All Points Bulletin

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a game by Realtime Worlds Ltd.
Platform: PC (2010)
User Rating: 7.0/10 - 4 votes
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See also: Best MMORPG
All Points Bulletin
All Points Bulletin
All Points Bulletin
All Points Bulletin

All The Best games were invented in the playground. Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, Doctors and Nurses -their names are legendary. Few, however, have ever made a pure transition into gaming. So while the world holds its breath for Stuck in the Mud Online we'll have to make do with APB - a near-perfect recreation of Cops and Robbers.

APB's city, San Paro, will contain thousands of civilians and up to 100 in each of its initial two districts - the Financial area (skyscrapers, alleys) and the Waterfront (water, boats, open roads). Players will be split between the criminals and lawmen (known in-game as Enforcers) and depending on what you get up to the game's clever matchmaking system in the sky will ensure that you get a fair fight.

Say you're a criminal en route to committing some mischief for an NPC, and are stealing a car to aid you - if your crime is witnessed by civilians, or the alarm goes off, the authorities will be alerted. If you're a proficient player with lots of big guns then the game might summon five or six player-controlled Enforcers to deal with you, or perhaps just one of a similar level and skill.

In terms of the missions handed out by NPC bigwigs (a chap called Zombie of the G-Kings for the bad guys, and LaRoche of the Praetorians for the Enforcers) they appear to be of a GTA flavour. A good example would perhaps be an Enforcer asked to escort a truck full of rich stuff to a bank, and thereby being extra careful not to attract the attention of nearby criminal minds who wouldn't mind half-inching it.

Mod Yourself

Successful completion of tasks like this will grant you unlock rights to the 30 cars in the game, money to buy boomsticks and even more extravagant ways to beautify your avatar. Which leads us onto another remarkable achievement of APB.

You see backing all this up is an astounding character creation system that goes far beyond the usual "I'll make the nose... very big" slider bars. Body weight, vein protrusion, height of Mohican spikes: the works. You can even design your own tattoos, and choose patterns and fabrics for your own clothing. Cars you unlock can also be modded in similar ways.

Hell, if you want you can even record your own theme tune in an in-game MIDI suite to play as you squat upon a deceased foe's corpse. Should you become especially good at any of the above then there'll even be an auction house where you can sell your wares and become a local celebrity artist.

Cleverness Afoot

If this isn't mind-blowing enough (and to be honest it should be) there's even more cleverness afoot.

Say you're driving along and playing some music in your car, running over civilians and giggling. When an Enforcer or two turns up to dish out some on-the-spot justice, if that song is in the library on their hard drive, they'll hear it booming out of your vehicle. If it's not in their library, then tech borrowed from LastFM will analyse the closest match you have on file and play that instead.

As for hearing other players' chitchat, well if you have the option turned on there'll be VOIP that gets louder and softer however far away other players are standing.

Best of all? First and foremost this is a PC release. What with the absence of Blizzard from this year's E3 there was a marked lack of titles likely to hit our favoured haunted box before the consoles (PC-exclusive The Old Republic being a pleasant exception) so it's i heartening to hear that Realtime Worlds have barely thought about the ' tech for the Xbox 360 version just yet.

There's little doubt that APB was one of the most original, daring and exciting projects at gaming's rejuvenated shindig this year - right up there with Peter 'Geppetto' Molyneux and his puppetry of the primary school. Whoever the victor though, with Milo & Kate, APB and Brink all developed on British soil I think we can allow ourselves to do a little flag-waving. So hooray and huzzah for UK developers! Long may they reign.

Can't Wait For Apb?

Introducing CrimeCraft: the gangland MMO

Whether Blizzard's lawyers are getting warmed up at an MMO with the word "Craft" in its title is another matter, but if you want to play a rival MMO crimeshooter to APB that's free then CrimeCraft isn't all that far away. It's a gang vs gang affair in which you leap in and out of cover in various PvP and PvE instances, and as such sadly not in the open world proffered by our chums at Realtime Worlds, but is still fluid and rather engaging.

Powered by the Unreal Engine, and with a 'hippety hop' vibe, CrimeCraft will feature full-on guilds, auction houses, character customisation and everything else that's become such an integral part of online life in the last few years.

