The latest trailer for Rocksteady Studio’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which debuted at DC FanDome, does not include any gameplay footage. It does, however, have some shout-outs to the Batman: Arkham games, which it’s weirdly a kind of sequel to. (It also has some banging music, decent editing, and some of the jokes land.)
For starters, the opening recreates the beginning of Arkham Asylum with the drive past the “hitchhikers may be escaping patients” sign, and the scene of Amanda Waller recruiting the squad is set in the game’s first combat area. (Waller isn’t played by the same voice actor as she was in Arkham Origins, but instead is voiced and mocapped by Debra Wilson, who voiced Waller in Telltale’s Batman: The Enemy Within. You may also know her from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or Mad TV.)
During the sequence where the Suicide Squad gears up with help from Gizmo, a kind of evil MacGyver from the comics, a couple of items from the Arkham series appear. King Shark puts on the bowler hat the Riddler wore in Arkham City, and Harley Quinn fires Batman’s grapnel gun. Seems like Gizmo has a collection of trophies and gadgets belonging to Arkhamverse characters, including a bat-glider and the super-speed boomerang Captain Boomerang uses to zip around.
Later on there’s a junker Batmobile with a repurposed Batsignal for a headlight, which has the same X shape across its face as the version on top of the GCPD building in Arkham Knight, though there’s no hint as to who’s driving it. Two more villains from the series also return: Poison Ivy is apparently alive and well if her vines appearing at the 2.10 mark are anything to go by, and the Penguin’s regrown some of his hair but still has that beer-bottle monocle embedded in his eye.
Last year, Rocksteady creative director Sefton Hill described Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as a hybrid between the Arkham games and some “powerful, awesome gunplay” in an open-world Metropolis. It’ll have drop-in/drop-out co-op for up to four players, but can apparently be played solo too, with AI controlling whichever characters you don’t pick. It’s due in 2022.