Suicide Squad impressions (Patreon)

Hey, thought I’d offer up some early Suicide Squad impressions after I spent some time with the PC version of the game this evening.

It’s a third-person shooter with four different characters that have basic abilities that more or less standardize across the cast. Most of those early abilities are traversal-based, so Deadshot has a jetpack while Harley Quinn has a bat drone and grappling hook that lets her swing from place to place. Same goal, slightly different mechanics.

Characters equip two guns in their loadout slots and also have a melee attack. For Deadshot, the melee attack is just… another gun. He just shoots a pistol for his melee attack, but the screen still says “MELEE - R2” when it wants you to do it. Silly, I guess, but not that big of a deal. Captain Boomerang throws a boomerang as his melee attack (which makes the pre-release criticism of DUDE CAPTAIN BOOMERANG SHOOTS GUNS WHAT fall kind of flat to me, but I don’t know, I’d never heard of the guy before so many comic fans have a point here that I just don’t care about).

The game wants you to perform actions in specific orders to defeat certain enemies. For example, shielded enemies get their shields knocked down by melee attacks, and then you can damage them with guns. Combing a melee attack into guns results in automatic crits. Stuff like that.

After a significantly long intro mission, you finally get to a hub area and it unlocks the skill tree. Haven’t seen much of that yet, so I’m not sure how much that’ll impact playstyles and such. The first skill for Deadshot—who I’ve mostly been sticking with because I feel like his jetpack is the most straightforward traversal ability—just bumps up some percentages on his attacks once your combo counter gets above 5x. Nothing fancy.

Characters also have a shield slot for upgraded shields. Shields look like a Halo kind-of-thing, but they don’t auto-recharge, so instead you’ll have to shoot fools in their legs and then finish with melee to perform a “shield harvest” and replenish your shield. Keeps you active and aggressive, which isn’t a bad idea.

So far most of the enemies have been generic crystalline alien… things. I don’t know, they’re Brainiac’s guys. The game gets you into the idea that the Justice League has turned bad very early on, so that isn’t kept as some kind of silly late game reveal or anything. I mean it’s the subtitle for the game, right?

The shooting is fine, maybe a little overly accurate. Easy to knock out headshots with pistols and assault rifles from very long ranges. You get a handful of different weapon types, like sniper rifles, SMGs, assault rifles, pistols, and “heavy weapons,” which so far has just been a chaingun. It appears that anyone can equip anything, but I’m not 100% sure on that just yet. Weapons come with rarities and bonuses, though the only better-than-starter guns I’ve seen are the ones that came as pre-order and/or deluxe edition bonuses. Weapons give you a raw damage number to work with and arrows to let you know what’s better or worse than what you currently have equipped. Not sure if drops just happen mid-mission or if they’re limited to post-mission rewards like Anthem.

“Like Anthem” sure is a concept, isn’t it? Yikes. Ya know, while we’re on the subject, I’d probably say I enjoyed Anthem’s combat more than this. This is maybe an Anthem-like. The more I think about it, the more the comparison starts to make sense? I will have to spend more time with this to see if the comparison holds. Anthem. Hmm. I should reinstall Anthem.

I’d also cite Borderlands here, as the game is constantly trying to be funny at you in cutscenes. Some of the bits work, there’s a subtle, missable bit with King Shark when you first encounter Batman that I thought was pretty good little bit of business. But it also does a big, lame “loud song plays while we show static images of the characters beating each other up” intro sequence that just feels a little overdone. Some good little one-liners here and there, and I think King Shark (voiced by AEW champion Samoa Joe) does a good, Drax-like "alien who doesn't understand human jokes and phrases" routine. But overall I think they’re trying to cram too many questionable jokes in way too often. Makes it feel real corny, real fast. Is Captain Boomerang annoying because his dialogue is bad or is he annoying because he’s supposed to be the annoying one? Only you can decide!

All that said, I’d say my first impression is that the action feels very generic and the character differentiation feels bad, but the game is also very tolerable so far? Not sure that I’d want to play through 10-ish hours of these encounters, and obviously the feel of the character progression will make an impact one way or the other. But I don’t know, its biggest flaw so far is that the action feels generic while the writing feels like it’s struggling to maintain a certain ratio of baditude to bad jokes. It’s aspiring to walk a very cool line, and I think it’s missing that line more often than not. But I wouldn’t say it’s a bad game at this point, either.

Pretty sure I said the same thing about Anthem at one point. Hmm. Turns out I still have Anthem installed to my PS5’s external drive. I should fire that up.