like the stretch it perhaps did when the original game was released 15 years ago.

The biggest through-line between the games is Harley Quinn, who in retrospect is a natural fit for a protagonist in an Arkham sequel. The character is mostly the same one that spawned infinite