ComicsAlliance had a bit of fun with the idea of Monolith's Gotham City Impostors initially. What's a bit of harmless FPS action with a monstrously popular franchise to candy coat it, after all? It's not like the REAL Batman was picking up machine guns and the like to murder a bunch of clowns dolled up Joker style. Seeing the E3 trailer in action, though? We can't help but wonder why a title more or less in the vein of Team Fortress wouldn't have benefited from a less polarizing skin. Check out the trailer after the jump to see how bonkers you think the game looks in action.The game's premise is simple enough. Each character is an "ordinary" person with a day job who just so happens to know how to operate heavy weaponry and feels compelled to join a confederation of insane cosplayers with either Batman or Joker leanings devoted to waging deadly warfare on the opposition. I'm into irony as much as the next blogger, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any group of even '90s Mountain Dew level X-Treeeem hipsters who could reconcile murdering people while roleplaying as The Caped Crusader. Touting the tagline "When Gotham City goes to war, ordinary people become extraordinary" just seems to rub in the fact that this brand of Batmannery completely misses the point. It's kind of a shame too, because aside from the Bats faux pass, it seems like a solid cartoony FPS.

To the game's credit, it cites a comic book story for at least partial inspiration. A recent Facebook post points to David Hine, Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens' "Impostor" storyline (being collected in August) that ran through Detective Comics #867-870 with this solicit copy:

Batman must stop mass violence caused by an impostor posing as The Joker. A warped variation of the Joker drug has caused those who use it to suffer mental breakdowns and embrace anarchy and chaos. With riots cropping up throughout Gotham City, the citizens find themselves divided into two gangs: one led by a Batman impostor whose mission is to bring law and order back to the streets, the other led by a Joker impostor out to punish the innocent and set Gotham ablaze. And in the middle of it all is the real Dark Knight - but can even Batman stop an entire city?

Without a Batman to stop the conflict, however, it seems like gamers only have the option to indulge in totally not being Batman in any way. Isn't the awesome-looking (and accurate) Batman: Arkham City going to be enough of a ca$h cow?

As resident Batmanologist Chris Sims noted in his last post covering this contradictory gaming concoction, "If there's a 'Game Over' screen in this thing where Batman shows up to berate you for wearing hockey pads, then son, you just got yourself a sale." We can only hope for such a mechanic when the downloadable title is released for download on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sometime in 2012.

Watch the Gotham City Impostors trailer below:

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