I played Suicide Squad so you don't have to: Initial Impressions.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (SS) is the latest game from Rocksteady Studios, the creators of the Batman Arkham games. SS is a third-person looter shooter that has you play as one of four members of the Suicide Squad and, as you might have guessed, take down the Justice League. I won't go into much detail on what the game is actually about, as this isn't a review. Think of this more as my initial reaction to playing the game. Use this to decide if the game is worth your hard-earned money or not, and I'll come back with a review at a later date.

In all honesty, I was hesitant to even get this game in the first place. I do love myself some DC and really enjoyed the Arkham series. But after seeing so many negative things about this game prior to its release, it made it hard to press the purchase button. Whether it was the fact that it is a live service game, or has Denuvo DRM, or even that the early access servers were basically nonexistent. All of these things made it hard to justify, but my sole reason to get it was the fact that my best friends got it. So the three of us play it together. Now that I have the game and have played it for some time with them and played a bit alone, I am ready to share some of my initial thoughts because, boy oh boy, do I ever have some.

Right out of the gate, the first thing you do is try all of the characters in a tutorial area; each character has a unique traversal and weapons. These traversals are one of the better things in the game for sure. Each of them is fairly simple, although some are definitely harder than others. King Shark has the best in my opinion, as it is the simplest and fastest (just a crazy high or long jump with a running startup, similar to Spiderman games). Deadshot has a decent one (jetpack), and Harley has a decent one (grappling hook and swing), but it is just so slow for long distances. The most entertaining and difficult would be Captain Boomerang (teleports to his thrown boomerang). I chose to play Harley Quinn, and in all honesty, I kind of regret it. Her traversal is just so slow, it isn't poorly done by any means, but it just isn't all that useful. The grappling hook part is really nice, and being able to get up super high super quick is nice. But swinging is just slow. It is comparable to swinging on a vine in a platformer game, you don't go very far, and you don't do it very fast. You might be thinking, "Well, maybe you're just not good at it yet", and you might be right, but I can do it pretty well, and it isn't all that difficult. Boomerang, on the other hand, feels so cool and definitely has the highest skill ceiling, which makes it a little more exciting when compared to Harley's.

The combat in this game is also just not what I expect or like in a game similar to this. The shooting is fine, everyone has played a shooter, and they're hard to mess up, so this part is fine. However, what loses me is the fact that melee combat is basically just a knock-up tool. You go in, hit the enemy with a melee attack and then shoot them to get a juggle combo off. That is literally the entire melee combat system. When I think of a Rocksteady game, I think of sick melee combat with dope combos and continuous streaks of hits on enemies. But if you try to do a second melee attack on the same enemy, you'll miss entirely as the enemy is sent into the air on your first hit. It is so unfun. If I wanted to juggle an enemy, I would do it when I feel like it by hitting them with a knock-up! Not every dang melee attack. I want to be able to weave together combos and hit streaks with melee. But alas, I got none of that. Doesn't even matter what character you choose; they are all the same. The other aspects of combat are grenades and special attacks that are just one button press. So it really makes it feel like you can only shoot people, but they actually force you to melee enemies as it breaks their shield that deflects bullets. But then they just have you shoot the enemy while you're in melee range. So I personally did NOT like the combat much.

The game itself is very good-looking, and the map design is nice. There is tons of verticality and a nice large area to explore. You can't actually travel to wherever you want till about 4 hours in, though. Prior to that point, you need to stay within a certain area, which they explain in the game, but because of the way missions are to start out the game, it is still not great. The story is excellent, and all the voice lines, storylines, plot and more are great. The humour is well done, and all in all, the story is super entertaining. I expected nothing less in this regard, though. But the story is only the first 10 or so hours of the game; after that, it is all endgame grind missions. Now I don't have a problem with this in other games by any means. But for this game, all of the missions are relatively bad.

