Following the success of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, there was a rush of new fighting games hitting the market in the early 90’s. A lot of them were straight up rip offs of those other games, but there were also several that used popular characters from already existing franchises. Today, we’re talking about one of the latter. Justice League Task Force is a fighting game for the Super Nintendo by Blizzard Entertainment and Sunsoft featuring characters from DC Comics. Is it any good though?

Quick answer, not really, but it’s fine. Justice League Task Force is one of those games that I played all the time as a kid, not necessarily because it was actually all that good, but because it was good enough and was one of the games I had access to. That puts it in a weird spot, where it’s hard for me to say to much positive about the game, but I do have nostalgia for it.

But let’s start with the positive. Justic League Task Force is one of the few fighting games from this era with a true story mode in it. We see it all the time now, especially after the positive reception to Mortal Kombat (9)’s story mode, but back then, you mostly just got an arcade mode and a versus mode. There’s not a whole lot to the story though. You pick one of the members of the Justice League (the game features playable villains too, but not in the story mode) and see a little bit of dialogue between standard fighting game fights. The story revolves around Darkseid taking over the earth with doppelganger versions of the good guys, which is how they explain having to fight other heroes. In a nice detail, when you beat one of the fake heroes, they explode like a robot, whereas when you defeat a villain, they just fall down.

The game also has a very nice look to it, and has characters that look accurate to how they were portrayed in the comics in that time period. That means we have Superman with a mullet and Aquaman with really long hair. The backgrounds are all nicely detailed too. I particularly liked Batman’s stage, which is on the rooftops of Gotham city, featuring its classic gothic architecture. I also like that when a match ends on that stage, a bunch of bats fly across the screen. Another standout is Despero’s stage, a bar aboard a spaceship. It has lots of cool aliens watching the fight and stars flying past the windows.

Unfortunately, it’s also just a fairly standard fighting game. It has the basics, you have light, medium, and heavy versions of punches and kicks, and you have special moves. You’re not going to pull off any crazy combos or anything here, but you’ll be throwing projectiles when your opponent is far away and be punching and kicking when they’re up close. I played through the story mode as Green Arrow, who had very simple special moves to pull off. They were all different versions of doing a quarter circle forward or backwards on the D-pad followed by one of the attack buttons. His moves are a bunch of projectiles, a fire arrow, an ice arrow, an arrow that shoots downward and explodes. Makes sense for the character.

As well as the story mode, there’s also a “battle” mode and your typical versus mode. Battle mode is really just an arcade mode. You can pick any character, including the villains, and fight one opponent after another. I’m not sure what you get at the end, most fighting games have character endings at the end, but I didn’t finish the battle mode. I did finish the story mode though, and was told to play on a higher difficulty, probably because I put it on the easiest setting.

At the end of the day, yeah, I had fun with Justice League Task Force. I don’t think I can really recommend it though, there’s much better fighters. There’s even much better fighters featuring DC characters. But for what it is, I think it’s fun enough and I was happy to revisit it.