Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the latest in a long line of multiplayer games that feature archetypes as its playable protagonists. This has sort of become a more nuanced way of assigning distinct classes to each character, and gives fans more personable or identifiable traits to look for in the character they wish to play. In Kill the Justice League’s case, fans may already be familiar with Task Force X’s Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark, and the fact that the game connects to the Arkhamverse is all the more reason to be excited about it.
Each member of Task Force X represents a different archetype, but where they differ the most dramatically is through their unique means of traversal in Kill the Justice League. This will hopefully help it to be distinct as a multiplayer game, especially one based upon iconic DC characters. Some fans may have wished to play as the Justice League instead, but Kill the Justice League was perhaps able to dodge a kryptonite bullet by choosing Task Force X as its playable characters because it does not need to toil over how to balance a bunch of overpowered abilities.
Task Force X Does Not Have Superpowers to Balance in Kill the Justice League
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s playable protagonists are all ordinary people with the exception of King Shark. In this regard, Rocksteady does not need to balance how powerful one character will be over another because they all essentially behave the same way, besides their traversal.
This is actually a fairly smart choice because it means that traversal can be interesting and dynamic without infringing on what makes a character more powerful than another. It will only have an impact on which characters fans think is more fun to move around with. If the Justice League was playable, Rocksteady would have a much harder time trying to see how to make Batman capable of keeping up with Flash, for example, or making Superman’s heat vision as fun to use as Wonder Woman’s lasso.
Rather, Deadshot could have a tremendous amount of mobility with his jetpack, for example, but he will not necessarily deal any more damage than Harley can and may not be able to successfully outrun her in Kill the Justice League’s open-world Metropolis. Those kinds of gameplay-changing stats seem to come from the different firearm categories that players equip on each character, which are all the same except for melee weapons.
Kill the Justice League’s Task Force X Shares the Same Weapons
It seems as if Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will share guns between each character, while melee weapons will be unique to each—including baseball bats and mallets for Harley, as well as sickles and cleavers for King Shark. It can be assumed that melee weapons will all behave similarly even if they have different animations between each character, and that will hopefully be enough to add a bit of personality to each Task Force X member.
However, it will be interesting to see if different weapon types or stat bonuses are more effective on one character versus another. This could allow Captain Boomerang to be more powerful with Suicide Strike damage or grenades than another character, for instance. Captain Boomerang’s Speed Force gauntlet might make quicker attacks with an automatic rifle more efficient than Deadshot could be while hovering around at a distance. Otherwise, players could instantly choose the character they think is the most interesting and never have a reason to switch to someone else, and that would be a shame.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
