All Points Bulletin: Reloaded, or APB, is all about pure carnage. You run people over, you blow heads off, you punch people and take their money, and you troll the user base as much as humanly possible in the process.

In that respect, APB is the pure essence of the internet. But APB is also a game of cat and mouse, of cops and robbers, and of good and evil. It’s not so much an MMORPG as it is a persistent world of Grand Theft Auto. Does it work? It truly depends on your love of the formula and your friends.

Cautions

For an MMO, this game is harsh. People swear very vividly in several languages and you pummel civilians. If the kids want to play a game, I would suggest Maple Story, the polar opposite of this bloodsport.

Gameplay

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style="font-style: italic;">There's also a third faction.
 You don't want to mess with these guys.

There are two obvious sides to the
game, in the Enforcers
and Criminals.  They
seek to thwart each
other at every turn, and that comes into play quickly once you step
outside of
the newbie zone where you get accustomed to the mission-based gameplay
of APB.

Whether you roll as one or as many,
you simply queue up and
you’ll be randomly assigned a task. 
This
ranges from busting criminals, securing lost merchandise, tagging
dumpsters, or
even planting bombs.  At
some point
during the mission though, you’ll be matched up against an opposing
team.  They’ll know
your objective and have their
own objective in mind for the key item or simply seek to defend the
area.  All of this
is seamless once you’ve entered a
‘district’, which corresponds to one of the three main types of
servers,
holding 100 or more people at any given time.

Here’s where this goes from style="">Grand Theft Auto into Beverly
Hills Cop. 
GamersFirst rightfully shifted the focus from APB's ample customization to gameplay, but unforunately preserved certain fatal flaws from the original release. At the top of the list (and something that, thankfully, GamersFirst is still tuning, according to the latest dev blog), the
matchmaking is still
seemingly random and will put you in mismatched fights, either from an
odds
perspective or against a team of extremely high level players. style="">  Combine this with an array
of predictable
spawn points, often times in sight of a guarded objective, and you’ll
have
bullets in the head before you even make it to a car. 
Once an objective is in the hands of the
enemy, taking it back is far harder than it should be. 
Good luck assaulting people on high ground in
cover.

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style="text-decoration: underline;"> style="font-style: italic;"> style="font-style: italic;">You don't see passenger mounts
in WoW giving you the ability to lean out and dispense lead.
 Make your friend drive and kill people with style!

Even though the gameplay can get
downright unfair and silly,
the physics of the game always lead to a good time. 
Cars will fly off each other like ramps,
people fly vans off rooftops and in front of objectives that players
need to
reach.  Players will
occasionally slide
for miles when hit by a car, and generally the world is just absurd
when you
have momentum and mass on your side. 
That can’t prevent the game from getting stale with the
same old formula
nonstop, but it greatly amplifies the fun of making a band of friends
and
cruising the town.  Three
people hanging
out of the side windows of cars hailing everyone with gunfire is simply
badass
and belongs in every game—regardless of genre.

Graphics

APB still looks alright by today’s standards. There are some frustrating UI issues at higher resolutions, such as icons for objectives being the size of sugar ants. The array of cars and the textures that they have could use some work as well. Even at high standards, you’ll be looking at the peak of maybe the PS2 era of graphics. Just like CrimeCraft though, the super stylized loading scenes and art that peppers the game are top notch.

Sound

One of the unexpected high points of the game, APB has some licensed tracks and some good music in-between. When you’re pummeling civilians for quick cash, they respond with a wide variety of quips and four letter words, some in different languages. The only low point is the weapons, which sound a little on the weak side.

Multiplayer Aspects

For the love of God, play this with
friends.  There’s
built-in voice chat, and
communication is key to getting to objectives first and fortifying them
or
escaping with the goods before your opposition can arrive. style="">  There is the ability to
auto-form public
groups and queue for missions, but since spawn times are upwards of 20
seconds,
each death is crippling both to the pace and to the success of the
mission.

Why the hell
can’t I run
any opposing player over?
  If
they’re the
opposition, they should be fair game. 
I
understand this would be harmful to the mission-based gameplay the game
is
going for, but holy crap you can mess with people that are against
other teams.  You
can drive cars in front of them, you can
shoot right next to them to distract them, and you can even jump in
front of
their line of fire.  But
since you can’t
harm players outside of your targets/assigned opponents on most
servers, you
can very easily be trolled.  Or
you can
do the trolling yourself if you see someone that beat you down in a previous encounter.

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style="font-style: italic;">Breaking into a car is easier
said than done.  You'll have to provide cover for your cohorts
while they're vulnerable.

Value & Lasting Appeal

There’s honestly not a lot in the cash shop. You’ve got an assortment of cosmetics, some rentable weapons and a few permanent ones, and a few choice vehicles. All of these are optional and that means the content of the game is full from the start. Sure you can go Premium and get a bonus to your XP and cash rates, but if you're the sort to pick up APB, smash some goons, and put down every so often, there’s no reason to subscribe... at least that we've seen yet.

As for lasting appeal: how much fun do you get out of run and gun action? How much fun do you get running over civilians and flying at strange angles off buildings and into each other? It might cause you to burst out laughing at first, but this genre has been slain in terms of ‘fresh appeal’. So the duration you’ll have this game installed is perfectly correlated with how many friends you have playing with you. If you’re alone, you’ll be done in a week, if you’ve got a whole gang, you might be playing this for months. But couldn’t the same be said for every game?

Pros & Cons

Pros:

  • Feels much better as a F2P game than a subscription one
  • The only MMO that bugs and physics errors actually make you laugh instead of rage
  • I wish I could steal mounts in other games. Stealing cars in this game spoils me so much.

Cons

  • Matchmaking is still awful and sometimes pits you against people that are almost done with their missions already!
  • Repetitive as hell, which might be a positive to some for this type of game
  • Heavily reliant on you making it fun rather than the game itself being fun.

Conclusion

All
Points Bulletin: Reloaded
seems like it's a little too late to the party. style="">  This genre was great fun,
but those of us who
lived it up doing crazy stuff and killing each other already got all of
that
out of our system in the last 10 years of Grand
Theft Auto
.  You
can get a kick out
of this with a group of buddies still, and there’s zero upfront fee to
give it
a go and keep it around, but if you’re the kind that flies solo a lot,
you
might want to look elsewhere for adrenaline packed fun.


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our APB: Reloaded Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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