GamesActionSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice LeagueSuicide Squad wants me to Kill the Justice League - but there’s another group that deserves it far moreWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesActionSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice LeagueSuicide Squad wants me to Kill the Justice League - but there’s another group that deserves it far moreWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League certainly lives up to its title. With one exception, it’s up to you and your band of ragtag misfits to butcher the whole band of legendary heroes in a series of bullet-riddled boss fights… and to be honest, I can’t stand it. To clarify, Idon’tthink Suicide Squad is the catastrophe that many are claiming that it is, but I’ll concede right now that I’ve never felt less heroic or triumphant than when I’m standing over one of these iconic, inspirational heroes and putting a bullet in their skull - and it isalwaysconcluded with a bullet to the skull. I should feel proud of my victory when it turns out that, yes, a fish, a second-best assassin and two unstable circus performers can indeed take out one of the most powerful entities in the universe. Such a shame that those powerful entities were unambiguously good people who just don’t deserve the fate you’re giving them.
And it didn’t have to be this way! There was a setting and a situation that would have solved the whole problem: a setting that Warner Bros. already owns the rights to… but we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s understand the problem before we start looking at solutions.
Spoiler warning: story details for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ahead.
Never meat your heroes
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
Read more about Suicide SquadSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League roadmapSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League best charactersSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League cast and voice actors
Read more about Suicide Squad
Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League roadmapSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League best charactersSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League cast and voice actors
Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League roadmapSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League best charactersSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League cast and voice actors
For those of you who haven’t played Suicide Squad, I’ll explain the situation. Set several years after Arkham Knight, the alien warlord Brainiac invades Metropolis with the hope of terraforming Earth; standard comic book fare. Rather than fight the Justice League though, Brainiac instead uses space science to take over their minds, making them devoutly loyal generals in his evil army. Without heroes to defend the Earth, the Suicide Squad are forced to step up and save the day: a perfectly solid set-up for a plot about reluctant underdogs.
Where things get trickier is the game’s insistence that, yes, youhave to kill the Justice Leagueand live up to the eye-catching title. Even when I saw that, for a while part of me didn’t believe that we’d actually be goingfullGarth Ennis on the JLA, that there’d be some workaround. Sure, maybe massacring the Superfriends is the initial mission, but perhaps later we might discover a way to free them instead, or maybe time travel and deus ex machina would undo the whole thing in the third act. Superheroes neverstaydead, right?
At best, this is a game about how it’s sometimes necessary to murder good people, and yet it doesn’t seem to realise how fundamentally unpleasant this notion is.
At best, this is a game about how it’s sometimes necessary to murder good people, and yet it doesn’t seem to realise how fundamentally unpleasant this notion is.
The killing yoke
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
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Perhaps if Suicide Squad framed its killings as more of a grim necessity,maybeit would be more palatable, but emotionally it’s all over the place. Boomerang pisses on the Flash’s corpse after bloodily executing him, with a joke about the size of his penis as the chaser, but then we get a completely straight eulogy from Lois Lane about the tragedy of Flash’s passing that feels like it’s trying to pull tears from the audience. The mental whiplash that follows is something that no amount of speed force can account for - are we meant to feel depressed at the death of a selfless hero, or cackling at our triumph over an annoying do-gooder? When I work out the answer, I’ll let you know. A friend even asked me recently if there was some sort of poignant reveal later on: did the League somehow summon Brainiac through hubristic overreach? Not to spoil, but… no, not even a little. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, I don’t think I want to know it.
Oh, the injustice!
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
That’s a Superman I’d be happy to smear across Metropolis; a butcher tyrant with no redeeming qualities. If Suicide Squad had kicked off with the Injustice crew popping out of a whole in reality and carving their way through the Arkhamverse’s Justice League, including a beloved Batman, I’d have been shoving people out of the way to grab my Iconic Electric Boomerang with Plus 3 Crit Chance on Hired Goons and… well, you get the point. But as things are here, “Kill the Justice League'' has ended up feeling less like an exciting promise, and more like a taxing obligation.
For more of our thoughts on the tales of Task Force X, check out ourSuicide Squad Kill the Justice League review.
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