The latest showcase for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League shown during Sony's February 2023 State of Play gave interested players a proper look at gameplay of Rocksteady's latest title. The footage highlighted combat from the perspective of the game's four playable characters: Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang. While the studio has the reputation for creating faithful games based on DC properties, like the Batman: Arkham series, the main playable cast of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League looks to be missing aspects that made their identities unique.
Live service, cooperative games have had trouble keeping players engaged in recent years. With the recent wave of announcements that live service games like Marvel's Avengers, Knockout City, and Apex LegendsMobile will be shutting down service, new live service games will have a harder time than ever giving players a reason to invest in their gameplay and economy. If Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League wants to stand out as a live service game in the eyes of players, it needs to lean harder into the aspects of its characters that make them appealing.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League May Squander its Characters' Potential
DC's Suicide Squad characters have always been associated with a uniquely twisted sense of personality and interesting individual characteristics. As a part of a group of villains sent on missions too dangerous for other operatives, the Suicide Squad is able to utilize the specific talents and powers of its members to accomplish what others could not. When designing a game based around these characters, players should expect to be able to utilize the powers that make each character a unique and necessary member of the team.
Unfortunately, Rocksteady's incarnation of the gang in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League seems to strip its characters of some iconic abilities in favor of standard third-person shooter combat. Each character fights using guns, and while the choice of gun can differ from character to character, such as Deadshot using sniper rifles or Captain Boomerang utilizing shotguns, this may not be enough to differentiate them from one another. They also each have some sort of high-flying world traversal option, giving every character the ability to quickly move through the air, which doesn't make as much sense for some characters as it does for others.
It does appear that each character has a special ability fitting for their identity, but this might not be significant enough to give them a unique gameplay feel. Instead, each character should have been designed more faithfully to their source material. Deadshot makes sense using guns and a jetpack as a skilled assassin. However, it's a huge missed opportunity not to make Harley Quinn a melee-focused character that mainly utilizes a bat or her iconic hammer, and Captain Boomerang not using a boomerang as his primary weapon seems like disservice to his name and character. King Shark would have made the perfect melee tank as he could tear through the streets, ripping enemies apart.
Rather than designing a game around the Suicide Squad as a concept, it seems like Rocksteady designed a third-person shooter and put a DC skin over it. As a result, it lacks the unique personality fans of the comics expect and runs the risk of being lost among the other declining live service games currently on the market. While the game may still find an audience, it may turn off DC fans hoping for a true Suicide Squad comic experience.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launches on May 26, 2023 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
