Gotham City Impostors

I am a huge batman fan! I watched all the movies, I watched all the T.V. shows and I have read more than my fair share of the comic books. I love the character of the dark knight himself but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in Gotham City itself where you have characters like Batman and Joker doing battle in the streets. I always wondered what kind of effect it would have on the citizens themselves, although we've seen what it could do in the last dark knight movie this game takes it to the next level.

 You play as either team Bats or team Jokers (I don't remember if it's spelled with a z or not) as you go head to head in a Impostors spin on your standard FPS fair. The two modes on offer in the beta are Fumigation which is like domination from Call of Duty where two teams are tasked to capture and secure three gas canisters for a set amount of time after which the team that held down the most gas canisters for the most time wins. The winning team is then treated to seeing the other team all collapse due to joker gas or by a swarm of bats (my personal favorite). The other mode playable is psych warfare where two teams are to go after the same battery to then connect to a speaker box system that then when activated starts spouting propaganda which causes members of the losing team to be unable to attack while the game tells them how much they suck (so much fun), best out of three wins the match. As you can tell impostors takes a more comedic spin on the batman universe instead of a more serious one and it works in it's favor! At times I found myself laughing at the stuff the character that just killed me would say as well as that of the my own. In a game where you bounce on trampolines to get to higher vantage points or equip your character with roller skates to make him/her run faster, it's obvious this isn't a game to take seriously.

Impostors is all about customization, after a few matches I was ready to customize my character's weapon load out and the way she looked because nothing says I'm hardcore like a bat chick with a toto, knee high stockings, a cardboard cowl and a freaking rocket launcher! One of the games main pillars is customization and it shows while playing I almost never ran across two characters that looked exactly the same and often after ever match I would run the load out screen to see what new stuff I unlocked for my character.

Despite all this there are a few technical problems. At points I found myself waiting 10 minutes just to find a match. In some more extreme cases I had to back out of matchmaking and re enter just to find a match. Normally after the match got started things would run smooth but there was occasional lag and freeze ups during gameplay but this is to be expected during a beta so I don't let it take to much away from the game.



In all I had a lot of fun playing the beta and I would love to pick this up when it's finally released. It does have some technical hurdles to overcome but hopefully those will be smashed in the final product. It's a breath of fresh air to see a FPS that not doing what Call of Duty or Battlefield is doing, instead it taking it's own approach to the FPS genre and until Boarderlands 2 comes out that is desperately needed and this game is absolutely on my radar of games I will be playing in the coming months right after Mass Effect and Kingdoms Of Amalur.