Review: APB: All Points Bulletin - PC

by Steven Williamson on 5 July 2010, 15:08 2.1

Tags: APB: All Points Bulletin PC, Realtime Worlds, PC, FPS

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The online law enforcement sim

Reviewer - Jimmy Ellis
People have been talking about a GTA MMO for years now, but it’s never come to fruition. The idea of a living, breathing, real-time world where people could hijack cars, complete missions and get involved in massive gun battles with friends and foes alike certainly has a lot of appeal. Realtime Worlds noticed this, and decided to steal in and get ahead of the game – the question is, does it live up to expectations?

Obviously it’s not as simple as taking an enormous open world, with NPCs, and then dumping in 200+ online gamers – you’d end up with chaos. So I was surprised to find that the APB worlds are fairly organised, and it’s borne from a very intelligent, strict set of battle criteria and rules. By default, your bullets can’t harm anybody, so you can’t just wander into the street and start killing other gamers. Instead, you’ve got to start a mission – the game then finds an opponent and you’ll be able to damage that specific person. The game is built around these “missions”, but sadly they’re a complete joke, coming down to nothing more than pressing F. Press F to bomb this building. Press F to investigate this crime scene. Press F to win. In fact, they should probably release a APB-specific peripheral which is just an enormous red F button.


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