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PC

System requirements:

  • PC compatible
  • Operating systems: Windows 10/Windows 8/Windows 7/2000/Vista/WinXP

Game Reviews

There's Been So much negativity heaped towards APB since its launch from the gaming media, that you can't help but feel sorry for both the game and the team behind it at Realtime Worlds. In many ways, having had a little longer to spend with this attempt to marry the persistence of online shooters with the anarchy of a Grand Theft Auto-style environment, I'm perhaps in a position to highlight more of the games positives than merely lay out the many flaws alluded to everywhere else.

Unfortunately, that would involve being able to identify those positives and sadly, APB seems to stumble over its feet every time it tries to take a step forward. This was a game of immense opportunity. Realtime Worlds talked an incredibly good fight prior to the open beta and, to be fair APB does everything they said it would. The downside is that none of those things really seem to work. At all. Let's start with what APB actually is, as there have been an awful lot of preconceived notions making their way into much of APB's negative coverage.

Much of that comes down to people being sold a notion of playing an open-world, massively multiplayer GTA -something APB isn't really attempting to simulate at any greater level than simply being set in a city and focusing on the cops and robbers therein. Beyond that, there's nothing of GTA's rich depth, satirical mind-set, or legendary characterisation and story. Nor is there meant to be.

APB is essentially attempting to be nothing more than a modern-generation, team-based online shooter with the bonus of having each match taking place in a semi-persistent world that sees other teams fighting each other at the same time. Players roll (and, indeed, role) as either a cop (Enforcer) or criminal, create an eerily lifelike avatar thanks to the astonishingly good character creator, then take to one of two 'Action zones', either to cause trouble or to prevent it.

Every mission you take has the potential to be a two-sided affair and you'll rapidly find yourself being matched against players from the opposing faction every time you hit the streets. You'll see plenty of other players roaming the streets, but unless the game has paired you against each other, you won't be able to interact with them, save for rare occasions when a player becomes so powerful he becomes an open target to all the other players.

The other side to the game is the social district - a non-combat area in which all the customisation aspects come to the fore. You can spend as long as you like tweaking everything about your character here (it's the side of the game that you don't have to pay to play), from the designs of the clothing, to the paint job on the car, to the five second musical ditty that plays should you ever be lucky enough to kill another player.

Everything you create can be sold in-game to other players, and should you be a particularly lucrative designer, you could find yourself funding your game time this way, eschewing the need for a regular real-world subscription.

Rookie Cop

In some ways APB hearkens back to games like PlanetSide and Counter-Strike: an attempt to cross the adrenaline rush of the latter with the open-world, multiple skirmish sandbox possibilities of the former. When you look at APB in that light, it actually sounds like the game.

What lets it all down is that it doesn't get any of the core requirements to make such a hybrid beast work right: the combat, the vehicular play, the difficulty curve, none of it does the necessary job of making APB an enjoyable affair.

Things often feels as though Realtime Worlds, in their haste to make abundantly clear to any and everybody that is most definitely not an MMO no sireebob, have thrown away all of the fundamental building blocks that any online progression-based game needs to contain to provide a solid, enticing and addicting experience.

There's a reason, for instance, that newbies don't go on high-level raids with brand-new characters - they'd die within seconds Yet a matchmaking system that routinely paired my lone Rank 20 Enforcer against a three or four-man gang of Rank 200+ crims is doing exactly that.

APB gives new players no scope to learn the game's requirements, although they'll quickly learn how respawning works given it's how they'll spend most of their time. Something as simple as tiered servers would be a godsend for players.

As would a decent cover system, or character classes, or indeed any nod towards the myriad advances that shooters have made over the recent years, advances that enrich the experience of firing guns at people and having them fire back.

APBs promo videos all show in-game characters engaging in tense stand-offs, taking cover behind rows of cars and making use of tactical nous to win through. APB's actual fire fights work nothing like this, instead calling back to the very early days of Quake II-style gunplay, cops and robbers bunny hopping everywhere and teams all behaving like individuals running their way towards a pointless, unskippable slaughter.

