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PAX Prime Hands-On: Gotham City Impostors | PSNStores

PAX Prime Hands-On: Gotham City Impostors

Posted by on August 30th, 2011 | 2 Comments | Tags: , ,

If you listen to our podcast or pay close attention to the sarcastic nature of my posts about Gotham City Impostors, you would have inferred that, simply put, I don’t really care about the game. The character design and whole concept of the game seemed silly to me, like the real life faux superheroes that the game is partially based on. Chris kept telling me how he got to play it at E3 and that it’s actually not half bad. “Sure, Chris”, I’d say, then scoff away with my nose up, waiting for the next bit of news from anything but Gotham City Impostors. Well, I finally got to play the game for myself this weekend at PAX. Ready for it?

It’s good. It’s fun. Really, though, it is good fun.

I played with five other Batmen on my team on a city street map. We were playing the Fumigation game type against six Jokers. In Fumigation, the objective is to capture control points and keep control of them. The team with the majority of control points gains percentage points out of a total of 100%. There were three points on the map that I played on, so the team who held two at once would be gaining percentage points while the other team’s points would be decreasing at the same rate. There’s a total of 100%, remember, so the scores go back and forth according to who’s controlling what. The game boasts fully customizable loadouts, but I chose one of the default classes just to get in the game quicker and help my teammates out.

I wielded your standard automatic weapon as well as a pistol and a crowd control weapon. I also had an invisibility potion that turned me invisible as long as I had the left trigger depressed. This item was especially useful in a cap point game type as I could sneak into a point and reappear with guns blazing, take down a couple of jokers, then disappear back into thin air. The Jokers had their own special equipment items to fool around with including bear traps to defend cap points. I seemed to be one of the very few people on my team who knew how to play a FPS, so our odds of winning looked extremely dim. Then, someone put the controller down and walked away.

Enter developer of the game. A dev jumped on a few controllers down from me and he and I started barking commands back and forth. “Stay here, I’m going to cap point 2”; “Check point 1 while I stop 3 from being taken over”, etc. The rest of the team started picking up on the fact that this wasn’t a Deathmatch game type and that in order to win, we needed some semblance of communication and teamwork. When the round ended, we were at about 20% and the Jokers were at 80%. But we had two capture points. Sudden Death started, which basically increases the rate at which points are gained/lost. Since we had two points, we started digging ourselves out of the impossibly deep hole we dug ourselves into all game. Soon enough we controlled all three points and held them for half of a minute. The long and short of it is that as soon as we started communicating, we came back from a serious deficit to beat the Jokers in Sudden Death. It was rad.

The next day we talked with someone who is working on the game and he told us some general features of Gotham City Impostors. The three game types are Fumigation, Deathmatch, and Propaganda Machine. It’s a 6 vs 6 affair at max, but there’s probably an option to play with less people. As I mentioned before, the game allows you to fully customize your loadout with whatever weapons and equipment you want. There are also passive buffs called Fun Facts that you can equip to enhance abilities. For example, there’s an anti-sniper Fun Fact that makes your chances of surviving a headshot go up. It’s online only, and there are Calling Cards and weapon skins that can be achieved through completing challenges.

For more info, check our previous posts about the game. It’s fun, and I’m glad I got to play it to find that out.