APB: Reloaded – not for me it won’t be!

“We’ve got an MMO to look at, who want’s to give it a go?”

It’s a short and relatively simple question, but here’s the thing… how do you review an MMO? The nature of the beast is that it takes FOREVER to play through and everyone’s experience will be different. The reality is that you have to boil the experience down to the mechanics and that produces a rather flat and un-engaging bit of prose.

So I, of course, offered my battered carcass up for the job of diving into APB: Reloaded to see what this reboot has to offer the world — sucker for punishment that’s me!

The first thing about APB:R is that it’s free, yes not a shekel do you have to pay to immerse yourself in the world of San Paro. This is a good thing, you may remember that the original APB sank miserably along with Realtime Worlds a while ago after a lot of people paid a considerable amount of cash for it. That was a bad thing, this is better. At least I thought it was, but I’ll get to that.

APB:R is a PC game, by that I mean there’s only a PC client available for it at the moment. I have a slightly quirky technical environment which I’ll share if you ask nicely enough, but it’s safe to say that with a little tweaking (hard drive space and graphics RAM) I got the client installed, set up my account and got to work on customising my character. There is a lot of flexibility in this part and you’ll probably spend a good hour or so getting the features ‘just right’ as I did. I still wasn’t happy with the result, it may be my environment (as I mentioned… quirky) but the mouse-based controls for changing the features were difficult to use and I eventually had to settle for something I wasn’t happy with otherwise this missive would finish about here!

Then we descend into the chaos that is the city of San Paro, I chose the path of righteousness and was an Enforcer, in other words an official vigilante let loose onto the streets with the minimum of training and a large gun, out to kill the bad guys. This all sounds great in theory but the realities are that there’s no appreciable difference in the gameplay once this choice as been made. I suppose you could commit to the back stories of each of your contacts, but understanding where Violet Prentice came from and why she does what she does isn’t really what a shooter is about is it?! And that’s only the start of where things fall apart.

You see for all the good that GamersFirst have done with this — and there are some real and significant improvements over the original APB for sure — there simply isn’t enough meat to engage me here.

1. Driving – it’s a key element and is actually pretty good in terms of the ways the different vehicles handle. I particularly like the way additional passengers in a vehicle can lean out of the windows and shoot, this adds a nice dimension to things and I hope that this element is developed further.
2. It’s free — as I mentioned this is good, but the model is to nag players into paying for the premium subscription with constant “Here’s what you could have won” reminders. I understand this, but it’s still annoying.
3. Dickhead kids spamming abuse – I like a good sweary moment, but I don’t feel the need to type it out for the world to read… why be a public a-hole kids?
4. Why am I an Enforcer? — or anything at all. The story tells me I felt some kind of civic duty, but this actually places nothing more than a burden upon you in terms of the gameplay as if you kill a bystander, say through hitting someone as they walk in front of your SPEEDING CAR, then you are penalised through loss of reward at the end of whatever mission you’re on.
5. I don’t want to play with others all of the time — it’s true, sometimes I like to do things on my own, but APB:R has no support for this. Leave ‘Ready’ mode and you can certainly wander the streets but there’s nothing you can actually do. Perhaps in the future you’ll be able to lend a hand to other enforcers on the job, maybe NPC Enforcers and Crims will provide ad-hoc engagements which you can take or leave, maybe but not today.
6. Dying, lots — in this world how is death and re-spawning explained? In Crackdown you’re a clone and that makes sense, here though the mechanics are just too jarring.
7. Camping – this is not fun. On the last mission I played I died no less than eight times before the clock ran out, simply because the bad guys had found a nice cubby-hole from which they could shoot away with impunity. I cried “foul” and “not fair” at this point and quit the game.

And I think it’s that last point which sums APB:R up for me. On every occasion I quit the game, it wasn’t because I had to tear myself away and do something else — eating or sleeping for example — it was because I got frustrated or even bored with what was happening.

I’m sure there are some groups of friends out there who all dive into the game together, play missions as a cohesive team and derive some decent amount of satisfaction from it. But that isn’t me and perhaps that’s the point and I know it’s the reason this is a blog post rather than a review. I can’t score APB:R out of ten because it’d get a four and that would probably be unfair because there ARE people logged in, playing and enjoying it.

My recommendation then is this: if you are part of a group of friends who like third person shooters and who can work solidly as a team you’ll probably get on okay with APB:Reloaded. If you aren’t then leave it alone. Trust me you aren’t missing out on anything!