‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’ video game review

The developers that brought the Caped Crusader to virtual life in the award-winning video game trilogy “Batman: Arkham” are back with a third-person action shooter exploring the even darker side of the DC Comics’ universe in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady Studios, rated M, reviewed for Xbox X|S, $59.99).

Taking place five years after the events of “Batman: Arkham Knight,” the up-to-four-player, cooperation-driven story introduces the Suicide Squad of inmates — marksman extraordinaire Deadshot, Clown Princess of Crime Harley Quinn, Australian master assassin Captain Boomerang and bipedal apex predator King Shark.

The quartet is forced (due to lethal explosives implanted in their heads) to perform a nearly impossible mission assigned by the amoral Amanda Waller, director of the black ops government agency A.R.G.U.S.

Specifically, Brainiac has invaded Earth and is terraforming the planet into his beloved home Colu. To accomplish this, he has infected and brainwashed key members of the Justice League — Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and the Flash.

Our quartet of supervillains must visit a decimated Metropolis and work together to hunt down and terminate the world’s greatest heroes while slaughtering an army of mutated humans and ultimately challenging Brainiac. 

The gameplay offers a too-standard and repetitive mixture of running and gunning, looting, upgrading powers and weapons (mainly guns), blowing up stuff and killing within an online (i.e., must always be connected to the servers) digital environment.

Its deviation from the stealthy yet slickly smooth combat seen in the Arkham games is beyond jarring. Each firefight in the open world with clusters of similar bad guys becomes, a neon-encrusted screen clutter of death packed with enough information overlays to guarantee migraines.

Mature gamers will find the experience a loud, visual noise lacking in subtlety. Exhaustive missions of jump, slide, climb, slash, shoot, gut and toss an explosive do not inspire.

Perhaps with three of my online friends discussing coordinated attacks, this might have been better. But the three computer-controlled members of my team were often idiots and sometimes impossible to navigate around in certain situations.

However, I did appreciate each character’s varied ability to traverse the environments: Harley uses a grapple gun to attach to her own drone, Captain Boomerang uses short teleportation bursts, Deadshot gets a jetpack and King Shark leaps around the city like the Incredible Hulk.

The most urgent part of the combat is getting through the frenetic death-spiral-type missions, broken down into only a handful of varieties within the roughly 20 hours of gameplay. Players can either explore interactive locations and meet legends such as the Penguin, Lex Luthor, Poison Ivy and Wonder Woman or covet the cut scenes that propel the story.

When not murdering minions, “Kill the Justice League” does have its moments.

I’ll offer a walk through the Real Batman Experience museum narrated by former investigative reporter Jack Ryder. The Suicide Squad meets the real Dark Knight there, but players also learn about his history through dioramas using cardboard cut-outs and triggering character bios.

Also the Suicide Squad uses the Hall of Justice as its headquarters, and a player can quickly learn about the Justice League history by enabling three-dimensional, holographic versions of the heroes through various displays around the ornate, multistoried building.

Equally fun is admiring the impeccable character modeling, by far the best available in video-game animation. The meticulous body movements, fluid facial expressions, detailed costuming and often snarky voice-over work bring the characters to eerie life-like stature.

The costuming is upgradeable and offers classic versions of the character’s garb, including Captain Boomerang’s goofy blue outfit of the Silver Age and Harley’s red-and-black harlequin outfit. A Deluxe version of the game includes Justice League costumes for the Squad to wear: King Shark dressed as Superman is pretty amusing.

Now, let’s touch on the caped elephant in the room, which is not a spoiler due to the ridiculous amount of negative press coverage already online: The Suicide Squad does kill the four Justice League members in boss battles — often in the most implausible and disrespectful ways possible.

Let’s ignore Captain Boomerang attempting to urinate on the body of a dead Flash and focus on Batman’s fate. After Harley Quinn delivers a vapid lecture to a beaten Dark Knight slumped on a park bench, she puts a bullet right in his temple. The end.

At this point in my gaming life, I’m harkening back to that brilliant single-player, story-driven experience of my hero. Or, what the heck, let’s just cut out the ridiculous hands-on action and simply turn this into a movie. Rocksteady already has multiple hours of brilliantly animated scenes.

For a game seven years in development, “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” leaves enough wrong and just not enough right to remain mediocre. Setting the woefully incomplete plot in the Arkham universe forced players to make the impossible-to-live-up-to comparisons to the crown jewels of Batman video games.

The current iteration is a live-service looter-shooter slog through a fabled comic book universe and requires Rocksteady developers reexamine previous glory to understand how to refine and proceed.

Although, it’s way too late for the soon-to-be-released free content expansions including adding a playable Joker to the team, so get ready for that, lovers of evil.