Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League review - brilliant writing buried under live service bloat

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League arrives with a genuinely strange opening—a tutorial that throws you into the middle of the action with a full arsenal of abilities before yanking you back to the actual beginning, where your ragtag crew of antiheroes sits in prison awaiting recruitment. The premise is solid: Brainiac has seized control of Metropolis and corrupted the Justice League itself, leaving four unpowered criminals as the only viable assault team. It's the kind of high-concept setup that should sing.

And for stretches, it does. The writing here is sharp. King Shark channels the earnest absurdism of James Gunn's film, landing some of the game's best lines while the world collapses around him. Amanda Waller, voiced by Debra Wilson, gets moments that crackle with authority and dark humor. An early encounter with Batman plays out like a horror sequence—the Dark Knight picking off your squad one by one from the shadows, each character eliminated in turn. It's genuinely unsettling, a deconstruction of the superhero mythos that lands with weight. These scripted moments, when they arrive, feel like the game Rocksteady Studios actually wanted to make.

But those moments are islands in an ocean of live service machinery. The bulk of your time unfolds in an open world that feels simultaneously undercooked and overstuffed. Missions blur together. Side activities are indistinguishable from main objectives. You're constantly wading through loot tables, skill trees, and UI elements that seem designed to confuse rather than clarify. The shooting itself is serviceable, but movement varies wildly by character—King Shark, inexplicably, jumps higher and travels faster than Deadshot, who has an actual jetpack. The other three characters operate with health pools so fragile that the chaotic open-world fights become exercises in frustration rather than fun.

The game's design philosophy appears fractured. There's the tightly scripted Suicide Squad—the one with excellent character work and narrative momentum. And then there's the live service Suicide Squad, the one obsessed with open-world busywork and endless progression systems. These two games collide constantly and awkwardly. You're pulled from a tense moment where bombs are literally embedded in your neck, only to be dropped into a sequence where you pilot a flying car to destroy some of Brainiac's crystals. The whiplash is constant. The overwhelming UI, the cascading notifications, the loot you're perpetually managing—it all adds up to exhaustion.

The game also makes a bold narrative choice by anchoring itself in the timeline of the Arkham games, meaning the Batman you grew to care about in those titles is the same one now slaughtering innocent civilians here. It's a legitimate deconstruction, the kind of superhero subversion we've seen attempted in The Boys and Jupiter's Legacy. When it works, it works well. But outside those scripted set pieces, the open world undermines everything. The game's disjointed opening—that confusing tutorial that leaves you wondering if you've glitched into the wrong section—turns out to be emblematic of the whole experience: an overstimulating exercise in confusion where solid ideas are buried so deep you have to excavate them.

Rocksteady has built something with real creative ambition here, and the character writing alone suggests the studio knew exactly what it wanted to say about these antiheroes and the corrupted heroes they're forced to fight. But the live service framework has smothered it. The flashes of brilliance are real, but they're so obscured by everything else—the grinding, the loot, the unclear objectives, the byzantine progression—that it's hard to recommend digging through the mess to find them. You're left wishing the studio had simply been allowed to make the game it clearly wanted to make, rather than the slightly messy compromise that exists.