Imagine booting up a Hulk game, and in the very first tutorial, you’re taught how to fire an LMG. Not even Marvel’s Avengers was that brazen.

That’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League summed up. King Shark, a bulky humanoid Great White Tiger, whips out a massive firearm instead of throwing fins. His whole shtick is that he’s big, burly, and strong, but none of that comes into play in any meaningful way. That’s not even to mention that Captain Boomerang mostly deals in assault rifles, despite his entire gimmick being boomerangs. It’s in the name!

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has myriad problems from its painfully sluggish movement to overwhelmingly cluttered UI, but it was doomed from the start because of its very premise - a supervillain game with guns.

There’s an abundance of generic looter shooters and half-baked open-world games out there, and while there are plenty of superhero games and even more in development, the very nature of the genre lends itself to unique experiences. Spider-Man will not play like Blade and Midnight Suns does not play like Arkham Knight, but Suicide Squad feels like a poor rendition of Sunset Overdrive in the vein of Crackdown 3, with a smidge of Agents of Mayhem and the failed Gotham Knights.

I’ve played this game before, several times. That’d be bearable if the gunplay was good, but everyone is squishy, and there’s no oomph behind your weapons. You’d think a few bullets to the chest for a goon would do it, but it barely makes a dent. There’s weight behind punching thugs in Spider-Man, whereas miniguns feel like they’re rattling off NERF pellets here.

The idea is, of course, that you’ll play enough to earn a heavy handing of points and better gear so that the gunplay gets better, but that climb is a grind rather than a natural progression of improving powers befitting a superhero game.

The appeal of team-ups is about synergising different powers and skill sets, but any character can use any gun in Suicide Squad thanks to the loadout system, which is, again, a product of its genre. It means that Boomerang can be your sniper instead of Deadshot, the world-renowned hitman known for using snipers. In the end, it blends all of the characters into a homogenous blob, when a giant shark should probably stand out from someone on roller skates with a big baseball bat.

The only major thing separating each character is how they move, but the end result is always the same tedious gunfight with nameless goons that lead nowhere.

It’s obvious when I put it into words, but superhero games should be about superpowers. You’d be a bit disappointed if Cyclops didn’t shoot lasers out of his eyes and was instead running around with a colt python. The same applies to the villains. If the leaks pan out, we’ve got characters like Deathstroke to look forward to, but I doubt we’ll see the intricate sword skills of a master who can handle his own against Batman, instead handing him an M16 and turning him into Deadshot lite.

That’s the problem with Suicide Squad’s foundation. No matter what it does or who it introduces, it has shackled itself from being able to explore different characters’ powers and abilities by focusing so much on generic gunplay. To rip away the unique nature of caped crusaders is to, ironically, shoot yourself in the foot before you even have a chance.

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I Played Suicide Squad’s Closed Alpha And The Previews Were Right

The NDA has lifted on the closed alpha, but my thoughts mirror the scathing previews for Kill the Justice League we've seen recently

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