Team play is supposed to be APBs trump card (the amount of work gone into the game's voice comms systems is superb), but unless you're part of an established clan and can devote your waking hours to training with them to be competitive, no-one communicates with you. I've been playing for weeks with an open mic and a desire to be told where to go, and at most two players have spoken to me, one just to call me a "retard", because we happened to lose a match. The intention by Realtime Worlds is noble, but the reality of gamers' natures is sadly lacking.

Casual players (those that don't spend 50 hours a day playing the game) need to be catered for with NPC missions, low-level geared play and a feeling that they might just have a chance to survive more than five minutes. Without those key aspects, anyone new to the game will take a quick look, spend 40 minutes being consistently shot to shreds by any opponent they meet, get thoroughly bored of the woefully under-developed solo missions, log off and never return.

This is perhaps the biggest flaw about APB that needs to be addressed, the solo play is terrible. It delivers no impetus when what it needs to do is offer a sanitised, but no less exciting version of group play. Realtime Worlds needs to implement decent single-player content to allow novice players a chance to start levelling up. And by decent, I mean more than the standard "drive, stop, press T, repeat" tedium that's currently there.

Pitch up against NPC crims/cops, offer a chance to practice your shooting skills, learn how to use the terrain and your equipment to it's best ability. Everything that any decent shooter teaches you as you play.

Which is a crying shame because had APBs on-paper game been anywhere close to the reality, it would have been a superb title that set new standards in what online persistent shooters could achieve. It's full of ideas. Good ideas. Ideas that should have made this the game we all expected it to be.

We could live without the fact that the world doesn't have GTA-like depth if we felt as though it offered visceral thrills that engaged us. But every time you find yourself having fun with the game, it's in spite of the way it works, not because of it (a car on fire flying over your head will always be cool regardless of whether it drives well or not).

Rookie Cop

APB isn't beyond repair. Successful MMOs have evolved hits through years of constant alterations and amendments. World of Warcraft and EVE Online are two that are barely recognisable from their origins. But APB doesn't have years to develop itself. On its release Realtime Worlds were defiant about the complaints from players and critics, almost as if they didn't care what anyone else thought of the game, because they were happy with it. But after the huge amount of negative feedback APB has received Realtime has said they're going to make changes to the game to improve the combat.

This'll likely be insufficient, as the game's flaws are at a fundamental level. Murmurs of free-for-all 'chaos' servers won't fix anything. The only thing that can save APB at this point is a radical rethink of the game's core structure. APB is bursting with ideas and it could so easily have been wonderful. What its developers have to do is deliver a game that lives up to those ideas. The framework's there, as is the potential audience. What happens next is up to Realtime Worlds.

This Mmo Is a lot of things, but right now it's a remake of Heat, as performed by The Muppets. It all began five minutes ago as I casually hung around outside a multi-storey car park as my colleagues stole a van up on the third floor. When they drove off a conveniently placed ramp and tilted delightfully downwards into the midriff of a passing pedestrian, an APB was called out on us.

I sprinted over the prostrate, spread-eagled body of the deceased innocent and leapt into the back of the van, then hung out of its sliding door as the A-Team were once wont to do. Within 30 seconds I was spraying machine gun fire at the four pursuers that the matchmaking system had judged were foes of equal ability to my own quadlet of lawbreaking scum.

We tumbled off the highway and smashed into the side of a skyscraper, and then fought a running battle through a street of exploding cars while giggling like maniacs.

In short, when it hits its own sweet spot of insanity, APB is the game I've been dreaming of since 1997: the first day my two little feet hit the top-down sidewalk of Liberty City and I gunned my very first civilian in what I imagined to be his face.

Crime Is Fun

The first decision you'll make in APB is a binary one: will you play as a Criminal or as an Enforcer? Crims can get up to hijinks within the sandbox districts of San Paro, while Enforcers are out to stop them. Both factions run amok on servers containing up to 100 players, whether amidst the high-rises of the Financial District or gunning their vehicles over the rooftops of the Waterfront. Criminals mug people, steal cars and drive them to dodgy dealers, ram-raid stores and run away with pilfered items, or simply murder members of the AI population, and as they do so their notoriety will climb through five levels of wanted-ness.

