Video Game / Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Warning: Late Arrival Spoilers for all preceding installments in the Batman: Arkham Series are unmarked on this page.

Don't be a hero.

"Task Force X: Your new mission is to kill the Justice League."

— Amanda Waller

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a video game based on the Suicide Squad and Justice League of America of DC Comics. Developed by Rocksteady, the creators of the Batman: Arkham Series, it was released on February 2nd, 2024 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Microsoft Windows.

Set roughly five years after the events of Batman: Arkham Knight, the city of Metropolis has fallen under siege by the Coluan tyrant Brainiac, who has used his Skull Ship to sever off any connection to the outside world. To make matters worse, he has also decimated the city’s population and enslaved any survivors by turning them into brainwashed augmented soldiers. To make matters even worse, the Justice League has also fallen under his thrall, turning them into pawns in his gambit to terraform the planet to his liking. In a desperate ploy, Amanda Waller, head of the black ops military division ARGUS, has enlisted (read ‘forced under threat of death’): Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark to assassinate Earth’s former protectors and put a stop to Brainiac’s plan. Up against impossible odds, this newly formed ‘Suicide Squad’ will have to work together in an effort to kill the unkillable and hopefully survive the experience.

Like the Arkham series, combat will play to the strengths of each member of the Suicide Squad, mixed with elements of gunplay. Unlike the Arkham games, Kill the Justice League will allow players to tackle the story by themselves, switching between Squad members as needed, or with upwards of three other players via Co-Op Multiplayer.

DC also published Suicide Squad Kill Arkham Asylum, a comic book series by John Layman and Jesús Hervás that leads into the game.

Watch the teaser trailer here.

Watch the story trailer here.

Watch the Batman Reveal trailer here.

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Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League contains the following tropes:

• Adaptational Badass:
  • Captain Boomerang is a Badass Normal in other media (including prior installments in the Arkham-verse), but after confiscating a gauntlet developed by Dr. Sivana, he's now able to tap into the Speed Force himself, zipping around to dodge fire and pick off enemies.
  • This serves for the whole of the Suicide Squad in general. In the original comics, it takes a gathering of heavy-hitter villains like an Injustice Gang or Legion of Doom to be on par with the Justice League. In this game, the Suicide Squad manages to kill the Justice League, in a world where the heroes' Plot Armor is inexistent.
• Adaptational Heroism: The playable version of The Joker is noted to at least be more controllable in that he was a member of the Suicide Squad in his universe whereas most portrayals of The Joker would typically be considered too unreliable to be used as an asset.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • The Arkhamverse Wonder Woman is shown to be significantly less durable than other variants seen in DC Media, dying in a single burst of Superman's Heat Vision during their fight. While they did wind up fighting for quite a while beforehand and Superman's DNA has seemingly been altered by Brainiac, there's no indication it boosted his powers and Wonder Woman can typically either shrug off or take his Heat Vision for a while head on without serious harm.
  • In the Superman mythos proper, Gold Kryptonite is a VERY serious threat to him, since all it takes is one instance of exposure to permanently De-power Superman and other Kryptonians pre-crisis. Here, it's just a replacement for Superman's Kryptonite Factor made by Luthor-2 after Brainiac's genetic tampering rendered him immune to the usual Green Kryptonite, and even then he'll throw off the effects after a while during his boss battle, requiring repeated shots with Gold Kryptonite bullets to render him vulnerable.
• Alien Invasion: Brainiac is orchestrating one in the background while the Squad is fighting the Justice League under his control. His alien ships are shown off in the city distance.
  Harley: Just checking— (points at the Brainiac ship) we're all seeing that, right?
• Alternate Self:
  • Lex Luthor is revealed to have been in contact with a bearded version of himself from another Earth, already conquered and terraformed by Brainiac, who the Squad enlist the help of after their Lex is killed by the Flash.
  • In the ARGUS tapes, Floyd Lawton begins to suspect that the Deadshot seen in prior games, who he had dismissed as an imposter, might have actually been a displaced version of him from another universe, as, aside from their difference in race, their skills and methods were otherwise identical. While they don't say it to his face, Luthor and Cash insinuate it’s the other way around.
• Bad Boss: In typical fashion, Waller is always ready with a threat to detonate the Squad's cranial implants if they don't get off their duffs and do some hero work instead of slacking off. The trailer even depicts her as apparently not mentioning to the team that their alpha target for assassination was one of the strongest superheroes in existence, leaving them to find out the hard way.
