I had this whole preamble written, but here’s the most important thing. It’s tempting to say that Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is the best DC Comics movie made to date. I just watched a ten-minute cutscene that occurs about halfway through the campaign, involving Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Squad in a running battle around Metropolis, and I may still be shaken.

But I won’t go into that immediately. I’ll sum up my NON-SPOILERY thoughts in the first few paragraphs and then indicate where the spoilers begin, so you can stop reading there if you like, and please bookmark this page if you’d like to come back for my full review with all the story spoilers.

SSKTJL (as it’s known for short), launched last week with a buggy early access that auto-finished the game for some players, which, okay, is weird. Even before that point, there was a lot of speculative skepticism, including from myself, about the game’s live-service elements, and whether it could live up to the high standard set by Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum trilogy, widely considered the pinnacle of modern superhero video gaming (unless you prefer the similarly-excellent Spider-Man games from Insomniac, you’re not wrong). A lot of the negative buzz related to the bad aftertaste from two recent underwhelming superhero team games, Marvel’s Avengers and Gotham Knights.

I may suffer from a little confirmation bias because I always thought Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League looked like a great idea. I wrote up some first impressions of the game a few days ago. Having reached the end, I can report that SSKTJL is, among a lot of things, the DC Universe event most analogous to what Avengers: Endgame did for the Marvel Cinematic Universe: a gigantic closing-night party with a huge cast of characters that brings it all home.

As a DCU story, for fans of DC comics, it’s the resonate event we needed, whether we deserve it or not.

(Hi comics people, I use the word “Endgame” as a shorthand indicator, like the word “Secret” for Marvel and “Crisis” for DC: a big event meant to change the universe and in so doing break and remake your heart. That’s what I mean by “Endgame-y.” Not the video game usage of the term “endgame,” which understandably could cause some confusion.)

As a video game, it’s pretty good. As a DCU story, for fans of DC comics, it’s the resonate event we needed, whether we deserve it or not. Oh, what is it about? Brainiac invades Earth and mind-controls the Justice League, so Amanda Waller sends the Suicide Squad to Metropolis to liberate the planet by killing Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and the Flash. Hilarity ensues. Epic happens. Iconic AF.

THE GAMEPLAY, THE COMBAT, THE TRAVERSAL

As far as the actual action-gameplay of it, one of my main concerns going in to SSKTJL was the emphasis on firearms over melee. After all, Rocksteady’s main thing was Batman, who eschews guns, and the Arkham games developed a beautifully complex-yet-simple melee system around the Bat-Fam’s fighting style, the best Batman combat in all mediums, not even close.

So, it took a while on the learning curve to reach an equilibrium that shares shooting, melee-ing, and traversal, but I got there, mainly with my favored Harley. I just spent a few minutes in a Metropolis sports stadium running a gauntlet of alien foes, jumping around, switching weapons, uh-oh losing shields, finding more shields with aimed gun-melee combos, remembering that there are finishers (“Suicide Strikes” they’re called in-game), reaching a kinetic flow of jump-shoot-melee cacophany, and I couldn’t have had a better time (I mean, with a video game).

Some reviewers have remarked that the alien villains are same-y, and it’s true. But I disagree with Jake of Gameranx on the point that there should be more factions; to me, the lack of factions gives focus to the mission’s purpose. And for me the alien hordes ARE creepy, the skittering facehugger types, the blobbish Akira/Abomination types. I’m upset by them, I want to blow them up.

It’s a very busy screen. For no reason I can tell except that it’s awesome, casino slot-machine animations appear for your overcharges/power-ups/level-ups. It’s a what-the-hell aesthetic choice that adds to the feeling of pretty chaos.

The map is very tall. Verticality is a big deal in this game, to the point of, gravity feels like your opponent. Harley’s traversal style is the most like Arkham Batman’s, and accordingly, rewards altitude and drags if you’re skimming close to the ground. Actually, everything in this game rewards achieving altitude. If you have a specific phobia of falling off buildings, do NOT play this game. You fall off a building every other second.

WHY THIS ONE MATTERS

Rocksteady has been trolling us all, cutely and purposefully. They knew exactly what they were trying to do, and did it. They said “live-service game,” knowing people would freak out because of all the things that stink about live-service games even though they make tons of money. They did not reveal how SSKTJL would be the NOT-stinky-live-service one, because they knew we would not believe it anyway. They let us see some of the goofy live-service stuff in the previews and NONE of the brilliant Endgame-y stuff, to manage expectations, and to let the story truly be a surprise for the faithful.

