I haven’t seen Suicide Squad and have no intention of doing so until Warner Bros. sends us out a copy when it hits home video. Look, I’m not against the film or anything, but this new DC movie universe has yet to grab me in any meaningful way. It all just seems so dark and depressing for the sake of being kewl instead telling a good story. It’s almost as if the entire world is just Gotham city and is populated by asshole super heroes. That being said, I stumbled upon the tie-in movie game while poking around the Google Play store over the weekend.
Suicide Squad: Special Ops is a free game that I completely expected to be full of in-app purchases, like most “free” things that make their home on the Google Play Store. The few screenshots showed off a first-person type game (a huge red flag for me on mobiles), but I figured I’d at least give it a shot and maybe learn a little about this movie version of the Suicide Squad. Look, ot was a slow weekend, okay.
Funny enough, Suicide Squad: Special Ops is not a bad; In fact it’s pretty darn good as a game in general. Suicide Squad: Special Ops is a first-person shooter that allows you to play with three of the main characters from the film. You can play as Deadshot who sports a rifle and wrist mounted pistols, Harley Quin who gets up close and personal with her bat and side arm, and El Diablo (weird choice) who only relies on only his flames.
Aside from El Diablo, each character has a limited number of bullets on one of their weapons. Harley will run out of bullets on her powerful magnum and Deadshot will quickly deplete his rifle. Throughout the game there are plenty of ammo caches, so getting more ammo isn’t terribly hard. It does take a little bit to reload at these crates and you’ll be vulnerable, so it best to pick them up at the start of an encounter.
The game is laid out nearly the same as that Call of Duty Zombies mode that was really popular a while back, only without doing any building or repairing of stuff. It’s a wave based game and after every few waves you can snag a special crate that allows you to upgrade an ability. It’s very simple, but it all works incredibly well on a phone; In my case the LG V10. Sliding across the left side of the screen moves your character and sliding on the right side aims your weapon.
A nice feature that I really liked is that all the firing is done automatically. All you have to do is aim at one of the enemies and the game takes care of the rest. It’s a nice system that lets you focus on one less thing as moving around will keep you busy enough. One thing that I really liked was that after each wave you can switch between any of the three characters to mix things up as you play as each have a very different style. Your two AI buddies will also help you fight during waves, and if you do die it’s not necessarily game over as you can switch to whoever is still alive.
There are a lot of different types of enemies, although they all look like bad versions of Swamp Thing. It’s probably explained in the movie, but I really can’t be bothered. There is the beginnings of a story here, but Suicide Squad: Special Ops knocks that crap off real quick and gets right to the action. Instead of a number of levels (of which they game looked to have at first) you simply move freely across three good-sized areas on a single map. There are two outside areas and one underground one that all look really nice. The entire game, in fact, looks pretty great on a small screen. Suicide Squad: Special Ops has this cartoon like filter and the game is pretty colorful, even if it take place in the depressing Snyder-verse.
Suicide Squad: Special Ops is a simplistic game, but it’ll grab your attention and makes for a fun few minutes of play every now and then. Even better is that there are no in-app purchases or ads that pop up while you play. The developers of this one really knew what they were doing and understood the limitations of a mobile platform, and for that they should be commended. How a crappy movie got such a fun little game is beyond me. Give this one a download as it’s a blast and one of the best mobile games of the year.
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