APB is such an amazing concept, Id love to have the enforcers vs criminals in a current day RPG game with the funky gun play included and the fun weapons, emblem maker, music maker, etc. The creativity was bright and they did so good with it. but that's the thing. The Company behind APB absolutely fucking sucks. They hardly update the game, they're pulling the plug on consoles, the game is filled with hackers, and the community is like a 4chan board filled with racism and bigotry. Not to mention, they refused to unlock my 2FA Verify after a whole month of back and forth emails. Every now and then I pray that a company makes a game like APB but not as big as a shit show.

[ambition and lost potential dragged down by a joyless core.]

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.

3.9/10

Boring and failed game that was fun for an hour.

APB: All Points Bulletin (Reloaded) is a boring, unfinished game that adds nothing to the MMO-FPS genre. It is a generic GTA Online clone (in hindsight) with some innovative ideas and concepts, but was delayed, abandoned, rebooted and is now still underdeveloped and (in my opinion), dead.

Back in 2010, I followed a school friend of mine who was hyped for this game. I booted it up, had exactly one hour of fun, and then got annoyed by the glitches, unbalance and general broken and unfinished feel of this game. After this, I lost all interest and never played the game again.

In the core, this is just a Brink/Overwatch/Counterstrike game, in which two factions battle it out on a map. Only in APB: All Points Bulletin (Reloaded), the world is massive and you can free roam wherever you want. You complete missions and try to stop players from other factions to complete their own missions. You can earn cold cash and spend it on weapons, upgrades and cosmetics. Some cool concepts are mission in which the criminal faction needs to rob a store, and the enforcers to stop them. This concept has been done again in GTA Online, many years later with heists, and here, it worked perfectly.

The whole idea of this game was to create a new, virtual world in which players can trade, fight each other, work together and have fun, but because of the issues and underdevelopment, the whole concept of the game failed fast in my opinion.

Graphicly, this game looked outdated and half-baked, even back in 2010. The open world concept was relatively new and the amount of room around you was somewhat incredible. The only problem was that it felt blend and lifeless. Just endless roads and all grey buildings, with some alleys here and there.

Sound wise, the game offered nothing special. Guns sound like pea shooters and the only redeeming factor here are the car sounds.

The controls and interfaces are a little confusing at first and take some time to get used too.

The biggest problem with APB: All Points Bulletin (Reloaded) is simply that it is too boring. It is lifeless, blend, empty and unfinished. When roaming around without playing a mission, it just feels so pointless. All the problems mentioned earlier play a big part in this off course, and it just a shame that this game, and all its innovative ideas for the future, did not come around. In the present time, games like GTA V took over and, in the future, GTA VI will do the same. This game falls short and will always fall short, no matter how many times it is rebooted and how much development will take place.

In the end, I think APB Reloaded was a nice attempt, but it failed miserably and is one of those games that get lost into obscurity.

I would still not recommend this game, regardless of its current state.

Joguei o APB Reloaded pela primeira vez em 2017 quando ainda tinha um nível até que considerado de jogadores simultâneos em seus servidores e vendo como ele está hoje em dia é um tanto quanto decepcionante, porém esperado para o nível de abandono tanto dos jogadores quanto dos desenvolvedores ao passar dos tempos, e olhe que por mais que eu não tenha jogado e nem gostado tanto na época em que joguei pelos tantos problemas que esse jogo tinha e ainda tem, como, por exemplo: sua dirigibilidade dura, tamanho absurdo de hackers e claro seu foco total em "missões" genéricas de matar um ao outro que necessitem obviamente de jogadores para serem feitas, eu não esperava um vazio enorme nos servers ao ponto de ser injogável por não ter o que fazer no jogo, por isso é realmente lamentável e inviável de jogá-lo hoje em dia fazendo com que até agora eu não consiga entender o porquê desse jogo ainda ter servidores ativos ou mesmo ainda ser liberado para "jogá-lo" na Steam...