APB Review

Few politicians decide that gang-violence is the only way to combat gang-violence, but in the city of San Paro somehow the bill passed. Enforcers work together to hunt down criminals and clean up the streets while the criminals of the world continue to do what they do best. Enter All Points Bulletin, where players can choose to be a thug or a very hip-hop oriented looking cop and start shooting just about anything that moves. That's the premise behind Realtime Worlds' first MMO, so how does it pan out?

In short: not well. It's not really an issue of a single mechanic either, but rather an entire collection of problems that keep APB from reaching its full potential as a large-scale sandbox MMO. Controls are relatively simple, and anyone familiar with basic computer gaming should be able to navigate their characters easily. Aiming has also been simplified to 'hit the target anywhere', with no damage bonuses for hitting the head (or any body part). The result is a game that removes quite a lot of general skill from the equation and instead heavily relies on equipment/weapons for the damage bonuses.

Questing is just as linear as the combat system. It mostly consists of missions that send you to a location in order to push the F key. This single button will do just about any task in the game that isn't movement, shooting, or driving a car. But the real challenge in ABP isn't completing a quest, but rather engaging in player vs player (PvP) combat. The entire game is really centralized around fighting rival gangs across the city, and objectives are intentionally made to cross over into one another. The hope is that players will come across one another, start firing, and instant fun is to be had. Unfortunately things don't work quite like that, as the only real goal that APB encourages is to 'win using any means'. Enemy players generally adopt the strategy of bunkering down into an area that offers only one point of entry and then blasting anything that comes into view.

It's easy to blame players that use this strategy for making the game less fun, but APB really doesn't offer any other combat alternatives. The world itself is bland, predictable, and poorly designed. Most games that encourage world combat have a wide variety of landscapes, and environments to choose from. Multiplayer games that don't have open world PvP will often, at times, designate zones specifically created to encourage more strategic combat. The entirety of All Points Bulletin takes place in the same city, which is mostly devoid of any recognizable landmarks or points of interest. The most interesting looking thing at any point in time in San Paro is the player, which also happens to be APB's only remotely decent selling point.