Game Review: All Points Bulletin: Reloaded

Oi followers!
Today I will be reviewing a free to play title, called All Points Bulletin: Reloaded. Or APB:Reloaded for short.

A bit about the game and developers.
APB was originally developed and published by  Realtime Worlds back in the 2010. It was a pay to play game by then. You had to pay 15$ a month to be able to play. After two to three months, the game got closed down and Realtime Worlds was finished. After that, GamersFirst bought APB and made APB:Reloaded out of it. It's a fully F2P title with options to buy some stuff in game.

About Gameplay. 

APB:Reloaded is a third person shooter game with a sandbox element. Imagine Mafia II, GTA or Saints Row but fully multiplayer! There are two sides in this game, Criminals and Enforcers. When you're about to make a character, you have to chose which side will he / she belong to. You can not change that later. If you want to join the other side, you just need to create a new character and start all over again. To the owners of a higher rank character, that can indeed be a pain in the butt!

APB:Reloaded does not have levels. It has threat level (also called Rank) and a notoriety level. Threat level is gained by ranking up contacts. Players have to chose a contact that they will work for. Once pledged to a certain contact, the player rises that contact's level points. Almost all contacts have 10 levels. As soon as the player rises one contacts level by one, he gets rewards. Each level gives the player different rewards. Players can pledge to a different contact anytime they want, but they can't be in a mission to do so. Notoriety level is much easier to gain and it has only 5 levels. Criminals start at the level 0 and have to advance it to 5. Each level allows the player to get slightly more money from the missions. Once a player reaches level 5, he becomes a "most wanted" person on the server. It will be announced that the person currently has a bounty on his / her head, and the next person who kills him / her gets a nice reward. Notoriety level is always falling down if you aren't doing anything, so it goes back to 0 pretty fast.

To earn new weapons, money, and standing with the contacts, players have to go on a mission. You have to press "K" as a sign that you are ready, which will then allow you to get a random mission. That mission can either be a kill mission, guard, burn, burglary or staying alive mission. It's totally random, and players can't chose if they want or don't want to do the mission. On each mission there is a chance that you get an opposition. The opposition will try to stop you from doing what ever you need to do. It's always better to have mission with an opposition because you earn much more standing and money by having some kills.

Money is an important part of APB:Reloaded because you need it a lot. Unlike the other games, in APB:Reloaded your guns are not permanent. You can buy a gun that will last 10 days. As soon as those 10 days end, the gun will disappear from your inventory and you'll have to get a new one. Different guns have different prices. Cheap guns usually cost about 2k, while the expensive guns can cost over 20 k! You also need to bear in mind that you need to buy bullets for each gun. Bullets are cheap, but they go away very fast so they seem as a waste of money as well. You also need a lot of money to be able to buy cars. Some cars are cheap, the others are very expensive. They can cost even more than 100k! But unlike guns, cars are permanent.

There are a lot of different cars that people can drive in APB:Reloaded. Players can either find a car on the street and take it away from the civilian, or they can buy their own car. The difference is that stealing cars from civilians does not make the car yours. Once you get out of the car, anyone can take it for themselves. While on the other hand, nobody can touch your personal car. Another difference is that you can't customize a civilian's car, while you can customize your own. You can change the car's colors, body kits, sound effect, you can add nitro, some other mods which make your car better and so on and on.

Customization in APB:Reloaded is endless. You can customize every single little bit on your character. You can make the face look same as yours, or you can make some superhero from videogames. I've seen a lot of Spidermans and Dead Pools. around. There are various clothing that you are able to purchase once you've unlocked them from the contacts. Once purchased, you can customize that clothing as well. You can add a lot of signs, tattoos and some pictures all over your body, cars or clothing. Hell, you can even put a skin onto your gun! I am using and urban skin, which gives my guns a kind-of paramilitary look.

There are some limitations though. As every free to play game, there need to be some stuff which you can purchase. In this game, there are premium guns, premium cars, or just premium itself. Premium guns are very Over powered from the normal, free guns but in my opinion that's totally okay. Why? Well because one of those guns costs 20€ for a lifetime license. Why would someone give away 20€ for a weak gun? By premium cars i ment either pre-made cars which are the same as free ones, except they have a pre-made look, pictures, and some mods set up. And there are also body kits for the cars you like. I have, for example, bought two kits and a car. And Premium itself gives the player no big benefits. The player just gets a lot of standing, money, and is able to have much bigger customization options. Unlike Free to play's 3 picture limit, the premium person can add up to 50 pictures per car and character's clothing or tattoos.

Just because a player has premium or premium guns, doesn't mean that he / she is "over powered". As said earlier, Premium does not make the player better. Free to play guns can always win against golden guns (golden guns are the ones you buy with real money). All you need to do is good teamwork and tactics.

Graphic and Audio
Graphically speaking, this game is amazing. It looks kind of realistic, the explosions are beautiful and customization is amazing. Everything about the graphic of this game is amazing.
Audio is awesome too. Great thing about this game's songs is that you can make your own songs in the audio maker. It will require a lot of work, but everyone in the game will be able to hear what you're listening to!


Pros, cons and final grade.
Pros:
- Amazing customization.
- Big two maps.
- A lot of different guns, clothing and cars.
- Ability to make your own songs.

Cons:
- A lot of hackers.
- A lot of sudden FPS drop to 0 (also called "Lag" in this game)

Final grade: 8/10

Extra info: So yea, even though this game is amazing and it has been in my top three games ever since closed beta, it has awful anti-hack support. I'm sure G1 are doing their best to fix that, but it's not working. There are more and more hackers every single days, and even with bans, it doesn't fix anything. But if you forget that, this game is just amazing! I love it and i won't stop playing it for quite a long while!

And a short video that I've made with my clan, just for fun