  • In Earth-2, Lex Luthor notes that Waller-2 got her own Suicide Squad killed through her poor or callous decisions.
  • It's later revealed that Waller never had any intention of granting the Squad their freedom. Either they would get killed by Brainiac's forces, which would be doing her a favor, or they succeed in seizing Brainiac's brainwashing technology which she fully intended to use on any surviving Squad members.
  • When King Shark manages to disable the Skull Ship's shield, Waller wastes no time firing a nuclear missile at the ship despite the Squad still being within the blast radius. She callously thanks the Squad for their sacrifice and the Squad would have been wiped out if it weren't for the brainwashed Superman's intervention.
  • Even the Gameplay and Story Integration is built on this, the Squad's need to harness shields from their enemies because Waller modified their shields to disable automatic recharge.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The game ends with both the Justice League and (the first) Brainiac being slain. This leaves the safety of Earth-1 and the multiverse in the hands of Lex Luthor and A.R.G.U.S. with no heroes left to keep them in check, and even Brainiac's death is effectively invalidated by the reveal that there are a dozen more of him.
• Beware the Superman: The whole Justice League sans Wonder Woman. Under Brainiac's control and their morals gone, the League terrorize Metropolis and humanity, with things having gotten so desperate that Waller and A.R.G.U.S. have decided to use the Squad to take down the League.
• Bittersweet Ending: Task Force X successfully kill the Justice League and Brainiac, saving the world. Still, there are countless innocent civilians in Metropolis dead and the Earth has now lost its greatest heroes and defenders, who end their careers as as mass-murdering villains. Earth-2 Lex Luthor and Amanda Waller are now in charge of protecting Earth, but they are hardly better than Brainiac was. But it does seem that Metropolis and its people will start to recover from the tragedy and the Squad's work isn't done, as they now have to deal with twelve other Braniacs across the multiverse.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: King Shark’s tattoos appear to be more than just for show as they are shown to glow light blue whenever he engages in melee combat. This might be to show off his godly powers since he is the son of a god.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The violence is much bloodier and more visceral this time around, as your main objective is to kill characters as opposed to subduing them like in the Batman games. Many characters suffer brutal deaths throughout the story, from Lex Luthor getting his heart ripped out by the Flash to Superman disintegrating Wonder Woman with his laser vision. Even the death animations are grislier now; should you lose to Green Lantern, for example, he'll summon a barrage of guns and mow you down onscreen.
• The Bogan: Captain Boomerang, to no surprise. His teeth are almost as yellow as the Joker's, and his introduction in the trailer has him working off a hangover.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The reason Task Force X has to fight the Justice League. Brainiac somehow took control of them.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the very beginning of the game, the Squad breaks into the Hall of Justice and steals various pieces of equipment from their trophy case. King Shark takes Riddler's bowler hat, which Harley calls "Riddler's Hat of Invisibility." She and Boomerang even pretend not to be able to see him once he's put it on. Later, during the Batman encounter, after Bats has shut off the lights, disrupted their weapons, and locked the door, Shark nervously puts the hat back on.
  • Boomerang is introduced in his cell at Arkham making a drawing of himself peeing on the Flash. When Flash is killed, he attempts to do exactly that but is stopped by the rest of the squad.
• Call-Back:
  • "Knight at the Museum" is a throwback to the classic predator missions… except this time, you're not Batman, you're his prey.
  • During the fear gas sequence, Batman taunts the Squad with statues of himself that materialize out of nowhere, just like in the final level of Arkham Knight.
• Cavalry Betrayal: The trailer shows that King Shark is genuinely happy to see Superman show up, right before he kills the pilot he just rescued.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: King Shark can carry one of these, ranging from an oversized LMG that seems to fire .50 caliber rounds to the classic six-barrel minigun as his gun of choice.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Even more than Harley, King Shark might be the biggest one on the team. In the first Insider episode, as they're touring the abandoned Hall of Justice, he reverently marvels at how the League is "larger than I expected"; Deadshot has to be the one to tell him that the nine-foot-tall museum tour holograms aren't to scale.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Equipment comes in 7 different varieties, sorted by color.
  • Regular gear comes in Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Epic with higher rarities having better stats and more passive traits.
  • Above these are Legendary items, which have a unique passive ability that can significantly change the behavior of a weapon.
