Everyone wants to be Batman, but no one wants to train like him. Welcome to the world of Gotham City Imposters, where wannabe superheroes (called Bats) and villains (called Jokerz) kill and maim themselves in the name of saving or destroying the city — imagine if Civil War re-enactors used silly names, real weapons, dressed up like a giant bats, and fought 6v6, and you’ll get a pretty good idea as to just how absurd and demented GCI can seem — two qualities that the industry could use more of in a market dominated by military shooters.
You can tell that GCI developer Monolith Productions took the premise and ran with it. While the reductive and cynical amongst us might see a game that can be described as a “shooter with a funny art style,” and declare it a Team Fortress 2 clone, Monolith has created their own game in GCI. It’s refreshing to see the studio that made a name for itself with the laugh-out-loud funny No One Lives Forever series get the chance to create another humorous game — given that the studio’s two most recent franchises, F.E.A.R. and Condemned, traded in humor for some dark subject matter. Narrative and stylistic trappings aside, the developers’ experience with first-person shooters shows through in many subtle ways; from the ease of aiming to the size of the magazines on the starting weapons — which when fired at a target’s center of mass, seem to run out of ammo just before downing an enemy (the takeaway: aim for the head.)
