Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (a.k.a. SSKTJL) recently began a new season of content for the DC Comics-themed squad-shooter game. Season 3: “Season of Lawless” starts with Episode 5: Thieves, introducing the titular new character Lawless and adding familiar but fancied-up environments to its main map and its Incursion side missions.

Lawless is the pun-friendly codename for Zoe Lawton, daughter of Floyd Lawton, better known as Deadshot, a core member of the Suicide Squad and one of the main playable characters in SSKTJL. She follows in her father’s path as far as being a dead-aim gunfighter and an ambitious thief. Her arrival in the story appears to herald the return of Green Lantern, the Justice League hero who was killed in the main story, as per the game’s title.

SSKTJL has received a lot of non-love from folks in the comments sections, and reportedly hasn’t been a big seller to compare with Rocksteady’s much-beloved Batman games Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Arkham Knight. I happen to enjoy SSKTL a lot, and have written such here and here and here, and ranted at length on the devastatingly great Wonder Woman-Superman fight sequence on the Hard NOC Life podcast. I return to the game whenever Rocksteady releases a new episode as part of their ambitious multi-season roadmap.

The gratification from complaining about things is a big part of extremely online gaming culture, and we can’t begrudge anyone their free-speech exercise. For those who dislike the game because of how Harley takes out Batman, I’m very curious if other Batman death scenes in Gotham Knights, Arkham Knight, Final Crisis are thought of as better or worse?

As a coda to the creepy series of boss fights with Brainiac-mind-controlled Batman, the final confrontation between Harley and Batman in SSKTJL is very much to my taste, evoking the last pages of Moore/Bolland’s The Killing Joke. If the perceived problem is that SSKTJL Harley does as many sapphic side-jokes as she can short of licking Wonder Woman’s statue, I don’t know what to say. For me, Harley’s snarky arc progression from Joker-adjacent lover/sidekick to shacked-up with Poison Ivy relationship status to mourning-Ivy-but-big-budding-crush on Wonder Woman is part of what makes Harley Quinn’s queerness so intriguing across the continuum of DC films, comics, animated shows, and video games.

ARKHAM ALL ALONG

Season 3 sees the return of the Gotham City environments from Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy. The Incursion side missions occur on the nightmarish Arkham Asylum grounds, hovering in abyssal space for a little added traversal challenge. These missions strongly recall the Scarecrow levels in Arkham Asylum, but with a more 3-D playable orientation. There’s the Bat-Signal atop GCPD, and there’s the good old Monarch Theater.

(Wasn’t there one where Gotham City and Metropolis like teleported atop each other? Or, was it in Batman v Superman we learned that the two major DC cities sit on opposite sides of the same body of water? Anyways, the visual gag with peppy candy-colored Metropolis reskinned by Gotham’s ubiquitous grey shadows and gargoyles is well-taken.)

Much has been made of the representation of Batman in this game, yet I wonder out loud if SSKTJL really has something against Green Lantern. Of the Brainiac-converted Justice League stooges, emerald-armored John Stewart comes off as the most stoogey. In SSKTJL’s campaign story, Stewart is the guy who most recently captured Deadshot, and there is palpable subtext (and overt text!) heightening the beef between them, suggesting (as in the Suicide Squad films) that Floyd is a principled nihilist half-trying to do right by his kid, and Green Lantern is a simp space cop whose service as Brainiac’s shock trooper is ironically par for his course. Lantern Stewart’s death scene in the main story was a truly harsh one, and was shortly followed by one of the more fabulous fanservicey scenes in superhero game history, involving King Shark and the venerable Green Lantern Oath.

LAWLESS & FLOYD

Lawless is of Gen Younger Than You, and immediately hits the buttons associated with Neglected Kid of a Professional Super-Assassin. Floyd thinks she’s 13 years old, but she’s 18. In contrast to the Gen X-nostalgic Task Force X-People, Zoe is clearly intended for younger folks to have a relatable character… by which to access the Suicide Squad game? No, yeah, it makes sense. At the risk of sounding ancient, I opine several of Lawless’ jokes feel a bit too E-Z Gen-Z coded, erring on the side of social justice buzzwords (which I’m totally cool with) and techy narcissism, e.g. references to “bodily autonomy,” “wi-fi passwords,” and an anxious obsession with battery life. Speaking of story beats, the implication that Deadshot is a “Deadbeat” Dad-shot is a pun we need not make effort to dodge. And yet, there’s a kind of warmth visualized in the similarity of Lawless and Deadshot’s melee style and finishing moves.

Deadshot is a Black dude in SSKTJL, aligned with the first Suicide Squad movie but not the comics. The recent additions to SSKTJL’s playable roster are, in the video game field, unconventional types: Mrs. Freeze, a masc queer Asian woman, and Lawless, a teenaged Black woman. In a society, world, simulation, whatever, where we’re still blathering about whether the pretty Star Wars hero is pretty or not, the option to make a slightly different choice of playable character phenotype is an under-appreciated but essential flex by Rocksteady that celebrates, well, player choice. After playing many open-world games as idealized super-athletic white people, you just might want to be a young Black woman with chaotic kid energy, or an Asian woman with a spiky haircut. Not every game is blessed with a customizable character generator like Saints Row or Cyberpunk 2077, so the inclusion of diverse types of Earthling bodies in SSKTJL feels like a significant win towards reaching new audiences.

Not that Lawless is a perfect character, and the storytelling sections of SSKTJL, beyond its gorgeous main campaign, are unfortunately few. Also, the moments when Zoe evokes Spider-Man’s social-media-obsessed opponent Screwball are not my favorite. Due to structural constraints of the live-service model, Lawless arrives a bit too fully-formed, and per her generational voice, is already jaded and over-exposed to everything. I’d enjoy leveling her up more if along the way there were a way to convey a journey. The rich potential is hinted at in a few dialogue exchanges with Dad Floyd, but they’re secondary to the task list which is still primarily about blowing up alien hordes. Zoe could make an excellent foil/friend for Ivy, who in SSKTJL has been de-aged and re-conceived as an adolescent eco-revolutionary. One hopes that in future episodes, Zoe and Ivy can at least share a cutscene kickback, fearing climate change together, or crafting some new melee mechanic.

WILL STILL PLAY WHATEVER SSKTJL PUTS OUT, BUT WOULD LIKE A BIT MORE OF A HARLEY STORY MISSION

Apparently we’re on 6 out of 13 Elseworlds/Brainiac variants in SSKTJL’s planned roadmap, and I, for one, don’t want to get stuck at the halfway point. At the same time, the regular feed of new playables would ideally contribute to and expand the story of the core Squad, particularly Harley Quinn. As noted in my original review, Harley acts as Dorothy in SSKTJL’s massively-violent sendup of The Wizard of Oz, she’s been easing own the road for a while now, and to fully realize the game’s evolution of the Arkhamverse, she merits some sort of journey home.

In light of Lady Gaga’s recent turn as Harley and her related concept album, I’d vote for a nightclub concert or a karaoke mini-game. Honestly, I’ve incinerated about a million of Brainiac’s minions at this point, I’m the active player base and I’m looking for another activity to do. I miss some of the trickier Riddler challenges in Arkham City/Knight, and there was a time I would’ve punched myself for thinking that.

Yes, it’s a repetitive game. Every video game is repetitive. So are the pop songs one likes that one has listened to a thousand times. In my next SSKTJL-related rant, I’ll explore a pop-musical angle of the game, since Harley Quinn-related music is all the rage this month.