Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is an absolute delight and one of my favorite games in a long time, has four main things going for it. The first and most immediately obvious is...
WOW. 5 stars! This wasn’t even a blip on my radar, but now it is. Nice review!
Huh. First I thought you were being facetious since I’ve only seen people bash this game, but then you compared it to Agents of Mayhem and I realised you genuinely liked it.
Good to hear you enjoyed it.
@tomchick You switched to calling the devs Rockstar instead of Rocksteady in the Character section.
Also, your enthusiasm is always infectious. I wasn’t very fond of Agents of Mayham, but now I’m finding myself somewhat interested in this game - knowing it probably won’t land for me. And I don’t care about the prior hullabaloo about when people can switch weapons and such.
Hunh. Five stars. For this.
Huh, I might have to try this once it’s cheap enough.
Ha, awesome read. Not sure when I’ll get to try it myself but I love when someone manages to find the fun in one of these games that got written off by seemingly everyone.
I had lost any interest in even trying a free demo of this one based on other coverage. Grumble, grumble, adding to wishlist.
I love reading love letters to a thing. The best act as a Rosetta Stone unlocking joy or meaning I otherwise fail to comprehend. (I could still use one for survival-crafting games. Subnautica was sublime, but I think only because the survival-crafting elements supported good narrative and exploration.)
Suicide Squad sounds like everything I hoped it would be when I realized it was a DC Agents of Mayhem-alike by a studio with serious superhero pedigree. In a way, Tom, I resent you for making me want to play this game, when it feels like it might not be around a year from now :(
Speaking of GaaS, do you have any thoughts about the monetization? And how do you feel about mission and enemy variety? Aside from monetization, those are the other concerns I have after reading other reviews.
Yeah, outside of the resetera thread, this game is universally reviled. How far did you get before petering out?
Tom’s number just reflects how much he likes the game. So, he likes it, he really likes it.
Alas, it seems Tom is in the minority in his love for this type of game. I’m not even talking of Suicide Squad here, Agents of Mayhem wasn’t that liked either:
I thought AoM was somewhat between mediocre and fine, a 6.5/10 game.
Well I guess Suicide Squad is going back on the wish list. Qt3 was the reason I played Outriders and I loved that too
Corrections?
“based on using multiers”
“how it[']s broken up and doled out”
Great read, thanks Tom! That was really detailed and interesting. Going on the wishlist, once I finish both Arkham Knight and Agents of Mayhem from my backlog, it will be Suicide Squad’s turn.
A glorious exercise in contrarianism. Which as a contrarian, I love to see.
Upgraded from ‘never’ to ‘when it’s on sale or hits game pass.’
Good review! Makes sense that Tom loved this based on his adoration of Agents of Mayhem.
Me? Got a refund.
Very good! Thanks @Mercanis. I’ve missed you. :)
Yes, I have thoughts about the monetization and I would love the chance to talk about mission and enemy variety. Thanks so much for asking, @liminal.
GAMES AS A SERVICE
As for monetization, I have to claim ignorance. There is a store page, but in all my time playing Suicide Squad, I’ve never visited it once. I’ve never felt the need to. I’m not even sure what they sell there, but from the page flashing by, I’m guessing it’s costume junk. Which I don’t need, although I have played plenty of “dress up dollie” in Suicide Squad. I have a fair number of costume bits, and if I want more, I can do the Riddler traversal challenges for each character (there are three per character, I think, each offering four costume bits). I’ve gotten the hat I want for King Shark, a suitably cute baby blue outfit for Harley, a bad-ass enough tactical outfit for Deadshot, and a Travis Bickle mohawk for Boomerang to go with his striped prison pajamas. And I didn’t spent a penny. Nor do I see any need to spend a penny.
Again, I’m not sure what they’re selling on the store page, but I’ve never stopped there. So as far as the game’s monetization goes, all I see is the price tag up front. And the cost of whatever Joker DLC they’re selling on March 28.
Is this “games as a service” or monetization something Rocksteady has been criticized for? I do know at least one of my friends has had issues signing into “WB Services”, which the game does every time it boots up, even if you’re playing single-player. However, the single-player is played offline and can be paused at any time (your game only moves onto a server when you want to host for multiplayer).
MISSION VARIETY
Okay, on to your other and – to me! – far more interesting questions. 1) Mission variety and 2) enemy variety. Let’s start with mission variety. During the story, the structure of the game is based on letting you sample different kinds of missions. Here’s where I’m going to spoil some plot elements to explain how the game works.
Metropolis has been invaded by Brainiac. He’s mind-controlled the city’s superheroes, recruiting them to help his invasion. The invasion is all but over in Metropolis and it’s presumably underway around the rest of the world. So Amanda Waller’s government agency – it occurs to me I don’t even know what they’re called, but the words Task Force X are often used – has the idea to recruit villains to fight the invasion because they’re all that’s left. Classic Suicide Squad!
