All Points Bulletin Review

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All Points Bulletin officially launched Tuesday, June 29, 2010, after a ten hour headstart was given to pre-order players.  Developer Realtime Worlds partnered with EA to publish the game and it hit retail shelves and online download sites in full force.  The premise behind the game is simple.  Shoot other players and drive cars, preferably over other players.  It’s a full player on player combat system with some role-playing elements thrown in.  Is it fun?  Absolutely.  Does it have problems?  Well, it IS an MMO, isn’t it?  Any time other people are thrown in, there are bound to be problems.  That being said, All Points Bulletin is still a solid entry in the shooter MMO market.

Players pick one of two sides – Criminal or Enforcer, create their character (using the in depth character creator that has become somewhat standard with MMOs), and jump into one of three districts, either a social district or one of two action districts.  There’s no restriction as to which action district players start with, as there will be contacts in both districts available from the start to level up.  It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but Financial seems to be more fun to play in than the Waterfront.  Financial is less open, so there’s more barriers to hide behind and environmental obstacles to run through.  It also seems like the somewhat mature players tend to play in Financial, but it’s necessary to do missions in both districts to advance, so that could just be some weird impression rather than the reality of the situation.

Players get missions from contracts and can pledge to a specific contact to level up with only that contact, or can stay unpledged and get missions from any contacts.  Contacts can be leveled up to six before a player can’t gain any more standing with them, but will continue to gain standing with the organization the contact belongs to.  Grouping with another player who is the group leader will have all players in the group doing missions for whoever that person is pledged to, so sometimes, a player might be doing missions just for organization standing, since they may have maxxed out the contact.  It’s not very hard to max out a specific contact, although there’s plenty of contacts in total to do missions for, so leveling all the organizations to their max is a long time in the doing.

Grouping itself is very easy.  Players can mark themselves as looking for group and be thrown into the first group that is not working on a mission.  They can also join a group manually, though they’ll often do so while that group is in the middle of a mission, so they have to wait.  Players can make their own groups and invite other people to play with them, which is probably the best bet if a player wants to focus on a specific contact and still group.  There’s also the ability to join teams in missions, which is a temporary form of grouping.  Sometimes, players will get a mission that other players have already accepted (and this is always true in a call for backup mission), and will join for just that mission with other players.  These missions will come from whatever contact the player is pledged to, so it’s a quick way to get short-term teams without the permanence of a group.  If there were one thing that could be done differently with grouping, it would be nice if a player could gain standing with the contact they are pledged to regardless of who the team leader is pledged to, but alas, that isn’t the case here.

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Missions take a variety of forms, from bounty missions, where criminals are just thrown into and enforcers can accept and it’s a simple kill or be killed type of thing, to missions where players have to complete a series of objectives, sometimes without any opposition at all.  These missions can be retrieval missions, where a car/organs/briefcase/miscellaneous object is laying around the world and the player has to go pick it up and return it.  They can also be activity missions, where a player needs to hack/raid/investigate/sabatoge an area.  These missions always begin with the player or group able to do them without anyone coming and shooting them up, but at some point during the mission, the game will try to set someone against them.  The person going against will usually have to stop whatever activities or guard a certain spot to prevent the opposing team from completing objectives.  They usually end with a kill or be killed scenario, where the first team to make a certain number of kills wins the mission.  The mission is always won or lost in the last stage, so even if a group accomplishes six other objectives with ease, if they lose control of a point in the last ten seconds of the mission, they lose.  This can be a little frustrating to players, because everyone gets lucky sometimes and rather than awarding the win to the team that actually did better throughout the mission, it just goes to whoever happened to end well.

