APB Reloaded - Shit or not

It's been two weeks now since I decided to install APB Reloaded, and in those two weeks I've played exactly 0 hours of it. There are a lot of reasons for this: work, family, upcoming holiday season, beer and disinterest. This morning, after an alcohol free evening of watching TV and eating Doritos Burn, I awoke before 7am with a hankering for online GTA-like action (or so I had built it up in my mind) and a mild discomfort in my colon.

After a few moments of registering an account (including a jarring interruption as it dumped me into a browser), 10 minutes sidetracked looking at Facebook Timeline (which is...dull), 5 minutes reading about the best server to play from in Australia and 10 minutes tinkering with the character builder I was finally logging in. And logging in, and logging in. Fuck, this game takes an age to load anything. The first thing I noticed was that I'd forgotten to change my resolution, so it's a mess of crap textures and jaggy edges. The second thing is the looping sound and lack of response. Yep, it hung within 2 seconds of getting into the game.

This was 100% of my APB experience

Not to be deterred, I rebooted - got sidetracked swapping out my wireless card and plugging in a cable - then made my kids breakfast. Then I made a cup of tea and I spoke to my wife for a bit. You can see where this is going, I wasn't particularly excited about APB and a hang at the get-go dampened the already moist tinder of interest. Long story short, I finally sat down again (after looking at the rain for a while and generally wasting time on a gloomy Christmas eve) and re-loaded APB.

Luckily my character was still there, I'd like to say I called him something cool like Franklin McThrustinDuds, but I didn't. Nice training shirt by the way. Back to it, had to watch the tutorial video again which was interesting the first time but the entertainment value of this production is inversely proportional to the number of times you're forced to watch it. And the ESC key does nothing. Plus it hung halfway through. So here we are, on the one hand it hung again, but on the other hand I was spared watching the entire training video from beginning to end.

I'm not saying this is what happened, but I am saying I'm open to interpretation if it gets me some compensation dollars

I'm not a patient man, so the next thing to happen was this:

Actual gameplay screenshots!

So, shit or not? I don't think I'll ever know. Time to wrap presents and refrigerate beer. Merry Christmas loyal following of 4 people, see you next year!