APB Launch Impressions: Neither GTA Nor MMO

If (like myself and many others) you were disappointed by the recent release of Crackdown 2, perhaps you found yourself looking to the most recent game from Realtime Worlds, the developer behind the first Crackdown, in hopes of finding satisfaction. If that's what you want, I'll warn you immediately to look elsewhere. APB is a wildly different game than Crackdown, and it's also a significantly less polished experience.

Let’s get the most important point out of the way first: Realtime Worlds has described this game as an MMO, and like most MMOs, you need to pay for game time (past the 50 hours of game time that you get with purchase). I think that tag is more than a little faulty, though.

As of launch, APB’s setting of San Paro has three districts. When you choose to enter one of these districts, you’re actually entering an instanced version of it with up to 80 players. Unless you add someone of the same faction to your group or get placed on a mission against someone of the opposite faction, you cannot interact with other players in any way. The 79 other players in your instance essentially serve as background actors until the game decides to activate a handful of them.

Sure, a district can hold more players than, say, a multiplayer match in Grand Theft Auto IV, but their effect on your world is even less than the average MMO. Let’s say you’re a criminal, and you see an enforcer arresting a fellow criminal down the street. You can aim your car at the cop and step on the gas, but unless you’re actually in a mission against that enforcer, your car will just harmlessly push him to the side, causing no damage and quickly breaking any illusion of reality that the game world has tried to build.

It’s also important to note that in MMO terms, APB is a pure PvP (player-versus-player) game. Computer-controlled citizens wander the streets and drive around in cars that you can steal, but you’ll never be asked to match guns with an AI opponent. Instead, a contact gives you a mission with multiple steps, and at any point during the progress of this mission, there’s a chance that someone on the opposite faction will receive a mission to stop you.

The idea of a dynamic PvP system in a big open world like this sounds fantastic, but things quickly fall apart in the game. Both the city and the missions themselves are incredibly boring. Need to break into a building? Drive to the door, hit the ‘F’ button, and watch a bar fill up while your character does a canned animation. Tasked with spray painting a gang symbol on the side of a building? Drive up, hit the ‘F’ button, and enjoy watching that bar fill up. It will quickly reach the point where you’re dying for an enemy to get placed against you just so you have a break from watching bars fill up over and over.

If only the PvP shootouts were any better. Grinding out missions for reputation and money allows you to access better guns and cars. Internal matchmaking should place you against enemies with comparable levels of access so that the power and flexibility their weapon loadout doesn’t totally dwarf yours. Unfortunately even in the first week when plenty of newbies should have been logged on, I consistently found my group outgunned, placed into match-ups against more or better-equipped enemies than we could handle.

In addition to player balance, the environments and missions you’re fighting in aren’t well designed for the PvP. Almost every location you’re sent to during a mission will contain a high number of entries, which is meant to make things more interesting -- you never know which direction your opponent will be approaching from. Unfortunately, if somebody gets the drop on you with most weapons in APB, you’re as good as dead. By the time you realize someone has appeared behind you, there isn't time to react and save yourself.

Playing in groups evens things up a little and is practically necessary to squeeze any fun out of the game in its current state, but that doesn’t stop all of the problems. In one mission, my team had to hold a parking lot for five minutes. After going back and forth with our opponents for a bit, they disappeared with two minutes left on the timer. Because we were holding a spot in a large opening, they could approach from literally any side. With 30 seconds left on the clock, the opposite team ran in from an angle we didn’t have covered at that exact moment, killed us, and took the location, causing us to fail the mission even after we’d held the spot for most of the time. Often it feels like these missions are designed with that kind of griefing in mind.

In his PAX East assessment of APB , Wired’s Chris Kohler pinpointed one of the major problems the game faces: “People are dicks.” The only way around this is clever world design that makes it hard or impossible for players to mess with each other in frustrating ways, and APB just doesn’t have that.

The one spot where APB shines is also the only thing it doesn’t charge extra money for: character and item customization. In addition to the game’s two action districts, there is one social district, where players of both sides bizarrely stop fighting and start…well, creating. Spending time in this district doesn’t deplete your game time, so even if you don’t currently have any time purchased, you can take part in what’s arguably the most interesting element of APB. Within the social district, you can make decals to put on your cars and clothing, control every aesthetic element of your vehicles, weapons, and clothes, and even use a basic music creator to put together a tune that will play for your opponents any time you kill them. One of the high points of my time with the game so far was running into a guy who had the Final Fantasy victory music play whenever he killed me.

APB was pegged by many (including Realtime Worlds themselves in some more candid interviews) as the MMO realization of the Grand Theft Auto formula. That’s a great tag line to sell the game, and you can instantly see where they’re coming from: There’s a giant, grimy, open city that’s full of crime and corruption that you can take part in. Fair enough. If GTA really only equals open world and crime sim, then yes, this is a fair extension of that formula.

However, that formula ignores some other things that make GTA such a beloved series: a meaningful plot, dark humor, a living world full of many things to do, and the ability to play around in missions and solve them in unique and unexpected ways. All of these important notes are entirely absent from APB. Perhaps Realtime Worlds’ Grand Theft Auto-based aspirations make more sense when you note that their creative director, David Jones, worked on the first two Grand Theft Auto games, titles that were still well-received but existed well before the series had built the identity that has made it a star of the industry. While the GTA franchise’s vision has grown and evolved since 1997, it seems like Realtime Worlds has not.

Instead of Grand Theft Auto: The MMO, APB is the equivalent of an unbalanced online match in GTA IV with the added bonus of impressive customization options and a fee to continue playing. If you’ve got some friends playing and you really enjoy creating clothing and paint jobs for your cars (and don’t mind that the actual shooting and driving isn’t that fun), you might find something worthwhile here, but most people won’t.