DC's Justice League: Cosmic Chaos Review

DC and by extension WB has been making questionable decisions for years now when it comes to all mediums, I don't even know where to start really and I don't want to go on a rant revealing my hardcore biases but to keep it short, my patience with WB and the DC brand by extension is wearing thin. So with all that said how was this game?

For a kid's game, it's decent and I do like some of the things this game does but I can't help but feel like for everything this game does well, the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games do better.

I'll start with the good, the story and writing is enjoyable. The bantering between Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and all the other characters are humorous and it does a decent enough job at keeping me engaged. The voice acting is directed well enough to the point where it feels like the actors are doing a good job selling me on the material. It parodies DC characters a lot while also having it's share of more serious moments. Speaking of Superman, it's great that WB finally made a DC game where you play as Superman as a good guy as opposed to making him evil like the Injustice games and the upcoming Suicide Squad game, it's a shame it took a kids game to do it, but I am glad it's here at all. I also like how this game has a Superman villain in it and it's not Lex Luthor or Darkseid which I swear the amount of Superman and JL media coming out now especially the JL, you'd think Darkseid was the only villain the JL has. I do think Mister Mxyzpltk is portrayed pretty well here, his voice acting and material does a good job at selling me on a villain that can't really do anything overly harmful for a game made for kids and he's a pretty solid choice to have for the game's tone. I am however not so big of a fan of Starro showing up because of his recent appreance in the Suicide Squad movie but he's decent enough.

And now here comes the bad, outside of the writing and story which I find to be charming and entertaining, the actual gameplay itself while not bad just feels like a worse Marvel Ultimate Alliance, I'd even goes as far to say the DC Lego games are more enjoyable. My big issues with the combat is the lack of button combinations which I will admit, I don't make a big deal out of as other people but it does head into the realm of questionable when the triangle button isn't even being used for anything. So as a result a lot of combat is spend mashing square and on occasion holding square to shake things up, doing special and ultimate and rinse repeat. There is no team attacks and your special attacks mainly consist of doing 2 moves, you can't even do team attacks like in later MUA games. Points to the game's favor, the game does shake things up with exploration and parts where you get a super powerful weapon to hold to kill enemies faster to avoid the game from being too monotonous but even the levels start eventually get reused a lot. Another issue I have is that enemies don't give health drops when killed, this is one thing I prefer Marvel Ultimate Alliance over X-Men Legends over, and this game having health packs be shared makes the parts where you fight large waves of enemies to be a long battle of attrition until you lose all your health packs, I eventually started playing on easy and then story difficulty due to how many same and overwhelming amounts of enemies the game throws at you. Don't let that fool you however, you can still possibly get game overs if Starro face hugs your entire party on Story difficulty. Add to the overwhemling enemies waves that they are also damage sponges too with the bigger enemies especially and if it weren't for Story difficulty, I wouldn't be able to beat this game. The final boss is just crazy with how many enemies you have to contend with plus the final boss, and you can get a game over if your party gets face hugged. I only won because of a glitch where I got my party face hugged but I knocked the boss' health bar in time for the final cutscene to activate.

Overall, if you are a DC fan, I say try the game out, if you are not, wait for a sale, it's one of the more tolerable products WB has made in recent times but don't expect this game to reach the heights of the Batman Arkham games, Insomniac Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel Ultimate Alliance or even the Lego games.