What I’d Like to See: A Suicide Squad Video Game

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One of the tossed-off tidbits that came out of Comic-Con 2010 was the development of a Suicide Squad game. Geoff Johns let the word slip over at Comic Alliance, saying the project would be “hardcore violent”. The film rights for the DC Comics riff on the Dirty Dozen were optioned a while ago and it’s a safe bet that said game will be joined to said film.

Now, I was a huge fan of the John Ostrander & Luke McDonnell run on Suicide Squad in the late ’80s. It was one of the first superhero comics to overtly tie politics into the motivations of its plots on a regular basis. The Squad took on super-terrorists, and team leader Rick Flagg even tried to kill a corrupt senator. Who knows what the film will be like, but there’s a few things I’d like to see in a Suicide Squad video game.

A Big, Dynamic Cast of Characters

The core conceit of the Suicide Squad–a fully deniable black-ops killteam made up of supervillains commandeered into serving the U.S. government–let the series’ creators rotate loads of characters into the missions. The game should follow suit. I’d also love to see combo attacks, like Nightshade’s teleportation linked to Deadshot’s unerring aim for across-the-map headshots.

Boomerangs. Thrown by Captain Boomerang.

With Digger Harkness, you got the perfect opportunity to make an occasionally lame gimmick or character into a scene-stealer. He gets all the best lines, doesn’t have to be morally upstanding and rocks the Oz accent. And his super-skill is perfect for a video game setting. You could use a variety of camera angles to make the precision aiming of throwing a boomerang come to life and could make a mini-game of catching it in the rebound, having it reward players like the Gears of War active reload.

Count Vertigo.

His power is to make you vomit. And that’s the least of it. At its most impressive, his skills could let designers turn a game environment topsy-turvy, suddenly throwing enemies on the battlefield into an M.C. Escher-style landscape where down is suddenly up. It would look awesome and there’d be enemy vomiting. So, double win.

Major characters should die. Often.

Everybody made a big fuss when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare offed a major character. Well, the Suicide Squad comic killed off its leader Rick Flagg, Adam Cray (a guy who was the Atom for a hot minute) and a few others I can’t recall at the moment. Each mission of this game should be like the last chunk of Mass Effect 2, governed by algorithms and mechanics that leave you unsure as to who might kick the bucket. It’d be a great way to add in replayability, too.