It may even be pretty hip-hop, as per the Outkast needledrop in the very first trailer. It’s definitely metal. Brainiac’s invasion of Earth is a metal happening.

I received a review copy of Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and am playing the base campaign now. I got to play the closed Alpha test a while back, so it’s interesting, revisiting the tutorial-opening section that we got to glimpse in its Alpha state. Mild SPOILERS ahead for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (but not endgame spoilers, because I’m not there yet).

Caveat: I am in the camp that thinks this game is a great idea, maybe the best idea ever for a superhero team game. I love the wish-fulfillment of inhabiting a super-squad in an impossible mission to take down the very much overpowered super-league, with DC characters I recognize and have geeked out on for my whole life. So maybe there’s a smidge of personal bias there.

Essentially, in this game, you play as Harley Quinn or Deadshot and/or King Shark or/also/and Captain Boomerang and fight the Justice League, who have been mind-controlled by Brainiac. Amanda Waller recruits them for the mission, as she always does, instructing Task Force X/The Suicide Squad that they must do her bidding or she’ll blow their heads off with explosive implants. The setting is Rocksteady’s version of Metropolis, a gaudy casino-colored counterpart to the Gothic dark cityscape created in the Arkham games. As far as gameplay, you traverse the city and shoot a lot of Brainiac’s minions, and you keep running into Justice League bosses: Green Lantern, Flash, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman.

Like I said, best idea for a superhero video game ever.

I’m not gonna get into the co-op Squadding-up details too much here; I will write a full review later when I’ve gotten through the main campaign. And full disclosure, am playing on a Playstation 5 and thus definitionally have no friends, so I’m not the qualified expert on how co-op games are supposed to work anyway. But there is a pretty massive story/solo campaign, and it’s — Holy Ambitious Epics, Batman.

THE FEELS OF IT

The pop culture touchstone besides the DC Universe is, I think, Escape From New York. An under-supplied special ops team in a city teeming with hostiles. Especially true of an early sequence where you meet actual Batman (the last voice performance of the Caped Crusader by the late Kevin Conroy), and, in a clever inversion of the Arkham stealth missions, you have to try to dodge him as he predator-stalks you. It is not the most involved gameplay thing, but it’s a great scene.

Owing to the Squad’s cynical- death-wishy identity, there’s a sense of humor that permeates everything, far more than in the grim Arkham games. The jokes are almost jarring when juxtaposed with the vivid, exhaustively-designed cinematics. The dazzling opening credits sequence recalls the Deadpool movies, both whimsical and sensually exciting with detail.

The voice acting is top-notch, and pretty much aligns with the characterizations in the Suicide Squad films: King Shark is adorably, brutishly oafish in the ways of land-lubbers. Deadshot is surly, erring toward bitter. Boomer has sort of a cackling Hugh Jackman vibe? Tara Strong is indeed strong as Harley Quinn, a role she’s played often in the animated shows. (By the way, regular readers of this blog may know that I have a Harley Quinn thing, favoring Margot Robbie’s version, but the cool thing about Harley is, like Catwoman, she doesn’t really have any bad interpretations, all versions of Harley give something special, whether played by Strong, Robbie, or Kaley Cuoco. But I digress.)

Again, these are all early impressions, but I wanted to capture how this game hits you when you get started. It feels like it’s going to great places.

THE GAMEPLAY

Switching characters is fairly convenient, you can’t switch at any moment (only Marvel Ultimate Alliance really got that to work in real time, as far as I know) but you can do it often.

The gunplay is fluid, and gratifying in proportion with how much you can turn off your comics-fan head saying, “this is an immense amount of shooting for a superhero game.” I stand by an earlier statement: No one cares whether King Shark can customize a sub-machine gun. One would want a more diverse power/special moves set, but A.) the Suicide Squad mostly don’t have exotic superpowers and B.) the variety of powers were a bit wonky to deal with in Marvel’s Avengers, so I get it. The two main variations on standard gun combat seem to be Counter Shots and Shield Harvesting, and I found them both fun mechanics, encouraging aiming and combos without being too tricky to execute. There are grenades, and finishing moves, and snappy patter between the Squad folks.

The traversal is a mixed bag, each character’s movement is different. So far I feel slickest with Harley’s grappling hook or Deadshot’s jetpack. Boomerang and Shark I haven’t gotten the hang of yet. What they’re going for is admirable; Metropolis is a very tall city, and you’re encouraged to stay off the alien-invader-stuffed streets, so the movement all embraces big jumps and verticality. Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of the Squad’s mortal skillset; I’m not used to thinking of Boomerang as being able to run like the Flash, so it’s not intuitive. (My preferences map onto the similar traversal styles used in Gotham Knights, where I also didn’t care for Robin’s winky teleporting or Red Hood’s weird magic jumping.) Depending on how you feel about Deadshot even having a jetpack, the disconnect may throw you off, too. But I like that Harley’s hook and glider evoke Batman’s grapple-and-launch in Arkham City/Knight, so when moving any long distance I choose Harley. None of the traversal styles are as superhumanly freeing as in, say, Insomniac’s Spider-Man or (that other iconic superhero video game) Saints Row IV, but in a way, it’s meta-apt for the non-flying Squad to be frustrated trying to get around the big city. There are vehicles, but they seem more for tank battles than for transport.

