Death by a thousand buffs.
Average, by Rocksteady’s standards, is a disaster.
Cue a lot of neon spray paint, subversive wisecracking and inter-villain banter.
Harley Quinn is Harley Quinn, inscrutable, impulsive and slightly sad.
The perfect way to write an evil genius.
More disappointingly, the same issue goes for the Justice League themselves.
He’s just Kal.
The biggest disappointment of all, given Rocksteady’s brilliant history with him, is the use of Batman.
There’s also a heartfelt thank you and tribute to his brilliant work after the credits.
It’s a few, repeating, largely inconsequential Bat-mines on floors and walls, and little else.
To waste all that rich material, and for it to be wasted byRocksteady, is an extraordinary shame.
There’s not even a moment where one of you goons yells “It’s da bat!”
Or rather, the impact on its combat by the decision to make this game a live service.
Fighting in Suicide Squad begins quite badly.
Quest design, for instance, is almost a non-existent discipline in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Within these categories though, each mission is effectively identical.
Like Destiny or Anthem again, there are different categories that they fall into.
There’s nothing to shoot!)
or in one desperately boring class of quest: escorting a very slow moving van to its destination.
The main story is a series of post-game activities punctuated by lengthy, lavish cutscenes and occasional boss fights.
It’s effectively an entire single-player campaignandpost-game constructed ofDestiny 2’s Public Events.
This, by far, is Suicide Squad’s biggest problem.
But it is missing the one thing that actually makes service games work.
It’s the chance to experience somethingauthored.
The shifting Vault of Glass, or the eerily gauche, brain-melting puzzle cube of The Leviathan.
Even the weekly Nightfalls are the same: linear, structured levels manually designed by human beings.
Input parameters including auto-run, toggle aiming, tap input toggles, camera movement assists.
Separate audio sliders, subtitle size and menu subtitles, text-to-speech option.
Another low-hanging comparison might be Batman himself.
A studio that was once a symbol of something good, somehow turned into the opposite.
Both of those might ultimately be a little trite.
And there’s certainly no sense that Rocksteady’s team was making this with anything less than total conviction.
There’s just no central, underlying game to actually hang it on.
A glittering, custom-made suit, without the hero to wear it.
A copy of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was provided for review by Warner Bros.
