Battlefield 6 Is One Thing, But I’ll Never Get The FPS Sequel I Really Want

There are some genres of video game that I find myself thoroughly engaging with, but unsure whether I’m actually having fun with them. The FPS is a perfect example of this. Of course, they’re competitive games by their very nature, and competition brings out the very, very worst in us.

If something like Mario Kart and other ever-popular kart racers can elicit screaming fury in the most mild-mannered of us – and I think we can all agree that they absolutely can – then there’s no hope for the FPS. Some of the worst hate mail and voice chat moments have come from my experiences with these shooters.

It’s all K/D ratios, howling at snipers and campers, and generally super serious business. The first FPS I truly fell in love with was a very different beast. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t sniping and camping and the resultant rage and pettiness, but there was a wonderfully ridiculous vibe to the whole thing that just felt so different. Does anybody else remember 2012’s Gotham City Impostors?

With excellent titles like the Arkham trilogy under his (Utility) belt, Gotham City Imposters absolutely won’t be the first Batman game that comes to mind for anyone. The Caped Crusader himself is nowhere to be seen in it, in fact.

Instead, the setup is this: The titular impostors (read excitable cosplayers) had chosen sides in the Batman vs Joker debate, taken the whole thing far too seriously, and a great Gotham turf war resulted. A little like the Turf War mode of the Splatoon series, and almost as absurdly colorful.

It lacked a single-player mode, which was a shame as the campaign can be a real gem of an FPS when done well. Still, I had a blast with the multiplayer.

As The Dark Knight made very plain indeed, dressing up as the Batman and imitating his crimefighting ways can have super serious repercussions for those who don their cheap imitation masks, and this is very much the case here too. The wannabe Jokers (stylized as Jokerz) may not have been malevolent masterminds like the real deal, but they also had an arsenal of very legitimate weapons.

Thus, Gotham City Impostors was a team game, with matches consisting of six Bats and six Jokers. As far as game modes go, I don’t think there’s a lot you can do to really innovative in an FPS, and that held true here. A simple team deathmatch, of course, was a given, and other modes featured objectives to either capture, defend, or capture and then defend.

The game didn’t not offer classes in the conventional sense, but there were still a lot of silly customization to enjoy. It wouldn’t exactly be enough to make you an FPS fan, but a lot of fun for those who were.

Body Types were an interesting inclusion, allowing players to choose between Speedy, Nimble, Tough, Burly, and Mighty for their character. There was a considerable HP difference between them too, with the Speedy having just 100 HP, scaling all the way up to 280 HP for the Mighty.

Madcap Customization Options Abound

The disadvantage with the latter, of course, was that you were an enormous bullet sponge of a target that even opponents with the most questionable aim couldn’t miss, and were also super slow. The three options in between these two extremes gave you a bit more leeway in either direction, along with the standard ‘right in the middle’ pick.

My favorite aspect of the title was the creativity of the Support Items and Gadgets. Through these systems your character could define their playstyle through a range of options, from the Glider Rig to the Grapple Gun, from a Bear Trap to an exploding jack-in-the-box trap.

It really was deviously satisfying to place a Trap-in-the-Box around a corner while being pursued by an opponent, then promptly scoring a surely infuriating kill as it exploded on them.

On top of that, character customization also allowed you to add two Fun Facts, with which you could boost your speed, stop headshots being so devastating when scored on you, and so on. Balancing-wise, I found Impostors to be a real treat, because there was always a choice that was very effective against whatever the opponents were using, and there was always a way to boost your favored playstyle.

Weapons themselves were a selection of quite conventional fare such as shotguns, and sniper rifles, though I appreciated the absurdity of the Boarding Party. You don’t see rocket launchers that fire homing, skull-pecking parrots (a humorous spoof of Turok’s infamously gross Cerebral Bore) every day.

The weapon mods, too, were a mixture of conventional and hilarious. A larger magazine is all well and good, but I generally preferred the B.O. Sniffer mod that allowed me to detect enemies in the vicinity through the cartoon stink lines they gave off.

In short, Impostors combined an excellent sense of humor with a solid competitive core, and I played it more than I have any other FPS.

This brings us, though, to the tragic conclusion, and the reason why I’ve had to refer to the game in the past tense (as much as it pains me) this whole time. It’s been forgotten by all but the most faithful today, with server closures and the game being delisted on multiple platforms.

In an interview with Time Extension, Monolith Productions’ then-designer Craig Hubbard stated that he feels the game was ultimately doomed by being designed with the free-to-play format in mind, then being switched to a paid model, while in development.

“When the operations team put it on Xbox Arcade and PSN or whatever, they listed all the microtransactions in the marketplace as opposed to having them in game,” Hubbard told the outlet. “So it just looked like we had like a thousand dollars worth of microtransactions and it killed the reviews.”

It’s now all but inaccessible, and there’s not exactly a widespread clamor for a sequel among the wider gaming public. Sometimes, though, the strangest and most unexpected games are revisited out of nowhere.

There are lots of retro FPS games that are still well worth playing, and though this would be pushing ‘retro,’ the argument stands.