Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League released Season 3 last Tuesday! To little fanfare, even though I’d say it’s probably the best Season so far. It’s funny, today I wrote a long comment on the Suicide Squad subreddit about Hitman, and now I’m writing a long comment on Hitman forum about Suicide Squad.
The reason it’s taken me a while to do the post is because I was catching up on unlocking the audio logs/concept art from Episode 4. I was hit by the bug in Season 2 where a lot of Codex entries got wiped out. They fixed the issue that caused it but couldn’t restore people’s entries, so in this season’s patch they just autounlocked all entries from the base game and the first three episodes. Not the most ideal solution, but hey at least it means that the other few entries which were glitched and wouldn’t unlock for me were fixed too!
This season introduces Lawless as a playable character, aka Zoe Lawton, the daughter of Deadshot. There’s some character between them, where Deadshot wants to be protective of her but he was locked up and wasn’t there for her for the past years. That even extends to when you’re playing the game, where Deadshot can say things like “Don’t push yourself so hard, Zoe!”. Why they didn’t do something similar with the interactions between Harley and the Elseworld Joker, I don’t know. Zoe sees herself as a Robin Hood type of criminal. She’s written as a typical sort of teenager, wanting her dad to stop worrying about her and she’s also a streamer so she incorporates that sort of lingo in her lines. I wouldn’t even say it’s necessarily bad writing cause it is pretty accurate to how teens are, but more questionable writing like why make a character in your game that way? That said she does have some funny lines, my favorite is when her traversal runs out she can say “this has a lower battery than my phone!”
I understand what they were going for with having the father/daughter dynamic with her and Deadshot, but boy is Lawless a bad choice to add to the game over so many other characters. Fortunately like Joker and Mrs. Freeze before her, she is very fun to play as. Her skill tree has a lot of electricity related skills which give so many ways to shock enemies. Her traversal is a gravity warping device she stole from Brainiac that lets her float all over, fittingly it’s similar to Deadshot’s but while he was more fast in a straight line, she’s a bit slower but is able to move around more. Her traversal attack is easily the best in the game, creating a mini black hole that saps the life out of everyone near it. Of the three post launch characters, I’d say she has the best design and the best free color swatches.
The dumbest thing I’ve seen from people this season is complaining about the game being “woke” and that Lawless is a DEI character. It really gives off vibes to me of “oh no a black woman, run for the hills!” Logically, if Deadshot is black, chances are his daughter would be black too. Having Zoe Lawton added over so many others who are actually associated with the Suicide Squad is a stupid decision no matter what race she is. The issues with Joker, Mrs. Freeze and Lawless are much more issues with character choice than any woke agenda. And of course they still need to bring up everyone’s favorite boogeyman Sweet Baby Inc. as if they’re responsible for everything wrong in the entire gaming industry.
Oh well, negativity aside the Battle Pass this season is the best they’ve done so far! In Season 1 there were several tiers which only unlocked voice emotes, but here they made sure to spread them out and bundle them with other unlocks so each tier is more exciting to look forward to unlocking. There’s also still plenty of banners and emotes to unlock too, the BPs include so many that I really don’t get why you’d spend money on ones in the shop. They also started including Anti Hero shots in the BPs. These are little cutscenes that play when you beat a mission so it’s nice to have some more variety with them. Season 2’s BP had two, but this BP includes seven. My favorite is the one for Mrs. Freeze where she makes a heart of ice around Nora’s cryochamber:
The skins for this season’s BP are Golden Age skins meant to hearken back to the earlier days of comics. There’s one color swatch which has old comics printed around it and another which has the classic “Bam!” “Zoom!” “Pow!” type of designs. Captain Boomerang finally got a Battle Pass skin of his own, and it seems Rocksteady took the complaints about him not having one to heart cause he was the one chosen to be the free skin this season. My favorite of the four is Lawless who gets an astronaut suit (fitting given her traversal) which reminds me of the skin for Ellie in TLOU2. She also has a special Nebula color swatch which adds a nice star pattern to the outfit:
But there’s still more to talk about with this season’s new Elseworld: Gotham! In this world Brainiac chose to attack and terraform Gotham instead of Metropolis.
I know and fully acknowledge that it was chosen to play up to people’s nostalgia for Arkham, but it was still really fun to see recreations of the Medical Pavilion, Arkham North, and even seeing Quincy Sharp’s statue again. There’s areas showing different parts of Gotham City too and it’s all suspended over a big lava pool.
What’s weird though is just how much effort was put into this Elseworld compared to the others. The original sandy Earth 2, the Jokerized world, and the frozen world were all clearly reskins of each other changing up some elements but copying quite a bit. However, Gotham feels much more original and unique with its areas. Even things from the other Arkham games aren’t just copied and pasted, but rather pretty faithful recreations they made themselves. And people still say that the people who worked on the game have no passion and don’t care about the earlier Arkham games!
The music, while it’s always been pretty good in this game, is especially great for this Elseworld! It has orchestral music combined with choral voices singing. It’s very reminiscent of Arkham Asylum’s soundtrack but it’s still its own unique track not a copy of the older music. For one last thing about the Elseworld, they did bring back the greatest sign from Arkham City:
And yet there’s still more to talk about. Season 1’s Incursions had no story at all, Season 2’s had a few lines of dialogue, but Season 3’s have intro and ending transmission broadcasts from Lawless which explain why you’re doing everything. Why they waited until Season 3 to have more story in the Incursions, I don’t know. I don’t even think it’s a case of more development time, cause surely if they had more story planned for Season 1 they would have included it then.
Of course given the whole setting of Gotham you can probably guess who the hero we save this season is. That’s right, it’s Green Lantern! Unlike Flash last season who we just kinda tracked his signal all of the sudden and who just kinda showed up after beating Brainiac with no reason given for how he got away, Green Lantern actually got explanation! It was Lawless who tracked him down on Brainiac’s skull ship, and thanks to the squad causing a distraction she was able to get him off the ship. Again, why did they not put more effort in last season? But now we have 2 of the Justice League saved, I do think it’s really funny how we’re collecting them in cases in the Hall of Justice like they’re action figures!
Anyway, since we seem to be rescuing them in the same order they were killed in, it should be Batman up next! Allegedly they’re compressing the original 6 seasons into just 4, but I’m not sure how that will work cause surely all of the dialogue for rescuing Batman is based around next season’s character and Elseworld.
It’s a real shame though that we more than likely aren’t getting Seasons 5 and 6. I recently found out that the planned characters for those seasons were Katana and Killer Croc, some actual good additions to a Suicide Squad game. Killer Croc even had some voice work done already, and he was voiced by the same actor who portrayed him in Asylum, City and Knight. Now though, it looks like Katana won’t be having anyone’s back or cut anyone in half just like mowing the lawn.
(I didn’t actually think they’d really kill him off lmao, I was really laughing due to how audacious of a joke/somber moment they crammed into this fairly happy game.)
I have yet to dwelve into A3 since I´m not sure my regular laptop can run it well enough, seeing how even A2 or even A1 at times can misbehave (played a bit of A3 on my friend´s laptop, which is now mine, so once I manage to hopefully fix the audio issues, I can give it a proper whirl; the vanilla content alone will probably keep me occupied for a year).
