Taking place in the same universe as the critically acclaimed Batman: Arkham Asylum video games comes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. In this installment of the franchise, the world conquering villain Braniac has invaded Earth, and mind controlled nearly the entire Justice League. But thanks to Amanda Waller, Task Force X (The Suicide Squad) are on the job. Now all they have to do is…fight off an alien invasion…and take down the Justice League in the process…piece of cake, right?
As a big fan of the Arkham games before this installment, this was one of my most anticipated games of this year. However, due to that fact, this game quickly became one of the biggest disappointments of this year thus far. Despite the idea of the game being interesting, placing it in the Arkham game universe is for no rhyme or reason. To a certain extent it almost feels disrespectful to those games that came before it.
Another big disappointment for this game is the combat and play styles that are present throughout it. Imagine! You have access to Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, King Shark, and Deadshot as playable characters! These characters all have such unique fighting styles, in the comics, and movies…and yet in this game every one of them is narrowed down to a third person shooting play style, and those other special traits just take a backseat? It just makes the gameplay feel repetitive, and uninteresting after a certain amount of time.
I will say however that one of the strongest aspects is the voice acting on display. This game features one of the last performances as the late, great Kevin Conroy as Batman, and even though the story doesn’t quite do the character of Batman justice, he absolutely gives it his all. He’s also not an outlier here with all of the voice actors being quite good. There’s even a moment in here between The Flash, and Wonder Woman, that emotionally resonated with me that I felt would not have worked without the great performances, and all the emotion behind it.
Jumping off that point, despite me not liking the concept of the story overall, the writing found throughout the game is quite good. The humor and comedic timing is spot on, and there were many times that I found myself laughing out loud at some of these jokes.
Overall, this game just feels like such a missed opportunity. Why on earth would you connect such a devastating event like Braniac’s takeover to such a beloved franchise as the Arkham games? It tells you in the title that throughout the game you are going to have to kill these versions of the heroes and it feels like it throws everything that came before it in the garbage. Then on top of that, the game is made into a third person looter shooter of sorts, and just becomes a drag to progress through. I’m going to give Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League a 5/10 and I pray to God we don’t see anything else come out of this franchise.