Gotham City Impostors Review

Quiet or Papa spank!

With Batman gone into hiatus, the city of Gotham has run amuck with wannabe fanboys and deadly klepto clowns ravaging the city. You take on the mantle of either the cape or the clown in this new wacky multiplayer FPS befitting its title. It takes all your preconceived ideas of a Batman game and throws it out the crazy window. In fact, this is a game about Batman without the "Bat" or any of the usual suspect of characters or cast in the Batman universe.

Now to set things up, this is a pure multiplayer game without a single-player campaign to water things down. It has the standard team deathmatch, Fumigation, and Psych warfare modes. There is also the boring but necessary tutorial and challenges to assist in better use and understanding of each gadget. Each mode is your standard affair of what you expect out of any FPS with a dash of its own flavor from the Gotham universe.

Fumigation is your basic domination mode with each team vying for canisters of poison chemicals to either neutralize or eradicate the opposing team. Psych warfare is a mash-up of neutral bomb, pitting both teams in a battle for a battery to power their brainwashing mechanisms that, once activated with the battery, send your opponents fleeing about every which way, flailing their arms uncontrollably for a terrifying 14 seconds. In the end all of the modes are the same hum-drum that we have played time after time, but what make it interesting are the abilities of the gadgets. It’s an awesome marriage of the Call of Duty playstyle and builds with the craziness and gadget-wielding psychos of Team Fortress.

All the maps consist of different areas of Gotham City, albeit with a huge coat of sunshine and happiness. Although they are painted with words like "crime" and "gritty", they look like the antithesis to every Batman comic I've ever read and every episode I've watched of the animated show. I think this is the only time I will ask this in my life as an FPS player, but please give me a bit of grey and drab. I am not saying that all the maps should be this way, but for the love of Robin, give me a night level.

On the upside, I do love that the maps have a deeper dimension due to the gadgets like the bat glider and the bat claw. They might not sound like much, but they develop a sense of verticality to the maps and provide some great ways to escape or to gain a height advantage. Indeed, the gadgets in the game are what give the game its Zsasz (see what I did there?). It’s what breaks it apart from the FPS mold, and they're not gimmicky at all. The roller skates (which are my personal favorite) give you the ability to cover more ground at ridiculous speeds and grant the ability to jump of ramps to make quick retreats when need be. The lists of gadgets go on and on, ande every gadget has another gadget that counters the other, making the game fairly balanced.

Along with the gadgets, you also have different builds of characters; from puny to mighty, each body type delivers different stats. You can be small and speedy in exchange of health, or you can be tall and meaty but lack in speed. There is a bevy of combinations that you can try to customize and craft your game style.

On top of that they also allow fun facts (aka perk system) that allows you to choose two boosts to aid you in your fight, and if that wasn’t enough, they also have a killstreak system called rampage. Rampage awards your basic killstreak rewards, like UAV to spot enemies on your mini-map and faster speed movement if you do well. Als, players that have a tough start to a match are helped by giving them a boost in extra damage or health to help even the score. There are Challenges galore that help you unlock all the collectibles in the game and give you a boost in XP for completing them, and there are over 1000 levels for you to conquer on your account alone. Although I highly doubt that anyone would get there soon, Gotham gives you the tools to make it possible.

For the price tag, Gotham City Impostors is incredible. It has bazillions of unlockable items including costume designs for each for your characters for both the bats and jokers. The game hosts a ton of weaponry and gadgets that rival the armory of Call of Duty. My only big gripe are the micro-transactions they added that help boost experience, buy costumes, unlock certain mascots, and expedite the time it takes how long to queue players into a working lobby. But for $14.99, you get a crazy bat Call of Duty with Team Fortress humor. What more do you want?