I remember as a kid hanging out in the arcades with my friends pumping many 10 pence coins into the machines, usually all of my pocket money gone in a brief afternoon.

APB was one game that took a fair few of those pennies. Pulling over bad guys, collecting doughnuts and beating up baddies to get confessions.  Eventually though I would move on to another game, there’s only so much crime fighting that you can do in one day. I think this is true with Realtime Worlds version of APB.  Good in short bursts, but lacks a certain something that keeps me pumping in those 10 pence’s.

After downloading the game which is about 7.5 GB in its current state, hurrah for my new speedy broadband, you are treated to a very brief intro. Crime is over running the city of San Paro; the police are unable to cope, so the law has been handed over to mercenaries to combat it how they choose.  Your first choice is whether you want to be a criminal or an enforcer.

The character creator is immense, a mix between what I have seen in Tiger Woods with the ability to mould the whole body and face to your desire and as I’ll discuss later, City of Heroes with its wonderful costume creator.  With time and effort you will be able to create a likeness to yourself if you so desire.

So with my character all set up I had to give him a name. As I had chose to fight crime the first name to pop into my head was Reg Hollis. To my dismay, no spaces are allowed in the name. I think this is quite an important thing to over look, a character is not just how they look, but a big part is also in the name.

So, as I confirmed my character the screen darkened. Tosh set foot into the tutorial. The game plays in third person. I had an uneasy feeling after 10 minutes when the tutorial finished and it set me off into the big wide world.  All that was explained were the basic keys, methods of travel (On foot or Car) and a few “Missions”, which were fetch this from here and take it to there and a raid on a warehouse door which a package appeared from after I had battered it enough.

The tutorial pretty much sums up the non PvP (Player VS Player) aspect of the game. You run missions for contacts, disarming bombs, raids, planting listening devices etc. This gains reputation with the contacts, which in turn allows you access to the better gear for use in PvP.

The game is split into two types of district. A social one and the PvP instances.  In the Social district you can customise your character, clothes and car, buy weapons and equip your character.  Customising your car and clothes very much reminds me of the garage in Forza.  You combine shapes and layers to create pretty much whatever you want; your imagination is the limit.

Now to the “meat” of the game, the PvP.  On entering a PvP district I spawned inside a police station and took my fist steps outside. The instances can hold around 100 players and the maps aren’t too big so you’re never far from action.  One thing I noticed pretty quickly is that there are no NPC’s (Non Player Characters); it’s all human controlled opponents.  I think that this was a wrong decision.  There is no underlying story to progress through, there are missions similar to the tutorial, go fetch this etc, but they are just a filler until an APB goes up and you basically put into a death match with another group of 4.  There may be 100 players on the server, you see the running or driving around in their own little matches but you only ever get to interact with them when the APB goes off and its only 4 Vs 4.

Your character is controlled over the shoulder 3^rd person as is the driving.  I found it easier to run around the city, as soon as you get in a car it seems as though the roads get coated in a sheet of ice.  They are unresponsive and just a nightmare to control, you lose experience for knocking over pedestrians and I could not keep the car off the pavement, so ditched it for a good old pair of boots.  The combat is ok but has a few annoyances.  Your enemy has a handy red triangle above them which can be seen from hundreds of feet away, even when they are in buildings. It tends to turn into a camping game or being a jack in the box as you dart in and out of corners trying to get a hit on someone.

I was impressed however with the stability of the game on release, it hasn’t crashed once, no bugs that I have seen apart from an odd graphical glitch. It visually looks good, lots of details in characters and scenery.

The price for a monthly sub is your standard MMO amount, but I like how you have the option to buy hours rather than a whole month’s recurring sub. Your hours only run down when you are fighting in the action districts, so you can spend as much time as you want in the social, designing stuff and chatting, even with only an hour remaining.  Being able to design your own logos to sell is a big draw and also a handy way of making coins that can be transferred into time if you sell enough of your product.

For me, in the end it’s really a glorified GTA IV multiplayer.  Fun, fast action with little to no content at all to keep people interested in the long run. I can’t see people subscribing to this for years, maybe six months or buying hours and playing a few hours a week or so for a bit of shooting fun.  I believe it needs a good story for people to play through and some way to increase the PvP action; even 8 V 8 would be a big improvement.

Overall, APB is a good fun action game in short bursts, very light on content at the moment and I really do hope that they add some single player content.  But as with all MMO’s they are never really finished, they just keep evolving.  I will be keeping my eye on the game over the coming months and hope things improve.  It is a solid foundation that just needs that little bit more content to make it stand out from the MMO crowd.

Written by: Adam Carter