  • Above Legendary are Notorious equipment. Functionally similar to Legendary gear, but their special passive is based on a specific DC character (i.e. Black Mask weapons apply a mark to enemies hit, and marking 3 enemies causes all marked targets to create a Fire-element explosion). Adding onto this, certain combinations of Notorious weapons belonging to two different villains can create a Villain Synergy bonus for even more power.
  • At the top of the list is Infamous gear. Infamous gear by themselves can have any number of generic passives. Similarly to Notorious equipment, Infamous gear has a special passive based on a specific DC villain. There is a significant difference to keep in mind: while Notorious gear encourages mixing and matching items from different villains, Infamous gear Set Bonuses require the player equipping multiple items from the same villain to maximize the power of their passive ability.
• Continuity Cavalcade: Players can visit a special facility called "The Batman Experience", an interactive exhibit hosted by Jack Ryder that recaps the events of Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and Arkham Knight.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Part of the game takes place in a museum exhibit dedicated to the events of the Arkham series, which, cardboard cutouts aside, have recreated locations that look mostly identical to how they appeared in those games.
  • Batman's identity as Bruce Wayne is no longer secret after Scarecrow revealed his identity in Arkham Knight. He even introduces himself by name to schoolchildren in the Hall of Justice tour.
  • The gadget that Batman uses immediately after is the Arkham City version of the Disruptor firearm jammer. Harley even calls the device by name.
  • Penguin calls Harley a widow, referring to how Joker died at the end of Arkham City.
  • When the Squad gears up for the first time, Harley finds her old Arkham Knight outfit in her locker, annoyedly dismissing it before crafting a new costume from a spare A.R.G.U.S. jacket.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • Both King Shark and Captain Boomerang were killed in past media connected to the Arkham series, with King Shark having his head blown off by Waller in the animated movie Batman: Assault on Arkham, and Boomerang being killed by Deadshot in a tie-in comic. Despite this, they're here alive and well, with Boomerang working somewhat well alongside his would-be murderer.
  • Before shooting him in the head, Harley brings up the time Batman told her she "never was too bright" back at the asylum. Batman did say this in Arkham Asylum... as internal dialogue in a scene where Harley wasn't present.
• Contrived Coincidence: After the Flash kills Lex Luthor and destroys the anti-Speed Force device he developed, the Suicide Squad is forced to retreat empty handed. However, shortly after they return, Toyman arrives, having somehow found the destroyed device, repaired it, and naively willing to manufacture more for A.R.G.U.S.
• Curse Cut Short: During the teaser, when the Suicide Squad realizes they have to assassinate Superman, Captain Boomerang gives a dejected "Awwwww, fu—" before the trailer cuts to the logo.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: In cutscenes, the Justice League are as powerful as their comic book counterparts. Flash dismantles Luthor's armor in seconds and rips his heart out between animation frames. Superman and Wonder Woman's duel demolishes much of the city. John Stewart holds off entire military assaults. In gameplay, the fact that they should be able to end the squad in less than a second is conveniently ignored.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: The way Brainiac brainwashed the Justice League was that he used alien techonology to restructure their brains to make their desires line up with Brainiac's goals so they believe helping him is the only way to achieve justice and peace, making them impossible to reason with. Presumably, this was also done to the common soldiers who were once humans.
• Dead Man's Switch: The bombs in the Squad's necks act as one for Waller: if she dies, they go boom. So the Squad can't let her die or kill her.
  • This is how Earth-2 Lex Luthor prevents Waller from controlling him as well: he has a nanobomb in his neck, and if he dies, the entire LexCorp building and all of the technology in it goes with him.
• Denser and Wackier: Compared to the Arkham series's very dark and serious tone, the game is very much this for Rocksteady. Justified, as we're playing as a group of wacky, amoral, sociopathic supercriminals.
• Developer's Foresight: In the "Knight at the Museum" segment, the squad encounters a brainwashed Batman who takes out the squad one by one, and since Harley needs to be the last one standing for the cutscene at the end of it, should a player try and open the last exit door as her, Harley will instead prompt one of the others to open it instead leading to them being knocked out by Batman, with Harley commenting she had a feeling that would happen and that it's Nothing Personal.
• Double Entendre: During their first capture of The Flash, we can witness the following hilarious dialogue between King Shark and Harley:
  King Shark: Our enemies come again!
