Warner Bros.has lifted the NDA aroundSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’sclosed alpha, in what is likely an attempt to drown out the negative tone of the press previews (which were unprecedented in their criticism) with enthusiasm from fans - it also means I can finally talk about the game myself.
To an extent, I think this gambit will work. More criticism will pour in now the floodgates have opened, but new defenders will rise, too. Based on what I’ve played, I don’t expect Kill the Justice League to get a particularly warm welcome when it arrives in a couple of weeks’ time, but for all the new voices that will shrug and say, ‘ehh, not great’, others will shout with a vengeance. The reaction from gaming press has made defending the game tantamount to taking up arms against journalists, and you’ll never go bankrupt betting on that.
There were redeeming factors to Suicide Squad if you want to look for them. While I hated King Shark (it took me this long to realise he’s an off-brand Drax), the other three squad members had good chemistry and were funnier than I expected. If there’s any trace ofRocksteadyin this game, it’s in the character writing, particularly Harley.
Unfortunately, it’s otherwise hard to see the work of the devs who set a new benchmark for superhero games. It putshuge emphasis on traversal and verticality, but the former is too slow, and the latter lacks fluidity, while making the world feel sterile and empty. Harley’s rope swinging feels like if you tried to playSpider-Man 2on aPS3while it stuttered and spluttered under the effort.
It’s blasé to continue to compare Suicide Squad to Spider-Man, but it’s not just that the two are superhero games launching just a few months apart, but that Suicide Squad has made traversal such a major part of its identity. Everything I’ve played in the game puts a huge emphasis on movement, while adding in restrictions. Each character has a way to leap across huge gaps, but unlike Spidey’s ability to swing endlessly, Suicide Squad only gives you two or three ‘boosts’ before a cooldown kicks in.
Given everything else about this game, it’s likely that you eventually unlock upgrades to give you a little more juice, but no one wants to be Harley Quinn so they can swing five times from a bat gadget and then plunge to their deaths in purple ooze. Traversal works in Spider-Man so well, not just because it’s good but, to dust off an old journo chestnut, because it makes you feel like Spider-Man. Suicide Squad left me feeling little but boredom.
Not only does sludge cover the world in a cheap narrative conceit, you constantly feel as if you’re moving through it. Then there’s the combat - it’s already up against it with a huge over-reliance on guns, likely a result of working backwards from wanting to give us gizmos to upgrade rather than focusing on what this game and genre needs, but it’s not even a good version of guns blazing action. If it was a conscious rebellion against expectations from Arkham, it was a poor one, and leaves the game feeling hollow and pointless.
WhenBatmantook on endless waves of goons, it at least seemed to build towards something, and there were always new things to try, while each arena was different. Suicide Squad seems content with empty, open air rooftops where peppering bullets from a distance eventually does the job. The power-ups, like King Shark doing an earthquake-inducing slam, don’t add enough variety and push you in close before immediately pulling you back out. It’s poorly balanced and squishy in the extreme, evoking none of the charm of Rocksteady’s previous work while taking its gunplay way too seriously.
It has been compared toSunset Overdriveby fans looking to find praise in the chaos, but Sunset Overdrive had exploding teddy bears, sprinklers full of acid, and vinyl record machine guns. It also had good traversal, but that’s another story. Suicide Squad’s guns are impossibly generic because the game bets the farm onDestiny-style marginal upgradesbeing the key to the player feedback loop. People may defend it now, when they’re still hoping the final product will spring a surprise and stick one in the eye for journalists, but in the cold light of a full release, I don’t expect this to stand up to scrutiny.
