Post Script
If looks could kill
Brainiac arrives in Metropolis in classic campy comic-book fashion, aboard a giant skull-shaped ship that features glowing purple eyes and humongous metal tentacles – the sort of engineering choices made with villainy first in mind and aerodynamics second. Yet it’s no less effective for that. The skull ship is a constant presence in your adventure, looming threateningly over the city in the background, and the subject of one of the game’s most memorable set-pieces. This is just one of Suicide Squad’s assortment of visual delights, which can emerge in unexpected places.
Pay attention to the displays in the Hall Of Justice, and you’ll clock that the drops Penguin sends you as rewards for a job well done are actually supply pods requisitioned from Batman’s personal stash. Examine Captain Boomerang’s trenchcoat more closely, and you’ll notice its buttons are shaped like his signature weapon. The models of the four main characters are some of the most detailed we’ve seen in a triple-A production, coming to life not only through their visual fidelity but their intricate animations. There’s a surprising amount of physical comedy here, and Rocksteady leans into slapstick with confidence, as the squad bicker, fight and smirk in the background of cutscenes.
It’s a shame, then, that the same delicate touch hasn’t been applied to Kill The Justice League’s user interface. Prior to launch, concerns were raised that the UI elements seemed a tad busy. And while they’re not quite as overstimulating as a couple of pre-release images suggested, it’s remarkable how much screen real estate is filled at any time. Numbers fly out of enemies when they’re hit; prompts encourage you to perform basic combat moves; incremental mission objectives are spread across the screen; combat modifiers are represented by almost illegible icons; and if you’re in a multiplayer game, the names of your squadmates are listed in a separate box.
In play, you wonder if all this is necessary. Even the minimap, that staple of open-world adventures, seems largely wasted in a game where you can take to the skies in seconds to get a bearing on your surroundings. And it’s only strikingly late in the game that we even remember we have ammunition to think about, having been topping up our magazines with each kill, happy to ignore the small ammo counter in the bottom of the screen – a process made easier by the quantity of other things cascading in front of our eyes. It is possible to rein in some of the excess from the game’s options menu, but the user interface is far from fully customisable.
This is not, of course, the first time that Rocksteady has undermined its own deft visual design. Batman’s Detective Mode in the Arkham games blanketed the entire screen in a blue wireframe mesh to highlight enemy movements, puzzle solutions and opportunities to use gadgets. It was possible, often even advisable, to play entire sections of those games without ever seeing the environment as intended. But, rather than a distraction, Detective Mode could also be an essential component of navigation, serving as both a useful visual aid and heady literalisation of Batman’s detective skills.
The same cannot be said of the UI here. In fact, there is a gnawing feeling that it looks this way simply because so many other multiplayer games have similarly cluttered displays to accommodate their story, combat and social systems. By the end of our time with Suicide Squad, we come to think of the interface as the product of the same kind of insecurity demonstrated in the game’s halfhearted loot-game elements and undercooked endgame. It’s not this way necessarily because the game, or indeed the player, needs it to be, but because it all aligns with certain trends. True, there’s no reason for Brainiac’s skull ship to have tentacles, either, but at least it looks rather good with them.