With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, developer Rocksteady Studios is hoping to do for the live-service genre what its Batman series did for melee action games. Batman: Arkham Asylum set a standard for beatdown combat that has influenced plenty of developers since its release in 2009, and Batman: Arkham City did the same for both large-scale fights and an open-world setting. Though Suicide Squad is pretty different–it’s a co-op third-person shooter–Rocksteady looks to bring the same speed, fluidity, and grace in its combat to make something just as captivating as the Arkham games were.
I recently spent about five hours playing an early portion of Suicide Squad at a hands-on event in Los Angeles, and I came away unsure if its mix of live-game content, loot-shooter RPG systems, and shooter combat could capture lightning in a bottle the way the Arkham games did. It’s clear what Rocksteady is attempting is ambitious and there are things about it that work well, but a snapshot look at the game wasn’t enough to get the hang of its systems or see whether it can eventually balance all of the elements that feel, on first blush, like they pull Suicide Squad in different directions.
The portion I played picked up at the start of the story, when protagonists Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang are forced to take on a pretty awful-sounding mission. Metropolis has been invaded by the villain Brainiac, who has used weird technology to take over the minds of most of DC’s best superheroes. Batman, Superman, The Flash, and The Green Lantern have all been corrupted, and they’re actively helping Brainiac turn any surviving Metropolis residents into twisted gooey soldiers. Before anyone can even think about how to deal with this alien invasion, they need threats such as Superman and Batman out of the way.