I went into this game with a bit of bias because Batman Arkham City is quite possibly my favorite game of all time; it is the one I have replayed the most. But with that set-aside, I wanted a month before I even attempted this game, mainly so I could get it at a secondhand discount from a friend, and after watching it get the beating end of the stick from nearly every aspect of the internet, I have come to the personal conclusion that it is not that bad, it’s still terribly disappointing, but it’s not the full-on garbage fire that everyone is making it out to be.
The game takes place in the same universe as the Arkham games, and that was the first hard pill to swallow for many people jumping into this game, and the second one is that you don’t play as Batman; you play as one of four members of the Suicide Squad: Deadshot, King Shark, Captain Boomerang, and Harley Quinn. After controlling each of them for a long period of time, I’ve come to realize the only difference between them is what type of weapons they can use and how they move around the world. The last pill, which is the biggest and hardest one to swallow, is this game has ditched the beat-em-up combat that the Arkham games have become known for and turned the gameplay into Destiny; they say it’s different in some areas, but it involves getting more guns and throwing away the last gun for a higher number, that was first oof that game had long before it came out last month, but as people were going through the story campaign that list kept getting longer and longer.
The game takes place in Metropolis during an alien invasion led by DC supervillain Brainiac, the Justice League of this universe attempted to defeat Brainiac but only ended up being overpowered by him and being brainwashed to do his bidding in transforming the Earth and purging all of humanity. It’s an interesting story that works as long as you don’t think hard about it, and it is quite entertaining in a dark way to see all these good superheroes turning into just the worst, but it’s still in that safe kind of worse, they didn’t turn Superman into Homelander if that’s the jest you got from the marketing. I was intrigued enough to continue through the 15-hour campaign to see the story as it was told through the highest point of the game; the scripted cutscenes once again prove that Rocksteady is up there with Naughty Dog and Kojima in terms of facial capture and making their characters appear more human during cutscenes, even though at times it comes off as more annoying than charming but I was able to look past it to continue. The Squad ends up in Metropolis being led by Amanda Waller, who puts bombs in their neck and orders them to kill the Justice League and stop Brainiac from expanding from Metropolis.
Then you have the gameplay, which at this point, all the goodwill the game had given me with its production value and interesting story slowly started to flow out of me and ended up draining me faster than I was expecting. The combat is to shoot the purple alien until it dies or punch the purple alien to disable its shield and shoot it till it dies. It is going to end up as a new textbook definition of monotonous; the only thing this game will have over the likes of, let’s say Anthem, is the game’s obsession with overstimulation; every aspect of the screen is either popping with flashing colors, or random numbers are shooting off the enemies, this was the first time since Cyberpunk’s braindance that I got a headache from playing a game just from the amount of flashing images on the screen.
However, the point that broke was the mission design and the boss battles; the game’s structure can be summed up in three different ways: missions are designed. The first one is going around an area, killing enemies, and then destroying their shield crystals to destroy their main hub. The second one being a center object that you need to protect will, killing enemies and collecting their souls. The last one was the most common one that I ended up finding, one person sets up a collection bus or tube, and you have to kill enemies to either have them reveal where people are to save them or collect their souls and deposit them in the tube. You start to see a bunch of repeating elements in the missions, but your mind doesn’t matter as long as the number on the screen keeps getting higher. As for the boss battles, this was the moment that the live service gameplay and the superhero genre collided and gave up because you defeat some of the most powerful superheroes in the DC Universe by shooting them with guns, I’m not even a hardcore DC fan and that made me go “no just no”. Eventually, you beat the game and land in the endgame, which I attempted for a bit until I realized how slow progression is and how long I have been trying to go up one level, I just gave up at this point, and I think the story at this point just threw up its arms and gave up as well.
So should you get thi…, I’m not even going to finish that sentence, if you find it with a low sale price and want a mindless shooter for 15 hours, then by all means, go all in. I gave this game a fair chance; I waited till the beating session was over before I attempted, I was having fun early on, but the issues kept popping up to the point I just couldn’t ignore them anymore, and the game became a chore. I don’t blame the developers for this because they have made some of the best games of the 360 era; this is a developer who wanted to make a cool game that the higher heads looked at and wanted some of that Destiny. This will more than likely end up being a massive failure for everyone involved, and that hurts me; I don’t know what else to add that hasn’t been said by those who have more knowledge on the subject of video game economics. But who am I to say what can be a successful product or not? I’m just a film studies major with a minor in business.
Score: 4 out of 10
Reviewed on Xbox Series X