  Harley Quinn: Worst dirty movie I ever saw!
• Easter Egg: A series of fourteen calendars can be found with specific dates marked, the first being January 8th and the last being December 14th. The final calendar is located near the park bench where Harley executes Batman, and has its date marked with a bat symbol. When the dates are arranged in order and the numbers are transposed with the alphabet, they spell "HE WILL RETURN," hinting that Batman and the rest of the Justice League by extension are Not Quite Dead. Doubles as a Call-Back to the Scarecrow radio messages in Arkham City.
• Equipment-Based Progression: The "Support Squad" of villains similarly entrapped by ARGUS is a loosely associated collection of vendors that provide different services to the Squad — Penguin manufactures guns, Toyman introduces and improves gear, and Gizmo builds them vehicles. Even Hack's physical upgrades are put in the context of her tinkering with their neck bombs.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Deadshot, Harley, and King Shark unanimously agree that implanting little Ivy with a neck bomb is going too far, even for them. Once Boomerang admits that he already implanted it, he earns a punch to the face from all three of them.
  • After the Squad kills Flash, Captain Boomerang tries to piss on Flash's corpse. Deadshot stops him out of sheer disgust.
• Evil Versus Evil: The game pits a group of hardened and unrepentant supercriminals who are being shepherded by a Sinister Spy Agency against an alien Omnicidal Maniac that seeks to have Earth destroyed.
• Forgot About His Powers: A very serious offender regarding the Justice League's boss battles, with all of them holding the Idiot Ball rather hard in terms of their powers' applications despite being morally uninhibited while serving Brainiac.
  • Flash forgets that he can just rip the Squad's hearts out with phasing whenever their anti-Speed Force shields go down...despite him doing JUST that to Earth-1 Luthor a while ago.
  • Green Lantern forgets that his ring is more than versatile enough to create large manacles or clamps to bind the Squad in place for easy assimilation or execution....despite him ALSO doing just that when he originally had them captive.
  • Batman forgets about the armoury's worth of gadgets he has available, instead choosing to just stand there after dosing the Squad with Fear Toxin instead of barraging them with Batarangs, Freeze Grenades, Explosive Gel, etc.
  • Superman forgets that, even with the Suicide Squad having managed to implement a new Kryptonite Factor on their weapons that lets them hurt him, he can just drop a building on them from quite far away...or that his Heat Vision has a far longer range than their guns now that collateral damage and innocent casualties are of no concern.
  • Braniac is shown in a cutscene to be able to abduct the squad via teleportation on a whim and hold them in stasis indefinitely while gloating. He was able to do this to Kal-El. Needless to say that he doesn't do this in gameplay.
  • Speaking of which, the entire story relies on Waller establishing a base in the Hall of Justice with a lot of guns, weapons, and supervillains, and the players calmly walk in and out the front door. Batman should have been able to determine their location easily, Superman should have been able to hear them, and Flash could search all Metropolis in moments. That is not counting the alien sensor technology available to Braniac. While the initial setup may have been Beneath Notice, after the death of one League Member, the entire Argus force should have been easily overwhelmed by an alien army numbering in the millions.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • On launch, some versions of the game were bugged such that the story mode was already completed.
  • A patch introduced a bug where the loading the game after the Kill Superman! mission can result in an infinite loading screen or falling through the map. This effectively renders the game completely unplayable.
  • The same patch introduced multiple glitches that effectively rendered the game's multiplayer unplayable.
  • Enemies can glitch into walls, rendering missions requiring all enemies to be killed impossible to complete.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Rather than forcing you to turn back or running into an Invisible Wall, wandering too far away from the mission area will cause Amanda Waller to detonate the bomb in your character's neck for disobeying her direct orders, just like she promised.
• Gatling Good: King Shark's firearm of choice in the trailers and promo material is a minigun that's completely dwarfed by his own size, though the State of Play shows that any of the four, even tiny Harley, can wield one in-game.
• Genius Bruiser: King Shark is described by the devs in the State of Play as being the most intelligent and literate of the four, with a massive vocabulary and a cultured, well-to-do upbringing. He also struggles to understand too-simple concepts or words, tends to misinterpret what's going on right in front of him, and sometimes makes Harley look rational by comparison.
  Shark: It is my shame to suffer mortals and their buffoonery.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: Harley uses one of Batman's grappling hook and a Batdrone to traverse around the environment.
