Review: All Points Bulletin

I do not review just one aspect of games, I review all aspects of them.

1) Account Creation

This is probably one of the simplest things in all of gaming, creating an account. Except with APB. With APB I spent a total of 30 minutes just trying to get my account created. Why? The CD-Key format is not explained. At all. I ended up getting on with their technical support before I figured it out for myself. More on technical support later. The format they want the CD-Key in is XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. Nowhere does it say that the hyphens are required. In fact, I cannot think of another game that requires the CD-Key to be like that. Ok, my account is created! What do I get to do next?

2) Character Creation

Customization is where APB shines brighter than most, certainly brighter than any other game in the genre. You start out with a blank character. From there you can go the easy and quick route of selecting general body types and facial features. Or you can click on the button at the bottom and customize just about everything. I spent about an hour customizing my character, I could have spent longer but I wanted to actually shoot at people.

3) Gameplay

The game is advertised like it is a Grand Theft Auto multiplayer game. It starts out like it is GTA as well. You have an NPC you "pledge" with. Pledging means that they will offer you missions as you are cruising around town. You also gain rep with their faction and also with that specific person. The higher the rep, the better the cash and more unlocks you get. Now, you can play as either an enforcer or a criminal. The names are pretty straight forward. Criminals are criminals and enforcers try to shoot them or arrest them. As you are cruising around town you will start being prompted for missions from the person you are pledged to. At first, the missions are pretty simple. Drive here. Pick up item x. Drop it off there.

However, after you have completed a few missions, you will start to get missions with opposition. Opposition is the enemy. It is other players. If you are an enforcer, it is criminals. As you start your mission, they get a prompt for their own mission, and it is usually to stop you. You will also be prompted for missions to stop them. This is where the game gets a bit frustrating.

The match making system is pretty terrible. Just about every mission I had after 2 hours into the game had me outmatched numerically and most of my opposition had a rating(the level system) 3 or 4 times higher than mine. This means that they had higher health pools, regenerated health faster, and had better weapons. All of which means that you were basically cannon fodder. The few times I got lucky with a grenade kill or running someone down with my truck quickly turned into dismay because the other 2 or 3 people on the persons team would immediately kill me. At that point, the mission types start to blend together into one big suck fest.

The mission types are pretty limited and almost all of them end in one of three different "final stages."

1. Hold a position from the enemy. You have limited lives and once they are gone the enemy wins. The enemy might or might not have limited lives. You have a countdown, usually 5-10 minutes. The variations of this are protect the area from them, or take the area from them.
2. Stop the enemy(also known as a bounty mission). You have to kill the enemy player x amount of times. They usually have teammates. Killing teammates does not count towards winning the mission. If you have teammates, the enemy can kill them to win the mission. This mission type sucks. All the opposition has to do is jump in a car and drive moderately well and they win.
3. Escape from the enemy. If the enemy kills you x times you lose. If you survive for x minutes or kill the enemy players x times, you win. This is the most frustrating mission type for the enemy players. You just get in a car and drive away. Or, if you have a decent group, get on a roof and you are basically invincible because no one can get to you without you shooting them in the face.

The missions get pretty stale after about 5 hours of playing.

Combat is also quite frustrating, as it seems less based on skill and more based on who starts shooting first or who has the better gun. I ran around with a Light Machine Gun for quite a while and had no problem killing anyone in a car. I could blow the car up before they had finished the exit animation. However, once they were out of the car I was usually dead. The upgraded guns that are only available to the higher rated players would not be that big of a deal if the match making system was not placing them against the lower rated players. It is basically a trial by fire until you get a high enough rating to use the upgraded weapons. For a game that is based around Player vs Player interactions, the match making and weapons balance seems to have not be thought out very well.

4) Graphics

The games graphics are pretty decent, when the game is not lagging. When you first login, everyone will look the same until all of their avatars have loaded properly. This usually only took 20-30 seconds. However, once you get into a big firefight, things can sometimes slow to a crawl and then you end up dead. This is not all server side, I am sure some of it is with my computer. But, the graphics are not that great that it should cause any serious client side lag. I have yet to find a game I cannot play on high settings. Indeed, APB says I can play it on high settings. The customized vehicles look great. The character animations are a bit robotic at times but still look pretty decent. The environment looks fantastic, none of the obvious cookie cutter patterns you see in a lot of games with big open areas. Other than the occasional slowdown, the graphics are good.

5) Support

Technical support is big for any game, but especially big for a game that just recently launched and is based entirely online.

During my account creation troubles I called technical support. It told me I had a 45 minute wait time, so I hung up and got onto their technical support chat option. It said I was 6th in line with a 1 minute 45 second estimated wait. 15 minutes later I had discvoered, through trial and error, the correct format and created my account. For fun I waited until a technical support rep came on. 22 minutes later they entered the chat. They said, "Hello, are you there?" "I am disconnecting if you do not respond." Then they disconnected. This happened in the span of 20 seconds. So far, my technical support experience sucked.

Later on in the weekend I was having trouble connecting. It would let me get as far as "Entering District" but would sit there for as long as I would let it. I would end up having to go to Task Manager and ending the process. I thought that maybe the server was down for maintenance, but I could never find anything about server status on their website. I even searched their technical support knowledge base for it, no luck. Eventually, again through trial and error, I figured out that my AV was seeing the punk buster(anti cheat) software, that APB installed and ran in the background, as a threat and was blocking it.

6) Overall Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. The gameplay is fast and exciting.
2. The character customization is unmatched.
3. It is probably as close as we are going to get to a GTA MMO for quite a while

Cons:

1. The matchmaking system is terrible.
2. Technical support is non existent.
3. You are never, ever, ever told about the market place or where to go to customize your vehicle or put on your new outfits. You basically stumble across these features while trying to find a bathroom.

I give this game 4 out of 5 stars. The problems that it has are easily remedied via patches and even with those problems, the game is still fun as hell to play.