Depending on civilian reports and the heat associated with a crim's name, the game's mainframe will call out an Enforcer player judged to be of a similar skill level (or perhaps two or three who each account for a fraction of the greatness of the villain's whole) and the chase shall begin. What's more, to ensure the highest level of funness is suckled from APB's almighty teats, both factions will be roaming in groups, each hollering at a bound gang of chums over VOIP - the Enforcers out to inflict their own brand of justice, and the Criminals watching the filth gradually amass in their wing mirrors.

Let's not run away with ourselves though, as once the character creation Enforcer/Criminal divide has been crossed there's still a way to go. Simply put, APB has the most powerful tools yet seen in an MMO to sculpt the persona you want to carry through your travails within San Paro. Fiddling with your appearance is a slider bar orgy of muscles, visible veins, age, chest hair and ear orientation - after which you'll appear in nothing but a pair of boxers in APBs social district.

Getting Dressed

This is the one area in which Enforcers and Criminals can hang out together, trying to maintain conversation while nearly-naked faction members with wonky half-done faces are continually born into thin air over by the customisation terminals. At these terminals APBs wondrous self-improvement systems go far beyond simple pointing and clicking at garments: they allow you to design your own symbols and fonts to use as graffiti, tattoos or car decals in-game, to buy and customise vehicles in which anything can be fiddled with from the noise.the siren makes to the symbols on the bonnet, and finally to create your own audio in APB's very own sound suite.

All this is explored in more detail in the Augmenting Realities boxout, but the message needs to pepper this preview like a spent Uzi rounds: APBs avatar customisation tools are mindblowing. It boggle the mind that so much information can fit down a crap BT Broadband connection.

Not everyone is good with colours though, and design might not be your thing, in which case the in-game economy spreads to auction houses where designs, clothing, weaponry and triumphant sound files for your victims to endure upon the moment of their death can be purchased. It's easy to forget sometimes, but this is an MMO -mailboxes abound, and elsewhere in the Social District you'll find nightclubs where you and your brethren can /dance the night away. In keeping with APBs desire to create a feeling of in-game celebrity, statues of successful players who have won daily, weekly and monthly leagues will take centre stage. You'll no doubt be gazing at their plinths wistfully as you corral your troops, or prepare to leap into the fray with a buddy who's already out in the districts ridding the streets of crime, or doing their best to riddle them with it.

Organised Crime

As you enter a 100-player server there'll predictably be a fair degree of activity on the streets: hoodlums tossing pedestrian bodies in their wake, Enforcers leaping off ramps with their red and blue lights ablaze, and all that jazz. An important thing to note is that until a crimefighter has been match-made against you (or until you've had an APB call if you're the filth) then you won't be able to kill any human players with weaponry. You can run people over just dandy, mainly because it's hilarious, but a bullet free-for-all would rob the game of that vital commit crime-chasey chase dynamic.

As an Enforcer it's down to you to wander over to a terminal that will conjure up your personal car and patrol the streets or react to match-making call-outs from the APB mainframe. For the opposing side petty crime might be the order of the day, or perhaps a seguence of tasks from an NPC contact -mission givers that instantly bring the contact system of City of Heroes to mind. Each contact represents a different organisation, and the further you level through each underworld outfit the better cars and weapons that are made available to you.

The controls of the game will be familiar to anyone who's ever fired a gun in simulated anger: left-click to fire, WASD to move, right-click to bring the camera down over the gun, C to crouch... it's simplicity in itself. For the criminals a typical string of tasks would begin with clear crimes -burning a certain number of doorways for example, stealing a collection of scattered items or half-inching a car and taking it to a local dealer. You're armed with your main weapon, a handgun and however many grenades you've brought into the fray - although the power of a car crushing a rival player in a side-on skid off a rooftop can never be underestimated.

In terms of providing targets to use these on though, it all depends on your gang's kill/death ratios, how far up the game's unlock ladders you've all gone and the notoriety you've all built up over the past few minutes in the game. This will then inatchmake Enforcers that are the closest fit (balancing both numbers and skill levels) and send them after you.

Despite the veneer of Cops and Robbers, most of the challenges are instantly familiar: assaults on specific areas, king of the hill, protect the VIP, team deathmatch - essentially short bursts of those same modes that've made online gaming simultaneously great and samey over the past decade.