• Groin Attack: Boomerang and Harley have a chance to utilize one for their Suicide Strikes, with Boomerang stabbing with his boomerangs and Harley smashing her melee weapon directly on the grenade she places on her target's crotch.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: When Harley shoots Batman in the head, the sound of a spent shell casing hitting the ground can be heard, which should not be possible as Harley used a revolver to do the deed; revolvers, obviously, do not discard shells automatically in the same way that a semiautomatic pistol would.
• Happy Ending Override: A weird example. Arkham Knight's ending was bittersweet at best, with Batman and Alfred faking their deaths after Bruce's identity is revealed at large. Kill the Justice League gives him a happier ending wherein years later, Superman invites him to form the Justice League, resulting in Batman coming out of hiding, regaining public trust, and having a team of more powerful heroes to depend on. The game then takes that away when Brainiac brainwashes Batman and the rest of the Justice League and makes them ravage most of the planet, with the now-evil Batman implied to have killed Robin in his rampage. Task Force X defeat and kill Batman, along with the rest of the Justice League, leaving the world in the hands of villains like Lex Luthor and A.R.G.U.S..
• Hypocrite: Harley Quinn, long time partner to mass murderer and terrorist The Joker, delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Batman where she call him out for "causing long-term mental and emotional damage" to everyone around him.
• I Shall Taunt You: Boomerang gets Flash's attention simply by playing on his insecurity — he makes a transmission while trash-talking him as the "loser of the League" and the JL's "team mascot", and wishing he could've had any of the other, cooler heroes as his archenemies instead of Barry. Despite Flash being no stranger to insults himself as a speedster, it works.
  Boomerang: CAHM ON THEN, YA PRICK!
• Joker Immunity:
  • Zig-zagged. Lex Luthor, who the trope would likely be named after if the Joker didn't exist (and ironically avert this trope in this universe), is quickly killed after the Squad encounters him... but the Squad quickly encounters another Luthor from a different universe who does everything he'd do anyway and survives the campaign.
  • Played straight with the Joker of Earth-2, who survives his world's devastation to be a DLC character.
• Meaningful Background Event: As the squad settles back after getting to the point in the trailer, looking carefully reveals that the helicopters are taken out by a laser and a high-speed collision; Superman didn't save the pilot, he downed them to begin with, and only spared one of the men to kill him face-to-face.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: While both genders suffer, the story tends to offer more sympathy to female characters.
  • Wonder Woman is the only member of the Justice League to be given significant screentime and to never get brainwashed. Furthermore, her death is treated with much more gravitas than the other members, although this is more justified due to her not being on Braniac's side at the time.
  • The squad is outraged to learn that Boomerang put a bomb in the head of Poison Ivy's clone under Waller's orders since she's a minor. However, they laugh and joke when Toyman gets injected with a bomb as petty revenge for embarrassing Boomerang despite him being both a minor and a helpless civilian.
• Mercy Kill: Played with. When Flash is caught in Wonder Woman's lasso, his words suggest that he, and probably the rest of the Justice League, would rather die than continue to be Brainiac's puppets. That doesn't seem to matter to the Squad, though, who kills them just as gleefully as they would have under normal circumstances.
• Moral Myopia: Harley Quinn engaged in this when she lectures Batman just before she kills him about all the pain and suffering he caused in his crusade. However, this completely ignores the fact that she was fully complicit in many of Joker's atrocities such as terrorizing Gotham City again, and torturing Jason Todd. She also tried to use innocent police officers as bait to lure in Batman for revenge on his part in Joker’s death.
• The Multiverse: There's revealed to be other Earths on which other Brainiacs are attempting a similar takeover to the one fought in the game, taking place on the Earth titled Earth-1.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Suicide Squad goes against the Justice League that has apparently gone rogue, with Superman being the target at the end of the trailer. This is exactly the event the Squad should prepare against in Amanda Waller's pitch in the Suicide Squad (2016) movie.
  • The prison numbers for the Suicide Squad members are all nods to when each character first appeared in comics.
    • Harley Quinn: 12-09-93 (Batman Adventures #12, September 1993)
    • Deadshot: 59-06-50 (Batman #59, June 1950)
    • Captain Boomerang: 117-12-60 (The Flash #117, December 1960)
    • King Shark: 00-10-94 (Superboy (Volume 4) #0, October 1994)
  • The Penguin's hair had grown long and messy within the five years since Knight. This gives him an uncanny resemblance to the Danny DeVito version.
