izigame.me

There will be spoilers both for this game and the Arkhamverse in general, but if you're reading this, you probably don't care.
Let me start off by saying that I really wanted to like this game. I tried hard to like it. And I'm a person that veers towards finding something to like. Look at the rest of my reviews. They are mostly "I like this, and here's why." But not Suicide Squad.
I played every one of the Arkham games and loved them. Arkham Knight is one of my favorite games, and I keep going back to it because of how cool it feels to play.

I'm not going to talk about the whole live service thing. Yes, it's a problem, and it is one of the major factors that is costing Rocksteady their fanbase, but not what I want to focus on.
I want to talk about how boring it is to play, and how much the story sucks.
I played over 20 hours, and to be fair, it was fun at first. Each of Task Force X feels unique when you first start playing them, but I came to understand later that it was only as regards movement. They moved across the map differently. That's it. In the end, they all shoot the same, and that's all this is - a Borderlands-style looter-shooter. And I love the feeling of playing Borderlands. So why don't I love this? First, in Borderlands each of the characters can use any gun. Figuring out which gun is better is easier. No upgrade or augmentation nonsense - you find a better gun, and just use it. When are developers going to learn that having more moving parts and processes doesn't make a game more fun? There's the enemies as well. Let's face it, they are all spiky purple blobs. All of them. There's no real variation. Yes, there are different ways you have to kill them, but actually, that made the game more annoying. So they don't die unless its a critical hit? Or unless its a shield recharge strike? Or unless you kill enough of those stupid little walking purple squid things?
Next, let's talk story. If you've read the title, then you know what you're getting. You kill the Justice League. The Flash, Green Lantern (John Stewart), Batman, and Superman fall by your hand. Permanently. For good. Let's be fair to Rocksteady. They gave me exactly what they put on the tin. I killed the Justice League.
But I didn't enjoy it. It wasn't fun. This is a game where everyone you meet treats you like crap. Even your own teammates (with the potential exception of King Shark, who was the only character I liked). Every member of the Justice League (sans Wonder Woman), has their brain fully eaten by a brain slug thing that totally overwrites their free will and enslaves them to Brainiac, who is already 98% finished taking over the world.
Because apparently that was the only way they could do this. It's not like the comics have stories out there where a Justice League on some Earth or other gets too high and mighty for their own good and, drunk on their own power, turn to killing "for the greater good", and not because anyone is making them, but because the world is too far gone down the path of evil and they've lost hope in anything but a drastic solution.
Every death felt horrible, but not for the reason you would expect. Killing DC's best and brightest was never going to feel good to fans of the comics. I expected that. But I hated that it was these idiots doing the killing, especially when it came to Batman. This game is set 5 years after Arkham Knight. Batman has once again saved Gotham (and arguably the world) at terrible cost. The world knows his secret identity now. Once again he has pushed himself to the absolute limit to save the city he loved.
And what was his reward? Five years later, he is taken over by a brain slug, defeated by a bunch of idiots who don't care about anything he did, before being, shot in the head by Harley Quinn after she gives him a short incredibly condescending speech about how essentially she was always better than he was, and how this "served him right" for how he looked down on her (which is rich, coming from her). Did the writers at Rocksteady expect that to be a satisfying end to his epic story full of tragedy, loss, and heroism? How does this reward your fans story-wise, who have played all your Arkham games? Not only was it a poor send off for Batman, it was a poor send off for the voice actor who defined the character: Kevin Conroy. The fact that this was his last time voicing Batman was one of the factors that led me to purchase this game, and I just wished the Arkhamverse Batman could have had a better final story than this.
Killing any of the league members didn't feel much better. Captain Boomerang literally urinates on Flash's corpse. I get it, Boomer's the worst, but that's what the Flash gets for all the times he saved the day? Fought Captain Boomerang but refused to kill, refused to sink to his level? But Batman's death was the worst. I felt so fed up with the story that I didn't even care about beating Braniac at the end.
Also I hated what they did with Poison Ivy. She was cool in all the other Arkham games, but they had to bring her back as a whiny pre-teen and put a bomb in her neck. Way to unravel all the sympathy I felt for the character after Arkham Knight.
Uninstalled. You got my money, Rocksteady. Congratulations.