Warning: this article contains full spoilers for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League!
After a long series of delays, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is out in the world. And DC fans all want to know — do you actually kill the Justice League? How does this bloody adventure end?
Now that the game is out of early access and available to all players, we’re here to break down the ending to the new Suicide Squad game, how it impacts the Arkham-verse, and how it sets up future DLC campaigns. Because if there’s one thing clear by the time the credits roll, it’s that Harley Quinn and the gang still have a lot of killing ahead of them.
Do You Actually Kill the Justice League?
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League does indeed live up to its name. The entire Justice League is dead by the end of the game, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Green Lantern. Most of these iconic heroes are brainwashed by Brainiac to aid in his conquest of Earth, leaving Amanda Waller only too happy to recruit Task Force X to assassinate them.
How does such a motley crew of incarcerated supervillains (only one of whom even has superhuman powers) manage to annihilate the world’s greatest super-team? It may seem like a stretch, but the game works to justify that major power gap. The team is aided by a number of fellow villains throughout the game, including Toyman, Lex Luthor, Penguin, and Gizmo, all of whom provide useful gadgets or anti-metahuman weaponry. For example, the team is decked out in anti-Speed Force tech, allowing them to take down the Fastest Man Alive. Later, they use Gold Kryptonite-laced weapons to level the playing field with Superman.
The game also positions Batman as a vital resource against the Justice League. The Squad discovers a recording Batman left behind intended for his sidekicks, one designed to help them take on the Justice League should the team ever go rogue. Batman has compiled a series of “Babel” files, contingency plans for each member of the League. That’s a reference to the comic book storyline JLA: Tower of Babel, where Ra’s al Ghul steals Batman’s contingency plans and uses them to take down the team himself.
It should be pointed out that Wonder Woman is the one Justice League member who isn’t compromised by Brainiac in the game. She plays a supporting role in the story, occasionally popping up to battle her fallen comrades. Wonder Woman eventually takes on Superman and manages to stab him with a shard of Kryptonite, but the Man of Steel kills her in the process.
As you’d expect, not all DC fans are thrilled with how the League is taken down in the game. Batman’s death in particular is a source of major contention, considering that this is the same version of the Dark Knight from Rocksteady’s Arkham games. These deaths also raise the question of how the world can move forward with a Justice League to protect it. Who fills that power vacuum? We don’t know if this is something that might be explored in future story content. Perhaps a team like the Justice Society will step in, or perhaps the League will be rebuilt with a more eclectic roster of heroes. Did someone say Justice League Detroit?
The Final Battle With Brainiac
As befits a game where the villains are forced to become the saviors of the world, Lex Luthor is one of your chief allies in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Two of them, in fact. Luthor is actually killed by the brainwashed Flash, but it’s later revealed that he was collaborating with his counterpart from Earth-2. Earth-2 Luthor crosses over to Earth-1 and becomes the Squad’s most valuable asset in the ramp-up to battling Brainiac. This multiverse will form the backbone of the future of the game going forward.
It’s this Luthor who discovers the dark truth behind Brainiac’s conquest. Brainiac has been colluding with 12 of his alternate selves from different universes. Their ultimate goal isn’t just to conquer Earths, but the entire multiverse. Luthor builds a device to extract information from Brainiac’s mind, hoping to uncover a way to stop this
As you’d expect, the game does culminate in a final boss battle with Brainiac. Harley and the team are decked out in tech that protects them from Brainiac’s mind-control powers, and they come bringing the finest anti-metahuman weaponry they’ve been able to scavenge in Metropolis. Brainiac modifies his own body for this final battle, allowing him to tap into the Speed Force like Flash and move across the battlefield at lightning speed.
After a long, frantic battle, the Suicide Squad finally prevails over Brainiac. He’s taken out — but not killed — and imprisoned inside a miniature storage device. Though the Squad very nearly succeeds in suffocating him in the process. Ultimately, Waller and Luthor are able to harvest the information they need from Brainiac’s mind, after which the villain does die and his body dematerializes. It’s at this point the team learns just how much work they have left ahead of them.
The Brainiac of the Elseworlds
As mentioned, Earth-2 Luthor discovers that Brainiac has been colluding with 12 of his alternate selves from other universes. The information harvested from Brainiac’s mind gives them a starting point, but only by hunting down and killing the remaining Brainiacs can the Suicide Squad truly end the threat to their world and the multiverse at large.
That’s effectively where the game ends. It’s a much more open-ended conclusion than we saw in the various Arkham games and that’s by design. Whereas Arkham Asylum and its sequels told finite stories with definitive endings, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is setting up future playable content with its ending.
The ending is basically a foundation for Rocksteady’s DLC road map, which will consist of at least four seasons of new content. Each season will add a playable character to the roster (the first being the Joker) and multiple versions of Brainiac to battle. The first season will be released in March 2024, with the rest to follow over the course of a year.
It’s unclear just how much new story content will be included in each season. However, we do know the DLC deals directly with the concept of Elseworlds, another name for the DC multiverse. That’s how Joker is being added to the cast despite the Clown Prince of Crime having died at the end of 2011’s Arkham City. The new levels will likely be set in other Earths in the multiverse, and may even feature alternate versions of the Justice Leaguers killed in the main story mode.
The real question is whether this is all building to a true ending for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. What happens when the 13th and final Brainiac is killed? Is there a special ending rewarding players for sticking with the game for a full year? We may have to wait a while yet before learning how this game truly ends.
What do you think of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s ending? Will you be playing all the DLC in the hope of unlocking the true ending to the game? Let us know in the comments. And be sure to check out IGN’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League review.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.