Your party is the tip of the spear, but you recruit support NPCs like Penguin, Poison Ivy, a disembodied hacker named Hack, and a gnome (?) named Gizmo. They hang out at the base and each one of them offers a series of missions you can take at your discretion. The more missions you do for that NPC, the more he or she will help you! For instance, as you do Penguin missions, you unlock better weapons (i.e. uncommon, then rare, then legendary). As you do Poison Ivy missions, you unlock additional Afflictions (i.e. fire, poison, rage, electricity). As you do Gizmo missions, he improves the flying cars that appear in some missions (more health, better weapon, etc.).
These NPCs have you doing different kinds of missions. Most of them are just excuses to get into a big crazy swirling battle, either defending some point, taking out a swarm of enemies, or hunting down specific enemies. And as I mentioned in the review, part of what I love about these missions is how far and wide they can range. There are even a few escort missions that move through the city, and they’re a lot less annoying than you might think, mainly because your “escortee” is invulnerable; it’s more like a traveling skirmish than a puzzle where you have to keep someone alive. There’s a common “football” mission where your team has to fight enemies until a “football” spawns, which has to be collected and carried to a scoring point. There are a few flavors of capture point mission, all with the scoring progress and objectives clearly indicated onscreen with HUD elements and directional assists. I guess I’d describe the mission variety as somewhere between “generous” and “crazy”.
(All of these have some goofy fictional basis, like you’re rescuing civilians or collecting samples or whatnot. But the bottom line is they’re all engineered to create a battle, usually in a specific neighborhood or around a specific landmark. And in the case of the NPCs, they’re all trying to make sure you understand a specific gameplay system. More on that in a sec…)
(One of the things I really enjoy about multiplayer is how much easier it is to do missions that range over a wide swathe of territory. Enemy difficulty is determined by the host’s setting, and it won’t scale with the number of players in the game. However, there is multiplayer scaling that throws more objectives into a mission with multiple players. So when you do one of those capture point missions multiplayer, it feels more “strategic” for having to cover more ground. Do you split up, or do you stick together? Your decision matters!)
But wait, there’s more! Oh boy, is there more, and you might not like it: each NPC applies a special rule/limitation to his or her missions. Some people must hate this. I certainly did, at times. For instance, during the Penguin missions, enemies only take damage from critical hits. During the Poison Ivy missions, enemies only take damage from affliction statuses (i.e. poison, fire). You can load up with your best gun and your hardest hitting talent tree configuration, and you can trip all your best bonuses with a 50X multiplier, yet all the damage numbers that fly out of an enemy will be zeroes if you’re not scoring a critical hit! So the Penguin missions have a ton of variety, sure, in that you’re doing different things in different places. But they’re always and only about critical hits. If it ain’t a crit, it’s a big fat zero.
This might suck if you don’t feel like monkeying around with your character build to focus on critical hits. But that’s the whole reason for these missions. Not just to teach you the game’s systems – which the game already did with a pop-up and codex entry – but to make sure you can put them into practice. It’s one thing to read about “Critical Hits”. Yeah, sure, they trigger when I hit a weak spot and they cause extra damage. Duh. I knew that and I can tell from the damage numbers turning orange and being higher than the numbers that aren’t orange.
But it’s something else to play an entire mission based on your understanding of critical hits, and that’s what these NPC missions do. For instance, critical hits also have a random chance of triggering regardless of weak spots, and this can be an important part of a character build. If you take an assault rifle or SMG into these missions, or an autocannon with a large magazine, or if you make sure enough of the pellets from a shotgun blast land, then you can simply pour on enough hits to do damage with the occasional crit. But for those Penguin missions, you’ll want to lean into this!
And perhaps the Penguin missions will help teach you about states you can put an enemy in where every hit is a critical hit. For instance, juggling. One of the very first things Suicide Squad teaches you about combat is that when you melee an enemy so he’s airborne, you can then shoot him while he’s in the air and every hit will be a critical hit. Again, the Penguin missions are the perfect place to put this into practice.
Now what I’m describing in terms of highlighting specific systems can be annoying. If you’re having a hard time with Shield Harvesting, for example, you might not want to play the Hack missions, where enemies only take damage from Shield Harvesting. But what Rocksteady is doing here is making sure you understand and can perform Shield Harvesting, because it’s a major gameplay system (it’s basically their substitute for hit points). To many players, these NPC missions might feel like bad scripting or punishing difficulty or pointless gimmickry, and I can understand that. No one wants to eat his vegetables.
