DC Comics’ Suicide Squad has been around in one form or another for decades. The latest incarnation, which started in comics in 2011, features fan favorite characters both new and old, like the mysterious Savant, sharp-shooting and sharp-witted Deadshot, and psychotically gleeful fan favorite Harley Quinn. While the upcoming movie is all set to put Suicide Squad in DC’s limelight for the first time, the series is already getting attention elsewhere, such as in a mobile game released by Warner Brothers International Enterprises. Given the technical polish of their movie tie-in games like Edge of Tomorrow, expectations are high, and fans won’t be disappointed. Much like the iconic therapist-turned-psycho that will be appearing in the big screen version, mobile gaming’s take on Suicide Squad is frantic, outright insane, and drop-dead gorgeous.
The game drops you into an action-packed tutorial where you get to learn the fairly simple controls and get a taste of how the game will work. Naturally, this whetting of the appetite is not at all representative of just how completely frenetic things are actually going to get. In this wave-based first person shooter, which operates somewhat like a simpler Dead Trigger 2, players are tasked with taking out wave after wave of increasingly powerful enemies as one of three heroes. El Diablo brings the heat, roasting enemies to a crisp, Deadshot’s sniper rifle and wrist-mounted guns will make Swiss cheese out of most foes, and Harley Quinn’s ready to fill enemies with very big holes courtesy of a giant revolver, or knock them senseless with a baseball bat if they get too close. Each anti-hero has a special ability that’s activated in their own way; Deadshot can access “Marksman Mode”, a bullet-time of sorts, by scoring direct hits, for example.
Fans who download this looking to get a taste of the Suicide Squad world won’t be disappointed. Cel-shaded graphics look amazing, while keeping things GPU-friendly enough for recent mobile devices to have no trouble with the game on high settings, though a low spec mode is available for older or weaker devices. The arenas that you roam looking for enemies to smash, burn and litter with lead are just as detailed and beautifully shaded as the player models, with little things like Harley Quinn’s bangles, globs of blood from blown-out enemies, and bits of broken glass really sealing the deal. The game world isn’t as immersive as a huge RPG like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or an exceedingly beautiful game like Crysis, but for a quick-fix mobile title, Suicide Squad fans and shooter fans alike are unlikely to be dissatisfied. The game is available free of charge in the Play Store right now.