The bread and butter of the game is the player versus player combat.  Even though this is a shooter at its heart, the physics of a shooter are lacking.  There’s no headshots.  If a player shoots another player and hits them, it counts against their health.  Fast guns with low damage seem to do very well in close combat, while a longer range weapon with high damage can sometimes be successful as well.  There’s a noticeable trend in the game for players to gravitate towards one of two weapons.  One, the OCA,  is a short range, quick firing weapon that is brutal is close quarters.  The other, an NTec, has a longer range and is also a quick firing gun, but not as quick as the OCA.  In a close range battle, the OCA almost always wins, but at a farther distance, the NTec is pretty unstoppable.  As players complete missions with contacts and level up, the contacts will sometimes gift better guns to the player.  Guns can also be unlocked and purchased by leveling up with a contact and organization.  Some guns can be modified to have a longer range, bigger ammo clip, less loading time and other such bonuses.  Of course, a good gun will only get players so far.  Skill does come into play, so even the best gun on the worst player won’t actually help that player defeat their opponents, if their opponents are better.  Even so, there’s enough opportunity for mediocre players to either get lucky or get with a good team, that even they can feel productive and have fun.

One on one missions can be somewhat fun, if it involves guarding a single location or having to take out the opponent, provided that part of the mission doesn’t involve simply running as fast and far as you can.  When it comes to a chase, you really need multiple folks running down the enemy to be successful, and even then, it will often prove fruitless.  The chase missions generally seem to be the least favorite type of mission and when it’s one-on-one, it becomes even more pointless.  Bounties suffer from being chase missions at times, because the criminal only has to escape (get away for a certain amount of time) before being killed too many times, and in a fast car against a single opponent, it’s extremely easy to do.  The game does try to match players against each other fairly, using a threat assessment, and players can reject any missions where the opposition looks too hard (it’s part of the details in the mission description), but it’s not perfect and criminals have less options because sometimes they are just thrown into a mission (if their notoriety gets too high).  Also of note is that once a criminal hits notoriety 5 or an enforcer hits prestige 5, it becomes more of an open PvP situation for that player.  Any criminal can be killed by an enforcer or another criminal at notoriety 5 and enforcers at prestige 5 can be killed by criminals.  The plus is that they can also kill any other players in the world who can attack them, so it’s a challenging sort of end-game that some players are loving.  Gaining notority and prestige is done simply by doing the activities that they should (enforcers by completing missions and killing or arresting criminals and criminals by committing crimes), so anyone can get to that aspect of the game pretty easy.

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The other main activity in the game is driving.  Vehicles are much like guns, in that improved vehicles are unlocked through gaining standing and some can be modified to make them even better.  Driving is one of those things that require a very high-end machine or players may find themselves on the laggy end of the street.  Driving with any graphics lag at all becomes pointless and players who don’t have a computer to handle it will find themselves giving up on this aspect of All Points Bulletin.  However, for everyone else, driving is pretty cool.  Each vehicle handles differently and some can only carry two people, so in groups of four people, players quickly abandon the tiny sports car for the bigger sedan or SUV.  Players riding in the car can lean out the windows and shoot, while the driver tries to keep pace with the opponent vehicle or run them down.  Of course, all this needs to be done while avoiding pedestrians if you an Enforcer.  However, criminals gain notoriety for killing the poor townsfolk, so in a change where the enforcer has to avoid and the criminal can run freely over the NPCs on the street, the criminals gain a little advantage.  The penalty against enforcers is mininal, but as an enforcer, they are supposed to be protecting those poor people, not running them down.  The guilt penalty may be a bit higher.

Outside of shooting and driving, there is also running through the world, leaping over fences, kicking in doors,climbing up ladders, jumping off roofs (to a little bit of body damage) and navigating through alleyways and streets.  This type of over-world activity is pretty fun and has yet to get old.  The fences and doors that can be interacted with are pretty obvious, thanks to some very clever world design, and the interaction itself is a single key press, no matter what activity the player is doing.  It will be interesting to see how they expand upon this system, because it’s a great deal of fun to cut through the backway, instead of driving around the block, and it would be great if they programmed in even more stunt running.  Or maybe skateboards?

