APB promises to do for virtual citizens what reality TV has done for washed-up celebrities and singers of questionable talent: make them famous. It's part open-world action game and part massively multiplayer online game, and you take on the role of a criminal mastermind or dedicated law enforcer and attempt to make a name for yourself in a virtual city populated with up to 99 other players. If you succeed, statues will be built in your image, your gang colours will be plastered over billboards, and the mere mention of your name will strike fear into the hearts of the police force and criminal underworld.
The world of APB is broken up into three districts: Social, Financial, and Waterfront. The Financial and Waterfront districts are action zones, where you can take on different missions and start wreaking havoc in the city. Each area has a distinct gameplay style, with Financial offering modern street-level action and Waterfront offering more rooftop-based action. However, before you jump into either action zone you need to create a character in the Social district. There are an insane number of options available, and everything from the size and weight of your character to custom tattoos can be changed. Once you've created a character, you can go on to customise clothing, vehicles, and even the kind of music that follows you around the city. A Photoshop-like drawing tool allows you to create decals, which can be applied to people, cars, or objects around the city, giving you and your gang a unique identifier. Anything that you create can be sold in the online marketplace to other players, giving you the chance to make some money to buy weapons and giving the less artistically inclined the opportunity to look good while roaming the city. You can check out more on the customisation tools in our preview from the Game Developers Conference.
Matchmaking in APB is different to most lobby-based action games. The character you create lives on a server populated with up to 100,000 players, with each of those players split across several cities of 100 players each. When you join a game, you're grouped with 99 others and placed in a random city. The attributes for your character remain constant no matter which city you're in. For example, if you've gained level-five notoriety, each of the 100,000 players will know about it. However, once you've chosen your character class, you can't change it on that server. Therefore, if you suddenly wish to switch to a criminal from an enforcer or vice versa, you need to start a new character on a different server.
Playing the game for the first time can be a daunting experience, as we found during our play test. As soon as we stepped out into the Financial district, we were almost run over by a horde of criminals racing past us with guns blazing, followed by a pursuing enforcer squad. You're guaranteed to run into other players completing missions or committing crimes, giving the impression that you're part of a living, breathing city. However, though you can see the other players, you can interact with others only if they're in a mission with you. Other players are identified by grey name tags, so you can't go around ruining everyone's fun by shooting them. There are plans to introduce chaos zones, which will allow hardcore players to do this, but they will not be in the game at launch.
Missions differ depending on your character class. As a criminal, you can choose not to take on missions directly and instead roam the city mugging people and blowing stuff up. This won't net you very much money, but it will increase your threat level. The higher your threat level, the more recognised you are around the city. Reaching a threat level of five makes you the APB equivalent of America's Most Wanted. A large reward is offered for your capture, and all enforcers in the city are alerted to your presence. This threat level remains until you are caught, so even if you leave the game, all the enforcers on the server know of your reputation.
If you choose not to free-roam, you can take on missions from one of the many AI-controlled characters scattered across the city. While you're able to take on some missions alone, most can be completed only in a group. You can join up with random players in the city or set up friends lists and clans if you prefer to team up with chums. The first mission we played had us defending a criminal safe house in the city. Our first task was to steal a car and transport it to the safe house. Hijacking cars works in a similar way to Grand Theft Auto: you walk up to the car you want to steal, hit a button, and your character yanks out the driver. Once you have a car, your teammates can ride with you and hang out of the windows to shoot pursuing enforcers or passers-by. Car handling is very forgiving, with an arcade-like feel that makes it easy to drive around the city. Our destination was a small building in the centre of the city that contained a coloured area we had to defend. Enforcers rapidly began to show up, raining down bullets on our team. We split up to defend the various entrances to the building, trying to pick off the opposition with some well-placed shots. The number of enforcers summoned to your position is dynamically chosen. If you are a highly rated criminal or have a high threat level, more officers will be sent to deal with you. Interestingly for a third-person shooter, there is no cover system, so we had to rely on crouching behind objects like dumpsters and walls in order to avoid fire. There is also no focused aim, though this doesn't affect headshots, as currently the game does not have location-specific damage.