I’m reviewing this one as much as a film as a game, because that’s more my expertise. Stay with me here: Video games work as the ideal case for a Snyderverse movie, more than the actual movies. The Justice League-related films were good at visual spectacle and not as good at the humans-being stuff, as per all that director’s work. In video games, the game provides the visual spectacle, YOU INSERT the human stuff by playing the game. Playstyle, preferred loadout, cosmetic choices, all that. Right? But hey, as it turns out, Rocksteady makes beautiful human-interest moments too.

Rocksteady promises a lot of new content in SSKTJL’s near future in the form of Elseworlds, more playable characters, and multiversal Brainiacs to fight. If you were soured by Avengers or Gotham Knights, in which the DLC didn’t add a lot to the games, I get it (I wanted to like the Wakanda level, but it was samey). But we may remember that Arkham Knight had some pretty compelling expansions. And obviously a lot of people will want to play a well-designed Joker.

I finished the campaign at 6AM, slept a little, woke up, and did the thing where I started up SSKTJL immediately to play a short mission. I wanted to make sure it was still there, it was not a dream.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SUICIDE SQUAD: KILL THE JUSTICE LEAGUE START HERE. PLEASE COME BACK LATER IF YA LIKE!

THE EASTER EGGS, THE INTERCONNECTIVITY

Hoo boy. Chapter 4 is titled “You Either Die A Villain… (Our Apocalyptic Vacation).” Basically every single thing is named after an extant DC Universe something.

BUT OKAY, THE FIGHT BETWEEN SUPERMAN AND WONDER WOMAN IS ALL ANY DC FAN SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT.

At some point while playing SSKTJL it became clear, not only does it feel kind of Endgame-y, they’re intentionally going for an Endgame thing. Cool, cool. I refer to my own Thread about why Endgame works as emotional fan-fulfillment.

So there is this running battle across Metropolis, with Wonder Woman and Superman smashing each other through buildings at high speed. Lois Lane is on a PA, telling everyone to evacuate. During this, the Squad must reluctantly protect the vehicle carrying wounded Amanda Waller, their boss whom they all hate, as the alien forces try to blow her up before they can get back to the Hall of Justice. THIS SCENE/MISSION SEQUENCE IS EVERYTHING. I played as Harley, grapple-swinging the rooftops, blowing up alien snipers, yelling at Waller the whole time. Finally, they crash into the steps of the Hall of Justice.

And then, and I get a little broken down writing this — wait, I’m not going to write it. You can infer if you like. If you’re a DC fan, you truly ought to watch it for yourself. The Superman-Wonder Woman fight resolves, and it’s a lot to take.

Harley, throughout the whole game, has a little crush on Wonder Woman. And it’s precious and true — who doesn’t get having some kind of crush on Wonder Woman? As introduced in this game, Diana is what she’s meant to be: moral purity, kindness, raw power. Harley sees that. We see it through her. After this mission, Harley is changed, and we change as we play her. It’s some real shit.

So it became really important to me, the player, to beat the crap out of Superman while playing as Harley.

To extend the Endgame analogy, Harley becomes what Nebula unexpectedly became after hanging out with the Avengers: her conscience is activated, because family and/or found family, and so choosing to do the hard thing. Tara Strong’s droll, mercurial voice performance takes us on the emotional arc with Harley without losing a bit of her core chaotic unpredictability.

So it became really important to me, the player, to beat the crap out of Superman while playing as Harley. The writing and the film-making influenced this preference more than any choice system. The Supes fight becomes incredibly compelling — it’s as hard as you’d think, you can’t get elevation to lock in on him, and he has all the elemental attacks — and also he’s talking like a pompous dick through the whole encounter, and it is so relieving (after several fails ending in graphic Superman-Murders-Squad-Member scenes) to shut him up.

THE CHARACTERS

The voice cast is uniformly excellent, a few standout points:

