As I said, character customization is pretty cool in APB (All Points Bulletin) but in the end, it's mostly cosmetic. Skill trees are nonexistent, and so the only upgrade to your abilities comes from the types of weapons you're allowed to carry. Leveling is replaced by the ideas of Prestige and Notoriety and the ultimate point of the game is not necessarily to become more powerful, but to become as famous (or as infamous) as you can. You gain Prestige by completing missions for faction NPCs and you gain Notoriety by committing crimes in front of witnesses. Paradoxically enough, public criminal action is actually a bad thing for a criminal, since more visibility means more Notoriety and more Notoriety means lower faction rewards.

RealTime Worlds may have thought that becoming a famous Criminal or Enforcer would be enough motivation to spend hours with APB, but without an overarching fiction, exploration, leveling or incentive to build in-game relationships, there's not much reason to play the game. After a few hours you realize the missions are extremely repetitive, even more so than most MMO missions are. Depending on which side you're on, they seem to all consist of spraying graffiti or wiping it off, and guarding or defending various points. And all missions are timed, which makes for some strange happenings. Sometimes you'll lose a mission before even reaching the objective and other times you'll win a mission without having to do anything. Neither is much fun (although you get rewards either way). Another wrinkle in the repetition problem is that it doesn't much matter which side you're on. It's really cool to imagine an epic battle between heroic lawmen and nefarious criminals, but the in-game reality is, aside from it being mildly interesting to arrest an enemy rather than kill him outright, the behaviors and goals of both factions are far too similar.

The last fun-obstructing issues APB suffers from have to do (apb gold)with the setting's seeming shallowness and less-than-great social aspects. There's not much in the world of APB that you can interact with—for my money, jumping fences and grabbing floating boxes doesn't count. There's not much you can do with the NPCs either, unless you count mugging them and hijacking their cars. Then there's the in-game community. Everyone knows you have to have a thick skin to play competitive online games because the anonymity of the 'net seems to encourage bad behavior, however, most games offer some incentive for cooperation. APB doesn't really do that, and even though it's a “mature” title, its context seems to have brought out the abusive fourteen year old kid in everyone. Yeah, I know...every game has its share of a-holes, but it seems APB, with it's “be a famous criminal” tagline, seems to have attracted every loud-mouthed jerk within range of an Internet connection.