THE EASTER EGGS, THE REFERENCES, THE META

The DC lore points are copious, and make my heart smile: The Speed Force, “Finite” Crisis, Elseworlds, all repeatedly cited, there’s even a Killer Moth reference. But it’s not done with over-reverence, rather a snarky self-awareness, as when Boomerang remembers, “Isn’t Deadshot supposed to be white?”

SSKTJL feels more fully-realized than its recent comps Avengers or Gotham Knights, and consciously so, it trolls both those games with the aforementioned cutting call-outs. The game feels like it was made by people who really read the comic books, and in my universe that’s a compliment. It has PERSONALITY. There are a lot of open-world shooters/adventures, some of them have personality and some don’t. MUA, Arkham, Insomniac’s Spider-Man, Nier: Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, all have an artistic perspective, they’re coming from somewhere. Gotham Knights has a big map but no particular soul. In the likable but wholly underwhelming Avengers, someone forgot to ask the question, does anyone WANT to fight Taskmaster a million times?

SSKTJL asks the question, “Do you want to think about how Harley Quinn (a non-powered mouthy acrobat) would fight a Green Lantern (a cosmic cop with a magic ring that can make anything out of thin air)?” Speaking for myself, as far as immersive video games go, that’s all I want to do. Because it challenges the foregone-conclusion problem inherent in a lot of video games; the boss is there to be beaten, you know there’s a way to do it, usually if you shoot the boss enough times in the wherevers. In this specific story, the power disparity between protagonist and opponent is so huge (the two-minute cinematic where Wonder Woman neutralizes the whole Squad is cooler than the whole of WW1984) you really gotta wonder, “Am I gonna get through this? It’s the freaking JUSTICE LEAGUE.”

Hence, dramatic stakes, hence, investment. The writing is great, and I think that’s the essential, elevating aspect, duh. I don’t lightly describe things as “punk rock,” but this Suicide Squad game…really, somewhat, Doesn’t Give A F-ck. In the sense of enjoying the freedom to explore, in the sense of “Why Not?” and indeed, “What If?” Poison Ivy is a kid now. Harley makes off-color jokes about gymnasts. The music from The Dark Knight shows up at just the right place. Why not?

Here’s a dirty little secret about the DC Universe, if you are the sort who wonders, “Why so much Suicide Squad content when all the famous characters are in the Justice League?” The reason comes from the comics source material: Suicide Squad is ALWAYS WELL-WRITTEN. Justice League is SOMETIMES WELL-WRITTEN. Since the late 1980’s reboot by John Ostrander and Luke McDonnell, the Suicide Squad comics consistently exemplify tight characterization, moral intrigue, and spicy action-movie one-liners, whether written by Ostrander, Kim Yale, Tom Taylor, or Gail Simone. The Justice League books are often well-written, but are more consistent for being beautifully-drawn. So if you want a memorable monologue, you go with the Squad, and if you want a cosmic splash page battle, you go with the League.

And this Suicide Squad game, thanks to the deft team of writers and artists at Rocksteady, so far kinda seems to have it both ways!

A lot more on this later when I’m further through the game. I reserve the right to rescind all of this if the ending is somehow really terrible or insulting. As of this writing, though, I feel like I’ll be talking about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as a surprisingly fitting endpoint for the DC Cinematic Universe, I mean the one that’s about to be blown up and restarted with Superman: Legacy and all that. The other day, on our Hard NOC Life podcast, Keith spoke about how he felt this era of DC movies and TV never quite reached its Endgame-level climactic teleological point. But if — and this is a big IF — Rocksteady sticks the landing, how could Suicide Squad vs. The Justice League NOT be that moment*? SS v JL: Sunset of Justice, as it were.

Review Part II will be here, same Bat-blog, same Bat-byline, at whatever point in the near future I finish the main story of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.

* (Or someone could just release the dang Batgirl movie, but don’t get me started.)

THE TWO POST-CREDITS BONUS COMMENTS

Rocksteady Studios people: You do WANT to make a Birds of Prey expansion for this game, don’t you? Stay with me a second — Huntress, Batgirl (Cain or Gordon? Porque no los dos?), Black Canary, Hawkgirl, Catwoman, all playable, some of them split between Squad and League. Maybe Vixen is the big boss. Please, just take all my DLC money, I wasn’t doing anything with it.

Also, Rocksteady folks, if you’re looking for stuff to patch, a nitpicky but real complaint: In this era of accessibility-consciousness, why is the HUD font locked at like 8-pt teeniness? I’m sorry, I’m Gen-X old, I can’t see, and not being able to read the tutorial is a pain that affects player experience. Up-sizing the subtitle font is possible, but I couldn’t find any setting to adjust ALL text for legibility. In fairness, most modern videogames have this problem, Rocksteady, it ain’t just you.

But how would you like it if I made the very last line of this article look like this for no appreciable reason? What am I, the Atom?