So imagine a player who doesn’t really care to learn about or practice systems. He just wants the legendary weapons unlocked, so he’s trying to do all the Penguin missions. And he’s discovering that his favorite assault rifle, the one he spent all his resources improving, is only doing 5% of the damage it’s been doing in the story missions and he doesn’t understand why. He doesn’t understand that his 5% chance of critical hits is the only thing causing damage. Suddenly, this game sucks and he’s not necessarily wrong. He just want to Deadshot some fools, not be taught a new combat system that involves learning all the ways critical hits work.
Now, there are a couple of very important caveats to what I’ve just described. The first is that I don’t think any of these NPC missions are mandatory. I could be wrong, and there might be some story gating. But I was able to play through the storyline without finishing all the NPC missions, and I believe it’s possible to finish the storyline without playing any of the NPC missions. I can’t imagine why you’d ever do that, but the point is, none of these is a brick wall, and I don’t even think they’re gates.
If you want to play through Suicide Squad with only one slot for contracts (i.e. mini quests that provide a trickle of resources), then you never have to do a Hack mission where Shield Harvesting is the only thing that causes damage. Fuck those missions, they were too hard, and you never wrapped your head around Shield Harvesting anyway. No harm, no foul! Just play the regular story missions that don’t apply any funky rules. This is an option (and the difficulty system is more than happy to allow it!). But I’m describing this system because I think it’s an important element of mission variety, and I also think it might be a design choice that frustrates some players.
Which brings me to my second caveat: this is not how Suicide Squad proper works. It’s only how the storyline works. I wouldn’t mind talking about the game Suicide Squad becomes after the storyline, but it’s a huge spoiler, and perhaps a topic for another time. But the whole pattern of NPC missions exists to get you to the endgame with a solid understanding of – and plenty of practice with – the game’s complex systems.
Because arguably, the entire storyline in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the tutorial. This is a bit of a whopper in a couple of senses. And I don’t want to scare anyone off with this idea that you’re not playing the Real Game until 20 hours in, or that it’s some JPRG model of withholding systems for dozens of hours at a time. But the Suicide Squad you play for the first 10 to 15 hours, which is a perfectly cromulent game and the subject of my review here, is not the Suicide Squad you’ll be playing afterwards. The mission structure changes dramatically into an incredibly open-ended spiral of increasing difficulty and loot questing (with some story still held in reserve!). What I’m describing here is what you’ll be confronted with for the first dozen-ish hours, and what I suspect people might be reacting to when they ragequit this game.
ENEMY VARIETY
Okay, on to enemy variety! A big part of what makes the mission variety work is the enemy variety and AI. A battle will only ever be as good as its enemies, and Suicide Squad has ideal enemies. They’re varied and distinct, and even in the post-game, I’m still meeting new enemies with new powers.
(In fact, I believe that’s partly point of the post-game content? To say more would be a massive spoiler, but I’d love to talk about it if anyone else has reached this point.)
Just as Agents of Mayhem was really good with “surfacing” all the information that swirls up during combat, Suicide Squad does the same. Every buff or debuff is indicated with an icon and most of them include some visual effect as well. This is a fundamental part of enemy behavior because it lets you understand what they’re doing. A major element of Suicide Squad’s combat is countering enemy attacks, so every enemy’s behavior is telegraphed with an animation and a corresponding visual effect to let you know it can be countered. Furthermore, just as the players get traversal gimmicks, so do the enemies. I’ve already said too much.
But the point is that enemies are varied, and an important part of this variety is that Rocksteady wants to make sure you see that variety and can react accordingly. Their snipers act very differently from their artillery guys. Their suppressors act differently from their melee guys. Each has its own icon when you’re doing recon, do you can quickly figure out who’s who and then just tell by the character model. The weak points on enemies are based on alien parasites called “terminauts”, which are basically fleshy nodes with tentacles. These tentacles wrap around their victims, whether it’s a human, a tank, or a helicopter, and the “node” turn into a weak point. In fact, there’s a pretty cool “terminaut” ecology in the game that feeds into some of the misison types.
I can’t tell how much Rocksteady pushed this feature, but there’s even a hint of adaptive difficulty like from Metal Gear Solid V, where the map “reacted” as you got better. The idea in Metal Gear was that if you kept getting headshots on enemies, they would eventually react by donning helmets. There’s a hint of that in Suicide Squad, and while it’s certainly noticeable, I can’t tell how robust it is.
So anyway, all this is to say any monetization nonsense has been invisible to me, and I’m quite happy with the mission and enemy variety!
Technically, he loves it. 3 stars is like, 4 stars is really like, and 5 stars is love. We have a very scientifically rigorous scoring system here. : )
Your superpower is having an amazing backlog to look forward to. Even if you don’t dig Agents of Mayhem or Suicide Squad, I’m pretty sure Arkham Knight is gonna blow your mind. I’m a little jealous. : )