My biggest gripe with the game is how uninteresting the missions actually are and the way that all the other aspects of the game are brought down by them. So to give you a better idea as to what I mean, I am going to describe what a mission looks like. You are at the base, you watch a lengthy cutscene (still great), and after a few minutes, you set out to travel to the objective's location; once you arrive, you stand in a yellow highlighted circle and wait for your friends to arrive. Once they arrive, you listen to people talk for a while and then fight a few enemies. You then watch another cutscene, and once this is done, you've completed the mission. You then sit through a long intro to the post-mission screens. These menus are up for roughly a minute or longer, and then you are back to a cutscene or deciding what objective to do next. I kid you not, with three people the fighting and travel is about 30-45 seconds. The other 10 minutes are cutscenes or the 1-minute menu, and it genuinely feels like they should have just made it a movie rather than a game. It is insanely boring to almost never actually play the game, even with the story being entertaining. I was genuinely sleepy playing the game purely due to how tiring and boring this was. Even when it was me playing solo, the combat lasted maybe 2 minutes max, and that was only for certain mission types, otherwise, it was roughly the same.

If I had bought this game solely for solo play, I probably would have refunded it within 2 hours of playing it. There are also so many entire screen pop-ups. Like it will pop up with a wall of text explaining grenades and how to use them. Now this doesn't sound terrible, but it is not skippable; you need to listen to a character read off every piece of text, and then you can exit the pop-up. I kid you not, you sit there for a solid 30-ish seconds or more to be explained how to press G on your keyboard to throw a grenade. Just tell me, "Press G to throw a grenade," in a tiny pop-up on the screen. It just feels very intrusive, pointless, and as if they think you're not smart enough to figure out what things are or what they do.

Ui elements are bad, and Hud elements are huge and unnecessary. For example, the right side of your screen shows your ally's name/username and their distance from you. But it is huge and in the middle of the right side of the screen! For one, I don't care how far they are, and B, why on earth does it need to be where it is? Put it under the mini-map or at the top, or make the font tiny. There are tons of minute things like this in the game that just add up to make it feel clunky and not optimized for the player. It's almost like those memes where its a board meeting, and some guy gives a legit idea, and the boss fires him, but the lazy employee gives the worst idea ever, and the boss promotes him. They just kept adding useless crap. And this is coming from someone who plays League of Legends and has 2 overlays. So I'm used to tons of things on my screen.

Missions are repetitive as all heck. I honestly can't even give you many examples because all of the missions are literally the same. One mission is to get the Penguin to make weapons for you; you travel there from the Hall of Justice; once you arrive, you have a cutscene, and you kill literally 3 enemies (I'm not even sure this happened, lol). Then you go stand in this yellow circle with the rest of your team, then another longer cutscene and bam, mission done. Most missions are like this where you go to a place, fight a few enemies, stand in a circle and then cutscenes. Keep in mind this is just during the story, though, I have no idea what the end-game missions are like, but I have almost no hope. To top it off, often times you don't even have to do anything to beat the mission. The ai or your teammates can just do it. As long as you go stand in the yellow circle then you're good.

Because it is a live service game, you can bet that there are microtransactions. But holy, are they ever expensive. One single emote (which you will likely never ever use) costs $5. The skins are also lacklustre, so they're not even worth purchasing.

The game also has a ton of bugs and glitches. So many times, I was walking, and I would hit an invisible object, and then all I could hear was 3 million gunshots in my ear. There are even glitches where you aren't able to finish a mission, you get stuck, you can't find what you need to, etc. But one of the worst I have seen is that your characters won't load, and when you start the game, everything is just black. Reinstalling doesn't fix it, and it seems as if it is tied to the account you play on, which makes it even worse. It baffles my mind that a triple-A game can come out so unpolished, unfinished, and just poor.

The only things this game really has going for it thus far are the story and the fact that it is co-op. Otherwise, I would not even buy it at a discount; just wait for it to be free.

5 hours in, this game is a solid 4 or 5 out of 10. I do truly love the story, but I would rather just watch a YouTube video of all the cutscenes because the actual game aspects are just not up to par. If you want to play a good live-service DC game, go play DCU online and if you just want a looter shooter, play Destiny or wait for The First Descendant (that game was amazingly fun)