  • The tribute to Kevin Conroy pictures Batman standing triumphantly on a rooftop, his cape billowing in the wind while lightning strikes in the background. This is a recreation of the iconic shot from Batman: The Animated Series, where Conroy first debuted.
  • At the start of Brainiac's boss battle, when he transmogrifies into a fascimile of The Flash, upon landing, he dramatically poses and turns his head to the camera while saying "My name is Vril Dox, I am the fastest man alive."
  • In a number of intercepted radio messages from Batman, he mentions "New Colu" while the above mentioned boss fight has Brainiac refer to himself as "Vril Dox". Colu in most of Brainiac's origin stories is his original homeworld and Brainiac's goal in his initial Silver-Age appearances was to take cities from various planets he came across into to rebuild it (though it was called Bryak at the time) after an unknown disaster. Meanwhile Vril Dox is Brainac's true name in the pre-Crisis timeline in the comics.
  • One of the terms Lex Luthor from Earth-2 uses for the worlds Brainiac ravaged is "elseWORLDS".
  • In his interview tapes, Earth-2 Joker exclaims that he can't wait for this universe to get a load of him.
• Never My Fault: The Stinger at the end of the trailer shows a boomerang harmlessly smacking Superman in the head. Captain Boomerang tries to play it off as King Shark's doing.
  Boomerang: Uhhh... you shouldn't have done that, Shark.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: The Squad couldn't care less about saving the world or fighting for the greater good. The only reason they're working for A.R.G.U.S. is a mix of their desire for self preservation and being coerced into it due to bombs implanted in their heads.
• Obviously Evil: Discussed in the Apocalyptic Log regarding how the Justice League got mind controlled — The Flash and Wonder Woman are highly suspicious of Brainaic due to him having appeared in a giant cobra skull ship, while Superman and Green Lantern are on the side of "we can't assume someone's evil just because they have spooky decor". Of course, by the conceit of the game, it's clear who turned out to be right.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: In the Game Awards 2022 trailer, just as Boomerang is about to give Flash one hell of a beating privately, he accidentally severs Flash's left thumb with an offhand boomerang swipe. Boomerang quickly makes Flash stand up against a wall as the rest of the Squad arrives, so he can claim the two were just chatting (though the Squad's attention is diverted elsewhere afterward). It's a slight variation here, as Flash isn't even unconscious at first, and can be heard groaning in pain when pushed up against the wall.
• Orcus on His Throne: Subverted. Braniac does not appear for most of the game, with Batman seemingly running his army in his stead, but the moment the controlled Justice League are gone, he immediately appears and make the Suicide Squad their replacements. They are rescued, and Brainiac becomes a very active force when they storm his ship.
• Parasol Parachute: No, not The Penguin, but The Joker uses one of these for transport, allowing him to fly upward Mary Poppins style and surf on it like a Hover Board.
• Plot Armor: Task Force X manages to survive many encounters with the brainwashed Justice League, even though only one of them is enough to capture or wipe the whole team out. Sometimes this is Justified, like with a pre-brainwashed Flash or Wonder Woman coming to the rescue. Other times, it can get egregious, especially when other characters like Earth-1 Lex Luthor are not given the same privilege.
  • To elaborate on Earth-1 Lex's death, The Flash literally tears his out heart. He does this between frames of animation, while the squad is surrounding Lex. Even though Flash could easily do the same to all the squad, he chooses to run in circles (presumably to make some lightning or a speed force tornado) until Wonder Woman stops him. He later says that he could have also grabbed them and run at so high of speeds that the flesh would be ripped from their bones. For how long it takes the squad to get the anti-speed force tech, Flash had so many opportunities to do either and he just doesn't.
• Primary-Color Champion: While "champions" might be a stretch, every Squad member's design, as highlighted in key art◊, features some varying combination of red, blue, and yellow.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Harley's "The Reason You Suck" Speech that she delivers to Batman before she executes him is meant to be treated as an empowering moment where a bullying victim stands up to their abuser, but falls flat once you take her actions in the previous game into account (consisting of Cold-Blooded Torture and mass murder at the very least). Harley herself admits in Batman's bio that her beatings, insults, and imprisonments at his hands are the least that she deserved.
