Image: WB Games
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a looter-shooter stuffed with battle passes and RPG-style gear to collect.
Rocksteady Studios showed up at today’s PlayStation State of Play to finally pop the lid off its highly-anticipated followup to the Batman Arkham series - Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Unfortunately, it’s looking a lot more like Marvel’s Avengers than most people were probably expecting.
Here’s the co-op gameplay reveal:
First thing’s first: Suicide Squad is a Destiny-like four player co-op shooter, though it can be played solo with bots filling out your team. The game is set five years after the events of Batman: Arkham Knight, right after the Justice League falls victim to a sudden invasion by Brainiac. The villain has arrived from the stars to brainwash the entirety of Earth starting with Metropolis, and has already swayed most of the Justice League to his side.
With Earth’s greatest protectors now her greatest threats, Amanda Waller creates a task force full of misfits - the Suicide Squad - to infiltrate Metropolis and combat Brainiac's invasion. The team is made up of just four villains-turned-antiheroes: Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark. Rocksteady also confirmed today that post-launch DLC is in the works to add new playable characters to the squad, along with more missions. All of this DLC will be, “available at no cost,” according to the game’s FAQ.
Suicide Squad also contains a battle pass, which is probably not what fans of the Batman Arkham series were expecting from Rocksteady’s next game. The battle pass is thankfully cosmetic-focused, giving players access to new character skins, emotes and “other items to customise playable characters.” The game also has a gear system similar to Gotham Knights, where players can find and equip different weapons to increase their power level.
So far, this looks like the exact same gameplay model touted by Square Enix’s failed multiplayer game Marvel’s Avengers, which also contained a battle pass, squad-based gameplay and promised free DLC heroes down the line. Support for that game is ending this September, so let’s hope Suicide Squad does a bit better.
There are a few things we do find promising about the game: it looks like Wonder Woman is somehow the only member of the Justice League who hasn’t been brainwashed by Brainiac into killing Metropolis’ citizens, and she’ll have to work with the maniacs over at the Suicide Squad to save the world. That's pretty compelling stuff. Batman is also voiced by the late Kevin Conroy, who reprised his iconic role from the Arkham games before passing away last year - though Bruce Wayne did have his identity revealed to the world and faked his death because of it in Arkham Knight, so we’re wondering how that got sorted out.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League releases on May 26, 2023, on PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series X|S. Guess what else is coming out this year? Mortal Kombat 12!