APB: All Points Bulletin

This game would be an easy 4.5-star, as there are so many good ideas and insanely fun stuff to do, from the clan systems to the car trunk customization and beyond. Nothing beats the feeling of riding around with your clan all having the same car designs, and so on.

All of APB´s potential is unfortunately evaporated in an instant due to lack of maintenance, new updates, and anti-cheat systems. I would not mind the micro-transactions if it was balanced properly and kept up to date.

With a monthly subscription and active development this would be one of the GOATs. Instead its been dying since its birth, and it makes me very sad.

let me get this out of the way. i'll readily admit that this game is... not good, to say the least. yet it has an odd effect on me where i can't help the fact that i'm just strangely drawn to it and can't stop myself from going back and trying it out every once in a while. even if i invariably stopped playing it the last time because it just pissed me off, leading to my eventual motivation for writing a review

apb is an open world quasi-mmo shooter in which players take the side of criminals or enforcers in the game's fictional city setting and partake in team-based missions, in which a group of players from one faction attempts to complete some objective and a group of players from the opposite faction are dispatched to oppose them. these missions are somewhat repetitive, and the objectives amount to little more than driving/walking to something, pressing the use key, and waiting, but the competition makes it entertaining enough as long as you're not being curbstomped. completing these missions awards you standing with contacts (which unlocks weapons, vehicles, upgrades, clothing, etc.) as well as money (which can be exchanged for goods and services), thus forming the game's progression. there's other window dressing - like open-world crimes such as mugging that criminals can commit to earn extra money, while enforcers can witness them and hunt them down - as well as the notoriety system which occasionally results in a player having a bounty for about a minute until they get unceremoniously murdered. but really the missions are the only thing that matters.

obviously one of this game's biggest draws that everyone talks about is the customization - and with good reason, as even today, very few games have matched the level of personalization that this game allows. in your character's appearance, their clothing, and even their vehicle, there's a vast array of options you can choose from, and you can decorate everything with custom designs (though this ability is somewhat limited without a premium subscription). there's even an auction house where players can sell the things they've created for in-game cash. but seriously, if there was a standalone version of the game that was JUST the various editors with all the options unlocked, i could spend a ton of hours on just that. and the music editor is one of the most novel ideas ever and i LOVE playing with it and making little midi-like ditty versions of songs that people will hear upon every infrequent occurrence of me killing someone. i hope the few people who die at my hand enjoy coheed and cambria, because they're getting to hear a recreation of a few seconds of the outro of "three evils."

now besides the incredible customization, the game doesn't particularly excel at anything, and anyone whos played it is likely aware of its various flaws. one of the biggest issues i personally take with this game is how agonizingly slow the progression is. the game entices you with so many items you can customize with, as well as numerous weapons and vehicles that make you more effective in battle, but in order to unlock anything you have to level up through chains of contacts spread throughout the game's two "action" districts (financial and waterfront) by completing missions for them. this can take quite a long time until you reach the things you want to unlock - especially when you have no opposition and thus reduced rewards, which is more common than you'd think. there's not a HUGE amount of people playing this game, and they tend to congregate in one district instance - usually financial, which means if the next contact you need to go through is in waterfront, you're often SOL.

speaking of players, the vast majority of the people playing this game now are very skilled players who have been playing for countless hours over years. now this game doesn't really have many issues with hackers, but you'll feel like you might as well be dealing with cheaters with how hopeless you are against more experienced and better-equipped players. sure, some part of the gap is based on skill, and you can eventually "git gud" enough to perform decently even with very basic gear, but it requires a lot more perseverance than most people have when you spend most of the time beating your head against the brick wall that is the playerbase. sure, the active playerbase being good at the game isn't inherently a flaw of the game itself, even if, from a pragmatic perspective, it does make it less fun to play. but hell, even if there were more new, less-experienced players, the matchmaking certainly doesn't try very hard to put them together. so there already aren't a lot of newcomers and those that do show up are quickly driven off by this, thus perpetuating the issue.

the starter weapons aren't awful (the STAR 556 is actually quite good), but the progression feels very linear in that the more you play and the more money you have, the better your weapons and upgrades. they're not so much different or playstyle-changing as much as they are just... better. and when you have to go up against all these people who have better things, you start to feel a little hopeless and the game starts to feel a little not-fun. and of course, when you look at the massive "armas shop" that sells all sorts of high-powered weaponry for real cash (as well as the "premium" subscription that lets you progress faster, among other benefits), the issue starts to be somewhat compounded. yes, being a free-to-play game following its revival (pried from the corpse of realtime worlds), it's no surprise that it has a bit of a pay-to-win problem. but to be fair, it's not the WORST. hell, the directly-cash-bought guns aren't even that OP anymore. the bigger issue is really the upgrades you unlock later in the game which take forever to get to, but slightly less forever if you got that premium ;). but it's still kind of a problem as it can easily turn off new players (which ties into what i said earlier).

mechanically, the combat is serviceable but unremarkable. there's no headshots or anything like that - as long as a bullet touches any part of someone's body, it does the same amount of damage - and the weapons feel fairly impactless as well. grenades get pretty annoying considering how much damage they do and how high-level players can throw them like a fucking quarterback whereas your sorry tosses go about 10 feet in front of you. driving feels loose and floaty, the vehicles have weird acceleration curves, handle collisions strangely (there are phone booths that inexplicably explode your vehicle instantly if you hit them) and since the physics are serverside, if your connection is less than fantastic you get some mad input lag, making all of this even worse. the maps aren't necessarily poorly designed gameplay-wise, with most objective areas having a number of routes to reach them, as well as various opportunities for cover or flanking, seemingly to reduce camping and force players into fast-paced close-quarters combat. still, there are unfortunately some exploitable areas that kind of kill that effort. the more obvious problem with the maps is that they feel so lifeless, empty, unmemorable, and boring, in stark contrast to the characters that inhabit them. there's really nothing worth doing outside of missions, it's just roads and grey or brick walls.

the weird silver lining to all this (aside from the customization) is that stylistically, the game is pretty rad - people don't talk about the killer visual aesthetic of the clothes, characters, and the loading screens, or that sweet, sweet theme music that now only plays during character creation. neither of all the lore content buried in the game, from the character bios to the mail messages contacts send you periodically as you work for them - both of which are read by probably nobody. hell, even the ui is pretty clean-looking (even if occasionally obtuse). but ultimately this exemplifies how such tiny details like this do little to soothe the pain in the game's core, and why i don't blame anyone for not paying much notice to them. it just leads to an experience where i really want to like the game, and i'll try to get into it time and time again, but the gameplay is just too much of a drag for me to play for more than a short while. i'm sure this isn't unfamiliar for many others who have tried it as well, and it's truly a shame knowing what this game was trying to be and what it could've possibly been.

This game is fucking abysmal but in terms of creative freedom its kind of unparalleled. What other game lets you customize your car to basically any degree you could want and then drive around blasting whatever shitty meme music you feel like playing, with other players actually hearing it?