• This is (afaik) the first instance of Deadshot having a major characterization/POV as a Black man since Will Smith in the first Suicide Squad film. That is, in the comics, he’s still white Floyd Lawton. Both/and, people. The game’s Deadshot (as voiced by Bumper Robinson) takes the stock assassin-with-daughter-with-heart-of-gold story and goes to new places with it. The conclusion of the boss battle with Green Lantern (John Stewart) is straight coldblooded, dude.
• Pardons, I don’t care for Captain Boomerang a lot, I only leveled him to 6 so far. Daniel Lapaine’s performance is great.
• Favorite King Shark bit: Well, at one point he takes the Green Lantern oath, and if the glowy absurdity of that doesn’t tickle your DC fan heart, I dunno what to tell you.
• Corey Burton’s Lex Luthor merits special mention: his laconic cadence perfectly renders that rich guy who knows everything you don’t. You recognize him and you hate him, even though he doesn’t say anything especially evil.
• Debra Wilson voices Amanda Waller, with authority. If any character suffers from being a bit one-note, unfortunately it’s Waller; she’s just so consistently hard and mean, but it generally works.
• Favorite Harley lines conveying her smartypants humanity: To Lois: “That’s editorializing a bit, but fair.” To a gear upgrade: “Jealous of my cool new toy? No, ’cause that would be envy!” To Shark, at a tender moment of disaster: “Ever had ice cream before, Sharky?”
• Jason Isaacs (a.k.a. Captain Lorca) voices Brainiac, because British people are evil. I KID, but the point is, Isaacs milks that trope with imperious relish.
• Toyman is Hiro Okamura, played by Christopher Sean, a Japanese American actor. There’s a delightful little vibe between him and Harley, as when Hiro comments that Harley is the second most-cosplayed woman character in the cosplay community, after Catwoman. A03 people, please start your Toyman/Harley fanfics now.
• Darcy Rose Byrnes as Kid Poison Ivy is so funny, and puts Harley in such a weird bind (they were lovers back when Poison Ivy was, y’know, an adult) that you can’t help but root for the human-hating toxin-crafting “eco-terrorist middle schooler.”
• And of course, SSKTJL features the final voice performance of Kevin Conroy as Batman. There are some hilarious/insightful callbacks to Conroy’s iconic line readings in the Arkham games. There is also a lovely tribute by Lois Lane at the end, commemorating Conroy’s real-life passing.

THE BOSS BATTLES

The big encounters with Justice League Prime are challenging enough; mainly they feel niftily authentic to how facing the Justice League would be, fulfilling the central promise of the premise. Flash is dizzyingly hard to hit. Green Lantern overwhelms you with an army of plasma contructs. Superman I mentioned, not eager to replay that. The Batman encounter inverts the stealth-predator sections from the Arkham games, to great effect. The Squad are the goons on the ground, and Batman is out there in the dark, jumpscaring you from all directions. The Arkham ding-dong theme reappears at just the right moment, risking all sanity.

The as-of-now final battle with Brainiac recalls the harrowing “final” boss fight of Nier: Automata (if you’ve played that game you get the need for quote marks). It’s big and aggravating and it kinda feels like your underpowered Squad character is gonna just keep dying, but for the whole supporting cast (Gizmo, Poison Ivy, etc.) coming to provide backup. Again, like the end of Endgame.

The Squad never fights Wonder Woman in gameplay. There’s a supercool cinematic when she first appears and dispatches them all easily, instilling early in our minds that these bosses seem unbeatable. Later, the Squad almost succeeds in annoying Diana into submission. And then, as mentioned, the most excellent Wonder Woman vs. Superman fight happens, and it’s something to just watch and marvel at. (Among the many Wonderwomanful things about this game, I also wanna note, Diana’s long hair is very practically tied back and tiara’d, as someone who is always jumping and hand-to-hand fighting would need to style it, it’s a really nice hair detail to see. Harley’s hair, too — no loose entangling locks on these ladies, they’re professional fighters.)

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING

I play on a PS5. I’m not someone who cares about frame rates or drops unless they seriously slow down the game. It’s smooth and crashed on me just once, and I lived.

Harley often looks so beautiful, and I don’t mean because she’s the woman, but because the facial animations are so sumptuously expressive, you can almost perceive the layers, the clown makeup over human skin. And again, here’s why I review this game more like a movie. The facial animations just sing. The Uncanny Valley Meter confirms, the faces are very lifelike, and yes it can be a little unnerving. It often doesn’t read as animation — in the movies we’d call it, “the CGI,” shorthand for photo-realistically drawn not-there people. SSKTJL breaks down the dividing line between feature film and video game a little further, for good or ill.

It’s the script, the writing, the voices. They’re going for a specific thing and they get there. If you don’t happen to like that thing, that’s fine; but it’s not because they didn’t know what they were doing.

IT’S THE WRITING, STUPID

There is absolutely no mystery behind how SSKTJL achieves its effect, nor in the fact that the game will land for some people and not others. It’s the script, the writing, the voices. They’re going for a specific thing and they get there. If you don’t happen to like that thing, that’s fine; but it’s not because they didn’t know what they were doing. Yes there’s SSKTJL’s technical achievement and the kinetic gameplay, but the Avengers game didn’t not have that. It’s just that the characters in Avengers lacked personality, or the conviction of their own artistic choices.

