"Officer Bob and his doughnuts..."

A.P.B is a game that you have to play if you’re into the old school style of chase and capture style gaming. It has appeared on several different formats and systems, all of which have essentially kept the same amount of consistency with each porting. With the Amiga version of A.P.B, you are back in the squad car and looking to hunt down the bad guys through several different stages in one huge city. Using nothing more than your car and a gun, you must hunt down several different types of criminals and impress your boss while keeping yourself on the force!

The story line runs a little along the lines of you being a brand new officer on the job, Bob, who is charged with the protection of a rather large city from petty criminals who roam the streets. Through your duties, you’ll be able to earn points, erase demerits and make yourself a hero to the police force. This is not to say that the job is easy, but rather a test of your ability to use your hand/eye coordination and make sure that you can fulfill your quota in each stage. If you can get into the tricky layout of the Amiga hardware, then you should have no problem getting through the game and making it to the end, which could take a few hours to do, leaving a little bit for replay value!

-The Game Play-

The game play that you find here in APB is something that you have to get used to. There really isn’t a whole lot of shooting and blowing things up, but rather pulling over cars and in some cases, running them off the road. Through the game, you’ll have the opportunity to catch bigger criminals through the use of extensive police chases, but those scenes come up far and few between. Most of what you’ll be doing is simply getting petty criminals to pull over so you can issue them a ticket and meet your quota for the stage in order to move onto the next. APB also takes on another role in which you have to watch out for what you’re doing by a demerit system.

You may find that the game doesn’t seem to be all that fair when you’re trying to catch a criminal and you end up getting in trouble for smashing into another vehicle that is in your way. For the most part, the catching of the criminal is merely to put your crosshair over the offender and then turn on the sirens so that they will pull over. The action really picks up though when the offender tries to run and you literally have to chase them down, only to run them off the road and listen to them complain about how you used excessive force! If you earn too many demerits though, you’ll end up getting your ass fired from the force, and therefore having to start the entire game over again.

Control isn’t really a problem here until you get into playing through the game and find that you have to use some finger twisting in order to target your offender and get them to pull over. Now, you’ll need to work on getting the finer points of the game down without smashing into something and earning yourself more demerits! Aside from all of that, you may find that the game really has nothing too advanced that you have to do, and with the small help bar that scrolls on the top of the screen, you’ll find that the game really does help you along if you’re having trouble trying to figure something out. Gamers who are into the hand held games shouldn’t have a problem playing through the game and getting the controls down, but beginners would do well to take a little bit of practice and work with the first couple of stages.

-The Visuals-

For an older action game, you’ll find that the visuals you find here are nothing that you really have to worry about and they do seem to reproduce the arcade visuals that you may have played with before. The camera is based on a top down view, so you’ll be seeing plenty of the cities from that perspective without anything else really coming into play. There isn’t any sort of scrolling that you’ll find with zoom in effects, and even the normal special effects match that of the arcade version. When you put all of these things together, you’ll find that the game is presented visually in a rather impressive way right down to the different cut scenes that come in depending on your performance!

-The Audio-

Audio wise, the soundtrack that you find in APB is something that keeps the pace of the game without giving way to anything else. You’ll find that the overall theme of the game is kept in all of the stages, but that some of the music tends to repeat without too much variation in the later stages of the game. The sound effects as well seem to fit the overall mood of the game, from the sirens that blare to the complaints that the offenders throw at you when you’ve pulled them over. Everything right down to the grumbling that your commander does when congratulating you is here, just as it was featured in the original arcade game!

-The Verdict-

APB is a great title for the Amiga and shouldn’t be overlooked for another action title. With the amount of games that you can find for the Amiga, you may have a hard time really getting into the more enjoyable games without running into the strange ones along the way. The control is a little twisted and takes some practice, but the game is virtually unchanged from the original arcade release. If you're into collecting Amiga games, then this one should be on the top of your list, not only because it’s fun, but also because the game is rather hard to get your hands on if you’re a collector!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/01/02, Updated 10/01/02