Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying about Leveling Up and Love Brass Knuckles, Creating Gang Symbols and Making Friends by Doing a Drive By.

APB is a game where you go commit crimes or enforce the law with a group of your friends. At its core, APB is a gang fantasy; but most MMOs are. Whether you want to call it a group, a clan or a fellowship of the ring, most MMOs veer away from the solitary or competitive gameplay of consoles for a shared experience with friends. And most MMOs give you items to distinguish yourself from your peers and give you a unique identity. But APB does these things in ways, and to levels, we've never seen before.

Customization: Crafting an Identity

It all starts with the investment that comes with creating a character, and everything the character owns, from scratch. There's something magical that happens when you create a symbol from shapes in the symbol creator, stamp that symbol on a car you've painted and drive it out onto the street. You feel invested in the car. It becomes your own. That car's yours, not just because you're driving it, or because you purchased it, but because you created it.

And this human creativity is the blood that flows through APB's veins. It's a game that encourages you to dress a little more wildly, to paint your car more exotically and to stand out. In the social district, where you customize and create for your character, there are billboards for you to show off your symbol designs and a convention center where you can parade your car. And the gamers play along. You'll never see the same look on a character twice and many of the things you see will surprise you, like a billboard saying, "I just had sex with your mom."

Clans aren't just collections of players, but marauding gangs wearing matching uniforms, patrolling the streets in trucks like something out of the movie The Warriors. We fought against (and beat) a gang that dressed entirely in white suites with their leader in white body armor. We drove past scary clowns committing a storefront robbery and flirted with female gang members dressed in only bikinis, pigtails and pistol holsters. It's wild, and it's wild organically because everything you see was chosen and created by a person; which brings us to our next point.

Humans Are Fun

Running from the cops is more harrowing in APB than Grand Theft Auto or the myriad of other open world games out there because you're being pursued by a living, thinking human. And this person wants your blood. When you see "APB" flash across the screen, you know that there is a real person that's elected to come and shut you down because of your crimes. It's exciting.

When you've finished with one mission, you'll get another all points bulletin telling you of a new one. You don't have to troop your whole group to the "quest giver" because, essentially, the "quests" come to you. It seems like a small touch, but it goes a huge way toward keeping the fun coming and decreasing downtime between group activities.

And finding a group is as easy as a click of the mouse. No longer will you have to awkwardly ask to join someone's  group like a nerdy high school kid at lunch trying to sit with the cheerleaders. APB will automatically group you with players from your faction.

And you should find a group eventually, because APB is not a ton of fun alone, and very difficult. Plus, going solo would keep you from experiencing APB in its fullest: riding along in a pimped out SUV, you and 2 of your friends leaning out the window with your Uzis, looking for suckers to waste. When you, like one of our teammates, start saying things like, "they're gonna have a hard time finding people with the balls to take us down," you're experiencing APB at its fullest.