• Purple Is Powerful: Braniac himself is incredibly powerful, of course, and his army are people he's brainwashed and transformed into his soldiers who are now mostly colored purple. They are powerful enough to mostly take control of Metropolis and dealt heavy losses to the ARGUS forces attempting to hold them at bay. The controlled Justice League members retain their suits but have purple eyes and veins and haven't lost any strength.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Anyone who has become Brainwashed and Crazy by Braniac's influence will have Brainiac's own glowing purple eyes, which usually don't become obvious to Taskforce X until some form of dramatic reveal.
  • The trailer first shows Superman rescuing the pilot of a downed helicopter, looking relatively normal. However, vaporizing the pilot with his heat vision is the first sign that he isn't himself, and he keeps his eyes at the ready, burning red-hot, for the rest of his appearance.
  • The Batman Reveal trailer shows Batman's glowing purple eyes through his cowl after he kills a security guard. Harley points out that he doesn't kill, but has to ask if the body is okay after Batman chucks him down from the rafters.
• Retcon: The first iteration of Deadshot, who was initially treated as the real Floyd Lawton, is revealed to be an imposter who took on the mantle while the current Deadshot was out of the game. Lawton remarks that he still has to deal with this "phony, steampunk-ass lookin' dude". The other Squad members also lampshade the change: Boomerang believes that the faker is the real deal, while Harley theorizes that he's a "long-lost twin of another race". Eventually it's revealed that the Deadshot from earlier games is actually from Earth-2 who was somehow sent to Earth-1 by Luthor.
• Role-Reversal Boss: More of an "encounter" than a full boss fight, but "Knight at the Museum" has you facing the Brainwashed and Crazy Batman for the first time, and he uses all the classic predator skills that you honed in the previous games. He shuts off the lights, disables your weapons with the Disruptor, leaves Explosive Gel all over the floor, blinds you with smoke bombs, and picks off all four Squad members with takedowns.
  Harley Quinn: My guys picked off one-by-one, this is all feelin' real familiar.
• Ruder and Cruder: Befitting of a game that stars Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang, the humor and language are much more vulgar here than in the Arkham games. This is notably the first game in the franchise where characters use the F-bomb.
• Sequel Hook: Even though the Squad manages to defeat Brainiac, there are twelve more alternate versions of him scattered across the multiverse that must be hunted down, setting up future content seasons and DLC.
• Shooting Superman:
  • The teaser trailer ends with a boomerang harmlessly bouncing off of Superman's head, though annoying him just enough to prevent him from using his heat vision right on the spot. Boomerang tries to pass it off as King Shark who threw it.
  • The gameplay reveal trailer has Flash, a metahuman that in most continuities can outrun sound, light, and even time itself, genuinely disgusted and insulted by the idea that Deadshot and Harley are gunning for him with firearms.
    Flash: ...Really?! Why don't you just MAIL me the bullet?!
  • In game proper, the Squad does end up shooting Flash (and later Superman) to death... but only after getting specialized gear to sever Flash from the Speed Force, and coating their bullets with Kryptonite, respectively.
• Smug Super: The trailer shows that Deadshot, true to his catchphrase, never misses, and he never misses a chance to let anyone know it, either. The others all call him on it in unison.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: As Deadshot lines up a shot at the Flash, Captain Boomerang outright chastises him for thinking it's going to work by snarking "Why you just mail him the bullet?!" before he fires; after the Flash has moved from Deadshot's line of sight to standing amongst the Suicide Squad, Harley hastily takes another shot which the Flash dodges, before sarcastically asking the exact same thing that Boomerang had done before the first shot.