Outside of the action districts, the social district is where players can be their creative best.  It’s a safe zone (combat-free) and it doesn’t count against any game time the player has, so as long as a player has a copy of All Points Bulletin, they can spend as much time as they want in the social district.  The main activities there are clothing and vehicle customization and decal design.  While it’s very cool that there are two ‘crafting’ roles in the game, the Fashionista and the Tuner, what’s not quite as cool is how these roles are leveled up, to gain access to more clothing, vehicle parts and ‘primitives’, which can be used to design decals.  These roles level up by simply sitting in the customization screen.  At any time of the day or night, there are people just camping at the customization stations, sitting AFK, while their character levels these roles.  They are time based alone.  The amount of time required to level these roles is pretty extreme.  Hardly anyone would actually work on customizing that long.  The end result is that these roles are essentially pointless.  Realtime Worlds would have been better served by making the customizations unlockable all at once or by some other in-game activity, because the way it works now, it’s rather silly.  They have made one change since the game launched to this mechanism – which is that players no longer get monitary rewards for leveling up a Fashionista or Tuner.  This was because it was very easy to get a bunch of money just by sitting AFK.  They really should just scrap the whole leveling system though.

Another unfortunate thing about social (and to a lesser extent the action districts) is the spammers.  Already, a site has gotten the jump and is selling both RTW points (the currency for buying additional game time) and APB cash (the in-game currency) and constantly spams social.  There’s no free trial, so it’s pretty unclear how they are managing to do this without breaking the bank, unless they don’t actually need a box copy of the game to go into social, which would be an unfortunate oversight.  The spammers change their names frequently, so in order to avoid the spam, players have to constantly be adding the new spammer name to their ignore list.  It’s  a shame that Realtime Worlds is not more on top of the spammers, banning them the moment they post.

The game is also not without its issues. Sometimes, in fetch missions, briefcases get dropped in an area players can’t retrieve them when they are killed, so the mission can’t continue and the team that dropped the briefcase ends up losing.  Also, grouping has some sort of delay bug.  The groups it shows may no longer exist or may be full when a player tries to join.  In addition, there’s no way to see who the leader is pledged to, so joining a group through the looking for group screen can be fruitless for players looking to level certain contacts.  Hopping in a four-seater, even when the only one, can sometimes find the player in the backseat, which can be a big no no during some missions when a player is being shot at.  However, none of these things are so annoying as to take away from the total enjoyment of the game.

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Of course, there are the some annoying things that are found in other games of this nature.  People who played beta in depth (not the ones limited to five hours) have a clear advantage over those who haven’t, as they know all about the weapons and the maps, and it really shows.  Bounties are plentiful (which criminals get sent right into and enforcers have to accept), but sometimes it can be a little much, especially since criminals who often have bounties on them know where to camp and take out enforcers with little effort.  Missions are more even since everyone has to head to the same spot and there’s no special ‘safe’ spots necessarily at the waypoints.

Despite All Points Bulletin’s flaws, many of which have simple fixes, the game is a great deal of fun.  Players can listen to their own music in the game using a simple import feature.  The game is gorgeous and the character customization options are endless.  The only real lag issues tend to be client side.  Joining a group or getting into a mission are quick activities, so players aren’t sitting around looking for something to do.  Leveling up all the contacts currently available in the game is a time consuming process and it will be easy for Realtime Worlds to add content by adding new zones, so the future of the game looks fantastic.  Even with doing similar missions over and over, because of the grouping and player v player aspects of the game, it doesn’t get old.  Players will little skill can somewhat compete against seasoned veterans of the FPS familiar with using WASD  and mouselook, but seasoned veterans can still enjoy the game, because it adds some fresh elements to the old shooter gamespace.  In general, All Points Bulletin launched well and is great fun, so anyone interested in this style of game waiting to pick it up, wait no longer.

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Review of All Points Bulletin