After you fight Flash, you bounce to an Elseworld that looks pretty much like the “Knightmare” sequence in the Snyder films. Things have gone badly. There’s a delightful patter bit with the Squad debating whether annihilated future Metropolis looks more like Apokolips or more like Boomer’s native Australia. #Dead.

There’s a two-minute-or-so scene where the Squad is locked in a shipping container, it’s just them talking in total blackness. And what is that but prioritizing character over spectacle, which is what we all supposedly want? Brave, and bold.

The prevailing tone is the Squad’s trademark cynical nihilism — they’re an expendable hit squad, after all — and what builds up over time is a sense of camaraderie, as when the Squad congratulate each other after co-destroying something. Later, Batman of all people gives a (little bit corny) speech about found family, to an unseen Tim Drake and the rest of the Bat-Fam, and the Squad hears it. Because, surprise, the underlying touchstone of SSKTJL is not a comic book, but The Wizard of Oz. At one point Harley quotes Dorothy, and then it all snaps together: the story of the girl who went to the fantastical land and met three supernatural male companions on a journey to kill a hideous evil.

That’s screenwriting, folks. (It is unknown at this time if by playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in sync with SSKTJL’s cutscenes, you will unlock Darkseid. I’m saying probably.)

MY RATING OF THE GAME, REDUCED TO NUMBERS (1-10 SCALE)

GAMEPLAY: 8
STORY: 9
VISUAL-AUDIO PRESENTATION: 11 would be 12 except for the tiny font problem
TECHNICAL FORTITUDE: 8 for not crashing or lagging, but I haven’t played co-op yet
OVERALL: 9 because the more future stuff could be more or less, but 10 for the base campaign

THE NEXT PHASE

If you’ve read this far, please indulge me a few personal requests to Rocksteady, because live-service games mean dynamic interaction with fans, que no? We have heard there will be Elseworlds, and a playable Joker. I would also love to see, in this sandbox:

• A playable Lady Boomerang, just ‘cos Lex says “Lady Boomerang” like five times?
• More Birds of Prey, PLEASE. I guess they all have to use guns, though. Black Canary would use a gun, no? Can we get Batgirl to borrow Huntress’ crossbow, or alternately, be Huntress? Or Scandal Savage? OH WAIT NO, DO BLACK ORCHID. I would just die.
• Can we get the font to be bigger and more legible, ever?
• As powerful as it is, I don’t want to never revisit the Wonder Woman part. Can we get an Amazonian event in that cool Coliseum-type location? Donna Troy?
• As an adherent of the Ostrander Suicide Squad comics, I have a soft spot for Nightshade, and would like to see her weird power set make it into a video game.
• If another Justice League boss materializes, I vote for Firestorm or Martian Manhunter.
• It’s a tiny bit silly that Deadshot can’t use every type of firearm. He should be able to use shotguns, he’s Deadshot. But I’ll live.

And I do have the sense that the most controversial elephant will be the scene with the final confrontation between Harley and Batman.

In closing, should mention a live elephant in the room: So far it seems I’m in a comfortable minority among pop-culture critics for liking this game a lot. I truly love this game, and I play mostly all the superhero games. And I changed my mind, because like a lot of people, I thought this game would be more live-service annoying than emotionally-involving. At one point Boomerang quips about his “massive and disappointingly male fan base,” and sure that’s a bit of a troll, can you even take it? Because if you don’t like SSKTJL, that’s cool. But if the “problem” with the game is some version of, Deadshot’s a Black guy! Harley is queer! Harley’s a woman! then I’m very happy to say, you are missing out.

And I do have the sense that the most controversial elephant will be the scene with the final confrontation between Harley and Batman. Without fully spoiling it — it’s remarkably executed — I believe it is an amazing moment in both characters’ long arcs: Harley summing up her long relationship with the Dark Knight in a declaration of cathartic (and kinda nihilistic) self-realization; the Batman, reduced to a pawn of the evil forces he fought against for so long, defiant as he falls. Bang.

(Do you even read the comics, guys? Anytime Batman dies he comes back and there’s like a dozen of him. It is not the end of the Bat-world.)

I’m probably not gonna have kids, but I’m gonna tell my kids this was the Justice League movie. By the time those non-kids grow up, video games and feature films will probably have merged further towards becoming one medium. That merge could be a fearful thing, to be sure. Rocksteady Studios understands the means of imparting fear and hope upon players in genuinely immersive experiences: The Arkham games, centrally, are about Batman’s relationship with fear, meeting it, embracing it, fighting it. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League surpasses Rocksteady’s previous work in one aspect: it ends up being about hope.