• Stylistic Suck: While the Batman Experience exhibit accurately recounts the events of the Arkham trilogy, many of the voice over's for each segment, which reinact various lines said by the villains, are overdramatic, and poorly delivered. Might have something to do with Jack Ryder being the curator.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: Despite prior Arkham games doing their best to avoid this trope, here the problem of superheroes not helping gets a lot more hard to avoid. Despite the battle with Brainiac taking weeks by the time the story begins, only Wonder Woman and the Flash are seen fighting the brainwashed League, and the Flash is quickly taken out. Other than some evidence Waller sent previous Squads in, there is no sign of any other teams or heroes interfering despite plenty of Easter Eggs showing there are superheroes who live and operate from Metropolis.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: The Justice League's own Hall of Justice is a rather glaring example of this, as the Suicide Squad are easily able to break into the building via the subway tunnels with a few explosives. They then help themselves to the functional villain equipment the League keeps as mementos and museum exhibits, that are only secured by glass cases. Later, the Squad is able to gain access to the Hall's highly secure Inner Sanctum just because they happened to have the Flash's thumb, and Harley is able to hack the Inner Sanctum's computer due to her knowledge about the Bat Computer's voice commands. It doesn't take long before A.R.G.U.S. moves in and appropriates the Hall as their own field HQ.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Despite sharing an interest in protecting Earth, Luthor and Waller despise each other and initially refuse to work together to fight Brainiac. Luthor-2 eventually ends up forming an uneasy alliance with Waller when it's clear they can't defeat Brainiac individually, but Waller makes it clear she will find some excuse to arrest him once everything is over.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Batman tries to pull one against the Squad, but an unimpressed Harley interrupts him and counters with her own before executing him.
• This Is Gonna Suck: The Suicide Squad's reaction to discovering their mission is to kill Superman in the first trailer.
• Truer to the Text: Much like the comics, the Gizmo in this game is an adult with dwarfism, instead of a Bratty Half-Pint like in Teen Titans (2003) and Teen Titans Go!, or an adult of average height as in Titans (2018).
• Twilight of the Supers: If the game's story is treated as a sequel to the Arkham series, and considering the events herein, the Justice League - no word on any other superteam - are brainwashed by Brainiac and massacres the city of Metropolis, forcing Amanda Waller to assemble the Task Force X to kill the heroes. At the end of the game, Task Force X accomplishes the impossible, and the Justice League go down one by one as villains they became under Brainiac, including Batman himself.
• Villain Protagonist: The Suicide Squad are a group of supervillains recruited from prison to do the government's bidding in exchange for reduced sentences. It is even taken further than most incarnations of the Squad, since the majority of their primary targets except Brainiac are brainwashed superheroes, rather than being worse supervillains than themselves or political regimes.
• Villain Respect: In his bio, Harley describes Batman as "a guy who's just NICE," owing to the fact that he continuously sent his villains (including Harley herself) back to Arkham to be rehabilitated instead of just killing them and ending their threats for good.
• Voodoo Shark: The game explains Deadshot being a different race than the Deadshot featured in Arkham City and Arkham Origins by explaining that the latter is actually an imposter from another universe. Not only does this not explain how Batman, the World's Greatest Detective, managed to be tricked by a man who didn't even have the same skin color as the original, it manages to raise a score of questions about how the imposter got to our universe in the first place, why they decided to take over the role of the original Deadshot once there, or how the imposter Deadshot managed to trick dozens of the original Deadshots contacts for years.
• Weaponized Exhaust: The trailer shows Deadshot frying some mooks by shifting his weight back to expose them to the full power of his jetpack.
• Wham Line: Not so much the line itself, but who's saying it in the Batman reveal trailer; the late Kevin Conroy, in one of his final performances as the Dark Knight.
  Batman: I am vengeance. I am the night. I am BATMAN.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Despite now being completely unfettered due to their brainwashing and having more than enough capability to track down the Squad and kill them on the spot, the Justice League repeatedly insists on leaving the Squad alive in an attempt to capture or just taunt them. One egregious example is the Flash killing Lex Luthor by ripping out his heart before anyone, let alone the victim, notice. Instead of repeating the same feat with the rest of Task Force X, he instead insists on playing keep away, which allows the Squad the chance to kill him. Arguably the worst part of it is the fight just before that point, where The Flash can show the ability to completely strip Boomerang to his boxers in the blink of an eye, but doesn't use the opportunity to inflict any physical damage to him. Ironically enough, the Squad, who are actual supervillains who are generally prone to this trope, completely avert it as they kill each Justice League member the first chance they get.
• Worf Had the Flu: How the game gets around the Suicide Squad being very outmatched in power to the Justice League is that they use one of the anti-League devices before the fight begins. Flash gets hit by anti-speed force tech, Superman catches a gold kryptonite boomerang etc.
• Writer on Board: Harley's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Batman near the end of the game about how he beats and mentally abuses the criminals he fights is particularly jarring since it's completely out of character for the Arkham-verse versions of Batman and Harley. However, it does make more sense from the viewpoint of the writer of that speech having particular criticisms against the idea of Batman in general that they wanted to air, especially since Harley espoused meta knowledge of Batman that she should not have known.

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