I’ve been writing a lot about various tie-in games over the past few years. Hollywood Hellfire, Expendabros, Duty Calls, that sort of stuff. A fair share of these are usually just stuff made in flash on a shoestring budget and will likely be forgotten unless people are smart to preserve these artifacts.
Sometimes, albeit rarely, these games actually have installers and can be played from a PC, which surprises me these days. To me, that’s something from the old Shockwave days, and not something most people do in the present day. But this recent one, based on a big comic book movie, was one I wasn’t expecting to go that route.
So. much. green.
I have to give props to the blog “I’m Reloading” for bringing this game to my attention. It’s one of my favorite blogs because reload animations are solely unappreciated in video games, and somebody’s gotta highlight them. They showed a recent animation to some Suicide Squad game, and they mentioned “It’s on PC.” Cue me scrambling right to the website to give it a download.
So it’s a first-person shooter. In it, you choose between three members of the titular Suicide Squad: Deadshot, who is your by-the-numbers FPS protagonist with an assault rifle and mini launchers on their hands; Harley Quinn, a melee focused character with a baseball bat and a six-shooter backup at range; and El Diablo, who just sets everything on fire.
Such tough decisions.
Killing enough baddies builds a special meter that when filled, activates a specific power up for that character. Harley’s is a devastating baseball bash that can damage multiple foes, El Diablo does an explosive blast around him, and Deadshot is just straight up by-the-numbers bullet time.
Harley Quinn about to channel her inner Scout from Team Fortress 2…
So is this a story-driven game with a sense of progression? Nope, it’s horde mode. Taking place at some point during the movie, our three “heroes” fight generic monsters with guns and powers, destroying them wave by wave. After a few waves, a new area opens up, and the cycle repeats ‘til about wave 10 or so, where it loops back to the beginning.
The only other interesting thing are Supply Drops. Using these will give an unlock for a certain character, from increased damage to increased health. However, this only applies to the character given, so don’t do what I do and use Harley exclusively for 15 waves because your other characters will be woefully unequipped for later battles if your main character dies.
(quietly hums Spybreak, that Matrix lobby music)
There really isn’t much else to say about this. There’s enemies with guns, enemies with miniguns, assholes with stop signs that’ll charge you and beat you senseless if you get cornered, even guys with flammable canisters that explode if you get too close, usually resulting in immediate death. Dying loses that character, forcing you to switch to one of the other living. Lose all three and the mission’s over.
I honestly don’t know who developed this, all credits go to “Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment” which must mean one of the few in-house studios WB Games owns made this. I say this because the era of having developers who just make licensed properties to fund bigger projects — like Rare or Beam Software — don’t exist in the modern age unless you count Platinum Games or something. It would’ve been nice to see credits just so I can appreciate who took the time and effort to crank out something like this.
I don’t know if I’d call this fun…
A shame this is a single player game, with the multiple characters there seems to be potential for a unique co-op game with these play styles. But I figure since you’re making something to advertise a movie, you don’t have the time or budget to pull that off. Oh well, maybe someone will tackle that idea some day.
Suicide Squad: Special Ops is a simple little FPS. So simple that it’s basically a quick pick-up-and-play sort of game that’s worth playing for 15 minutes at most. Give it a try now if you got some time to kill. This is probably better than the movie coming out, at least.
Comic book movies don’t do a whole lot for me, so finding some enjoyment out of this silly tie-in game was probably better than watching the slog that was Suicide Squad the film. You don’t see this happen much these days, most of the time they just do cross-promotion in other games instead. It’s a dying art form, and I wanna see it come back. Mostly so we can get a new James Bond game, it’s been too long.
