Gotham City Impostors: A Smart, Funny, Well-Built Shooter Where Nobody Is Batman

Gotham City Impostors is a first-person shooter where nobody is Batman. The game, developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, puts two teams of six against each other: amateurs in homemade costumes on one side, criminals dressed as the Joker on the other. It launched in February 2012 on PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360 as a downloadable title, not a disc.

That is the whole premise, and it is a good one. The game does not ask you to be the Dark Knight. It asks you to be a person who has decided to dress like him, badly, with a grapple gun and a rocket launcher made of PVC piping.

Trailer, via IGN.

Custom Costumes and Grappling Hooks

Gotham City Impostors supports up to 12 players at once. Players customize their costume, gadgets and other aspects of the game. The visual style is colorful and over-the-top, with settings that include an amusement park.

The gadget list is where the game separates itself from the era’s military shooters. Players get guns and knives, but also grappling hooks, glider wings, roller skates and explosives. The weapons run from conventional firearms to outlandish builds: a grenade shaped like a jack-in-the-box, a rocket launcher assembled from PVC pipe.

That mix matters. A first-person shooter lives or dies on movement, and glider wings and roller skates change how a map is read. A player on skates commits to a line. A player on a glider owns the air for a few seconds and then does not. The gadgets are not cosmetic. They are the argument.

The customization extends past the loadout. Costumes are player-built, which fits the fiction: these are people assembling an identity out of whatever they had. The game understands that a homemade costume is funnier and sadder than a real one.

Four Modes, One Battery

Gotham City Impostors shipped with four modes: “Psych Warfare,” “Fumigation,” “Bounty Hunter” and “Team Deathmatch.”

“Psych Warfare” is the standout. Two teams fight to bring a battery back to their base and hold it long enough for a machine to brainwash the other team. It is an escort and hold objective with a comic-book payoff, and it forces both teams to move.

“Fumigation” has players capture and hold three gasblasters, a type of command post, to push their gas level to 100%. Win as the Bats and the enemy is swarmed by bats. Win as the Jokerz and the enemy is suffocated by a poison cloud. The mode is a three-point control match with a better ending.

“Bounty Hunter” is the most interesting of the four on paper. Players win by collecting coins that enemy players drop when they die, and they can pick up a teammate’s dropped coins to deny the other team points. That second rule is the good one. It turns a deathmatch into a fight over territory that happens to be made of corpses.

“Team Deathmatch” does what it says: kill enemy players as fast as possible.

There are also “Challenges,” played alone, used to master gadgets and earn extra experience. And there is a training mode called “Initiation,” where the Bats’ leader instructs the player on how to use weapons and gadgets.

A Free-to-Play Second Life

Gotham City Impostors was not physically released. It arrived on Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade, on PlayStation 3 through the PlayStation Network, and on Microsoft Windows through Games for Windows – Live.

Then, on August 30, 2012, the PC version was re-released as a free-to-play title on Steam using Steamworks. That is a real shift in how the game was sold, and it is worth naming plainly. A paid downloadable shooter became a free-to-play one in the same calendar year. The game’s business model changed before most players had finished with it.

The free-to-play move was the right call for a multiplayer-only game with a small footprint. A 12-player shooter needs bodies. Charging at the door limits bodies. The re-release lowered the door.

What the Game Gets Right, and What It Does Not

The best thing about Gotham City Impostors is that it refuses the obvious adaptation. Batman games of this era reached for the myth. This one reaches for the costume, and the joke lands because the game plays it straight. The grappling hook is not a gag. The jack-in-the-box grenade is a gag, and it still kills you.

The four modes are uneven. “Psych Warfare” and “Fumigation” give a match a shape and a finish. “Team Deathmatch” gives it neither. “Bounty Hunter” has the sharpest rule in the game in the teammate-coin pickup, and it is the mode most likely to be misunderstood by a lobby that just wants to shoot.

The visual style is a strength. Colorful and over-the-top is a deliberate choice against the grey-brown shooters of 2012, and the amusement park setting earns it. A game about people in homemade costumes should look like a place where people in homemade costumes would go.

The weakness is structural. Multiplayer-only means the game is only as good as its population, and the free-to-play re-release on PC was an attempt to solve exactly that. It is not a content problem. It is a math problem, and no amount of customization fixes it.

The 7.3 out of 10 is a fair number. Gotham City Impostors is not a landmark shooter. It is a smart, funny, well-built one that arrived as a downloadable curio, changed its price, and asked a small audience to keep it alive. The gadgets are the reason to play. The premise is the reason to remember it.

What matters most here is the restraint of the premise. Monolith did not build a Batman game with a Batman in it. It built a game about the people who wish they were, and let them skate and glide and swing around an amusement park with a PVC rocket launcher. That is a stranger, better idea than the license usually gets.

first-person shooter · free-to-play · game review · Gotham City Impostors · Monolith Productions · Xbox 360