Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League trades Arkham's darkness for colorful chaos

Rocksteady Games has spent years building a reputation on darkness. The Batman: Arkham series was a masterclass in restraint—a grim, focused descent into Gotham's criminal depths, all grey stone and shadow and the weight of a single man's mission. Batman is dead now, at least in the universe Rocksteady created. And with him, apparently, died the need for seriousness.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the studio's answer to what comes after that darkness. It is, by every measure, the opposite of what came before. Where Arkham was singular in purpose, this new game is chaotic and plural. Where Arkham whispered, this one shouts. The trailer alone makes the shift visible: we begin in the familiar grey confines of Arkham Asylum, surrounded by the visual language of the previous games, before the camera pulls back and carries us into daylight. Metropolis spreads out in front of us, bright and saturated, with Brainiac's purple hues bleeding across a city that has never seen the perpetual night of Gotham.

You will play as one of four characters: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark. Amanda Waller, played by Debra Wilson, has assembled them as Task Force X with a single objective—kill the Justice League. Each character brings a distinct toolkit to the mission. Deadshot carries a jetpack capable of igniting enemies. Harley Quinn wields her baseball bat and a repurposed grappling gun borrowed from Batman's old arsenal. King Shark brings a massive machine gun and the kind of brute strength that comes with being, well, a shark. Captain Boomerang has his boomerangs, each one a different tool depending on the moment. These are not cosmetic differences. Each character has its own skill tree, its own strengths, its own weaknesses. The way you approach a problem changes entirely depending on who you've chosen to be.

This is where Suicide Squad departs most meaningfully from its predecessor. The Arkham games were notoriously difficult, their boss battles and puzzle sequences designed to punish hesitation and reward mastery. Many players never finished them. But Rocksteady has built something more forgiving here, or at least more flexible. You can tackle Superman. You can chase the Flash. You can do these things with three friends beside you, all of you controlling different members of the squad. If you don't have friends available, the game will fill those slots with AI companions, though a human teammate will always be more reliable than code. You can swap between characters mid-mission, experimenting with different approaches to the same problem. Each playthrough becomes a different experience depending on which character your friend chose, which abilities you've leveled up, which tools you've decided to prioritize.

The tone throughout is deliberately twisted. In one scene from the trailer, Amanda Waller activates a neural implant in Penguin's head, sending electrical current through his body as he attempts to escape. His corpse jerks with the voltage. Harley radios in to report he's still moving. Waller, with perfect deadpan delivery, says she'll hit him again. The body convulses. King Shark, watching this unfold, asks Waller if she can blow up his head instead. It is grotesque and funny in equal measure, the kind of humor that only works when you're not taking yourself seriously.

This is the fundamental shift. The Arkham series asked you to inhabit the mind of a man obsessed with order, with control, with the weight of responsibility. Suicide Squad asks you to embrace chaos, to laugh at the absurdity of four misfits being sent to kill gods. It is lighter in tone but not necessarily lighter in challenge. Rocksteady is promising that the difficulty will remain, that Superman will still be formidable, that the Flash will still be fast. But you won't face these challenges alone, and you won't face them in silence. You'll face them with friends, with humor, with the knowledge that if you fail, you can try again with a different character, a different strategy, a different approach entirely. The game arrives in 2022 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. By then, we'll know whether Rocksteady has truly managed to build something that honors what came before while becoming something entirely new.