On the one hand, I took an oath to protect and serve. As I respawn and begin jogging back to the raid, I consider quitting the mission. A disgusting, musically illiterate cover of the Simpsons theme comes parping out of my headphones, the theme of the player who killed me. Just like real police!Īrriving at the raid location, I step out of the car and promptly die in a hail of unexpected gunfire. Shooting someone in the head doesn't do any more damage, so you should aim for the chest. I'm distracted from my daydream as I crush a fire hydrant, whereupon I decide to drive on the road instead. An awful tragedy! Why, when I catch the criminals that made me do this, I'll make them pay. I'm distracted from my reading by a pedestrian screaming and bouncing over the hood of my roadster. I will complete this raid, and I will do it for the people of San Paro. Something something gangs something bad something raid something. Our police work for the afternoon completed, we get back in our cars and peel out, and I skim-read the briefing for the next step of the mission that just appeared in the upper right corner of my screen. Which is to say nothing of the madness of APB's embedded community: criminals in their underwear firing assault rifles at cops in day-glo pyjamas - with everyone hearing grotty squirts of inexpertly assembled techo tracks whenever they're killed, because players can create their own theme songs.īack in the storage facility, my District Commander friend leaps heroically from between our two cars to walk over to a door, which he takes four photographs of. Cops with no regard for civilian safety, criminals with a work ethic, everybody using cars as disposable battering rams and stepladders.
Now APB's gone free, there's nothing stopping you from having a quick explore just to experience how surreal it is. Which is actually the reason for my overblown intro up there. For the last two years, a handful of scrappy survivors from original developer Realtime Worlds have continued to attempt to realise the game's potential, culminating in the launch of APB Reloaded late last year: an "improved" cops'n'robbers MMO with a modern, free-to-play business model. So APB (short for all-points bulletin) is back. We are San Paro's finest, and we are here to do Police Work. You can create a custom musical theme to play every time you kill someone. He leans fatly over a submachine gun and has two grenades in his pockets.
He is a squat, bald Mexican called Jorge who wears ill-fitting jeans and no shoes.
This man is a District Commander of the San Paro police force.Īnother car arrives, this one curling into the area via a handbrake turn that sideswipes the facility's gates, keeps going, and promptly pancakes the District Commander between both cars. He's wearing bright green trousers, a blue shirt and a red cap - colourblind couture. It crashes into the courtyard of the storage facility, brakes, and a man steps out with the ease of somebody who's just completed a parallel park.
Suddenly, a rally car covered in Monster energy drink logos comes flying off the nearby overpass. Welcome to San Paro, the city of 2010's MMO shooter APB and, today, free-to-play MMO shooter APB Reloaded. The sun beams down high above it, rendering everything in the colours of affordable breakfast cereal. A deserted storage facility on the cheap side of town.