Here, however, each burst is intermingled with hectic chases from location to location - and if one faction arrives before another then they can do their best to set up shop for the battle ahead barricading areas with stolen cars, and taking up the best sniper positions. After this burning vehicles unexpectedly plough through tunnels full of cops with hilarious results, Enforcers dazzle their prey with stun grenades and arrest them (forcing them out of the game for longer than the usual respawn time) and bullets fill the air.

Once the mission chain is over, due to a faction victory or the time limit being hit, plaudits and cash are doled out to the worthy and battle ceases. Everyone stands, once more unable to shoot each other, and share a happily awkward post-action breather before going their separate ways. Some choose to dance.

My personal highlight during my playtest as a criminal came when I tormented a defeated Enforcer with an exploratory /wave amidst the burning wreckage of our previous dealings. There was a pause of a few seconds as my foe worked out how to return a friendly salutation, as I watched a friend steal a sports car 50 metres behind him and accelerate towards his back.

I estimate the Enforcer got through around four frames of his happy waving animation before his broken ragdoll somersaulted skywards. I could honestly have died laughing.

It's these moments of unscripted hilarity that APB frequently delights with. Your first hours within its districts will be happy ones indeed, but as to whether the game will retain you for the hundreds of hours that a successful MMO expects of its players is still an unknown quantity. An opening problem is an unfair, yet important consideration: APB is not Grand Theft Auto IV.

Ghost Of Nico

This is pernickety, but almost everyone who goes into APB will have experienced Niko Bellic's adventures - and when you first play the game there's a mental barrier in that the Grand Theft Auto mechanics you expect either aren't t. present or aren't (in APB's beta at least) as honed. It seems strange that you can't I shoot a driver through a windscreen, it niggles that the car-exit animations are I laborious in comparison to Rockstar's, the lack of motorbikes is evident, and the grungy character of Liberty City is absent in the wipe-clean exteriors gf SanParo.

Most of these issues could be cleared up as the game develops over the months and years post-release, of course, but I can't sit here and pretend that I didn't feel sad when APB's burning cars didn't blow up in the fashion to which I am accustomed. Crimes such as ramraiding and mugging too seem somewhat mechanical and, I dare say, MMO-ey. Shallow and unthinking criticisms I know, but I can't deny what my brain told me it was thinking.

A larger issue is simply whether APBs combat is too simplistic, and whether over time familiarity will dim the pleasures of the relatively basic multiplayer conceits that adorn the top layer of a frankly remarkable playermatching system. The back-end of APB is so clever, so complex and so ingenious that the actual top-end gameplay does seem a little facile in comparison - it doesn't feel that there's much room for hugely tactical play, for example, and you frequently find yourself standing stock-still as you hose an enemy with bullets rather than frantically dashing around the place to seek cover.

Then again, as with all MMOs.the release of APB is widely seen as the beginning of its ongoing development rather than Dave Jones whipping his scarf over his shoulder and saying "And that's the end of that chapter!" There's a three-year plan in place, and the game will evolve according to player demand: new areas will be made available, new game modes will emerge and existing mechanics will be tweaked.

As you wander around Real Time Worlds' studios it's clear that there are plans to somehow incorporate what are potentially more scripted engagements from enigmatic scribbles on whiteboards - events like bank jobs, heists and raids on supermarkets. You genuinely begin to feel that the Financial and Waterfront districts are something of the tip of the iceberg, and that a mass of potential content is waiting beneath the waterline.

Fun With Guns

Right now, as the game enters its final beta stages, APB is a remarkable framework for unscripted frivolity. The dream is that upon release, with the expert guidance of us the in-game gun-toting madmen, Realtime Worlds can build higher on the remarkable back-end they've constructed. I can safely vouch that upon release APB be good, but a year later I'm fairly confident it will be remarkable. Or at least, that's the dream.

We are entering a world bereft of nightly police-based entertainment what with those bastards at ITV thoughtlessly cancelling The Bill after 27 years of high-quality programming. APB genuinely looks like it could fill the gaping void that's due to open up at 9pm on a rsday - and on other days between. It's even got a character customisation suite that will let us recreate DCI Frank Burnside, DS Jim Carver, PC Reg Hollis, and perhaps even the one with the moustache that had all those drink problems. For this, most of all, we should be grateful.

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