Review of APB Reloaded

I've put about 24 hours into APB Reloaded and felt it was finally time to review it.

Pros

• When the matchmaking actually works it can be a very fun game—even if you lose. As long as the enemy team does not pull any cheap tricks.
• The customization is incredible for both clothing and vehicles.
• The developers created a mixing station where players can actually create their own themes with a piano and over a dozen different instruments to choose from.
• You can add your own music to the game and other players besides yourself can hear it.
• You can join other instances as a group.
• When you get killed by someone with a familiar theme it makes the game fun instead of aggravating.

Cons

• Pay-to-Play (P2P) players ruin the game.
• Your player reloads automatically and there is no way to disable it. This is a problem when  you are leaning out a car window and stuck there while reloading instead of having your teammate take you to cover.
• Ladders cannot be clung onto halfway.
• If two players try to climb a ladder where each player is at any point on that ladder, it will push both of them off.
• There is a very common crash during character selection.
• When sitting in the window of a car and pressing F, the character has to crawl back into the car before getting out.
• In a car, players should be able to press a number or an F key to change seat positions.
• Because money you acquire as a Criminal must be laundered, it spurs a combination of gambling and addiction, with the addictive qualities of the game only accented by the gambling.
• You cannot search for items in the Marketplace (Auction House).
• The matchmaking system is worse than garbage. It's useless. I've had match-ups of four silvers against four golds, whereas it's supposed to compensate by giving us more players. This happened once, and it gave us two silvers but also gave the golds two silvers.
• I've had two missions that required a certain amount of kills where enemy teams did the following:
  • Pop two kills and then drive away the entire game in a vehicle. The game should have caused their vehicle to drive slower since they were in the lead, but it didn't and what should have been a stalemate was a victory to them.
  • Drive away to several spots in each district which are nearly invincible. One is in the northeast of the financial district where the only way to backdoor is to climb a ladder (you get shot while climbing), and the other is a long hallway where you can get sniped or picked off not even upon entering, but by approaching and trying to shoot back.
• You will see around three of the same civilian model while driving down most streets. With the incredible amount of options for customizing your own character, there should never be more than one instance of the same model in a world at one time.
• Civilians should never drop duplicates of 
• Civilians cannot be mugged while sitting down, crouching down, or while on the phone.
• Cannot use the arrow keys in buy menus.
• Gold players can join any instance, including Bronze and Silver. Bronze and Silver players should be able to join Silver/Gold instances and Gold instances, respectively, so that they can play with friends. My first day as Criminal I played with two Golds and should have been able to. However, Gold players should not be able to join lower instances because they use their higher tier weapons to farm lower players which is beyond unfair
• Apparently when you have a bounty on your head, you can be witnessed by Enforcers at any time, even if you've been on the lamb for more than a minute and your last crime should have expired already.
• When witnessed or in a mission in general, the game might spawn the Enforcer by Your Drop, but after he kills you, it does not spawn you at Their Drop, but rather Your Drop, giving you no possibility whatsoever to fight the Enforcer for your money.

Suggestions

• Players join "Clans". This would be fine it it wasn't completely contrary to the plot of the game. Enforcer clans should be named Squads or Units and Criminal clans should be called Gangs.
• All streets should be named so it actually feels like a real city.
• Squads and Gangs should be able to take control of streets per instance.

Review of Fable III (Spoiler Alert)

Some of this review will be a comparison to Fable: The Lost Chapters, which is expected being the second sequel to TLC. I'll start with the list of good things about the game, so that hopefully everyone ignores the list of negative things I found about the game.

Pros

1. Weapon upgrades.
2. Special battle scenes.
3. No wasps.
4. No beetles.
5. Addition of wolves.
6. Balverines have a much more fierce attack than in Fable: TLC.
7. Guards do not upgrade
   
8. Manage all properties from mini-map.
9. Gun handling for different directions.
10. Treasury.
11. Attacking stops the player from opening chests.
12. Jobs. – Sometimes jobs can be tedious, but since the player can just spam real estate you only play a job for fun (hopefully).
    
13. The mini-map lists all silver key, gold key, and gnome locations.
14. Music during sex.
15. Co-op: Can kill gnomes and collect silver keys from your world in another player's world.
16. Reaver – At first I was angry because I wanted Reaver's head on a platter a lot more than Logan's, but his speeches when you are monarch and you make a decision are riveting and made being a monarch that much better.
17. Fast travel – A necessity otherwise it would be a dominant walking game.
    
18. Buying houses seems to spawn people so even if you let half your kingdom die, you can regain some of it.
19. You still collect rent for your world in another player's world.
20. The Darkness. – When I first traveled to Aurora with Walter it felt like I was in an entirely different game, not even in the Fable universe anymore. At first I marked this as bad, but I enjoyed it later on.
    

Cons

1. No armor.
2. No trolls.
3. Hollow Men – A far underpowered version of the Undead from Fable: The Lost Chapters, mainly due to their having no skin or armor to make them harder to kill.
4. Interacting with people not in realtime. – You spend the majority of the game in a black screen as you transition to talk to someone.
5. No health bar.
6. No Mana bar.
7. Can only buy what is on display in a shop. – There is some degree of annoyance having to run all across each area buying potions, food, and new weapons.
8. Only two weapons for each class (mêlée/ranged). – The rifle/pistol dichotomy makes sense, but sword/hammer? What happened to the maces, cleavers, and greataxes from Fable: TLC?
9. Pistols should be duel-wieldable or have more ammo than the rifle. – When the player starts out, there is no reason to use a pistol over a rifle. The rifle is stronger, has a greater range (they are ranged weapons after all), and has the same ammo as the pistol. Of course, duel-wielding two different pistols would make pistols far superior to rifles, so in short, pistols should have had six shots to them.
10. Only one type of quest. – Whereas in Fable: TLC, you could have Gold/Silver/Bronze quests, all quests other than core mix together so you can have a series of relationship quests spamming your quest list, or have your quest set to the gnome/book/flower quest that will lead to nowhere.
11. Cannot chose emotes. – Sorry, maybe I hate playing patty-cake whenever I meet someone. I would prefer to shake hands but that goes away after the first emote pack.
12. Back-story shallow. – Yes, Logan is the hero from Fable II, but what made Logan Archon? There is no telling why he was 'the last great Hero'.
13. No paths. – Paths are interwoven with cities so that every area has some sort of human settlement with mobs either all around it (Silverpines) or many mobs before it (Mourningwood). The rest of the areas do not show up on the map because they count as being part of another area, so you may either not know they exist or forget they exist, such as The Hole. Mini-areas should at least show up on the map in grey.
14. Should not tell the player if his/her choices are good or evil. – The player should be able to surmise for him/herself whether choices are good or evil.
15. No access to your inventory. – If there was anything I hated about this game, it was not knowing whether I had something necessary on hand or if I would have to go travel to get it again.
16. The subtitles for letters transition too fast. – Far ahead of the speaker's pace.
17. The Hero says 'Who's a lovely boy?' when tickling little girls.
18. Can only hold 10 of one type of food, and can only have that type of food on hand. – i.e. that type of food would be replaced if the player picked up or bought another type of food.
19. Co-op can switch the amount of gold between the two players.
20. Co-op bug where the owner of the world cannot use the map, but the guest can.
21. Cannot use the map in demon doors.
22. Cannot tell the gender of a baby before naming it.
23. 'Unhappy' responses the same as neutral. – My wife came up to me and said 'Nice to meet you!'.
    
24. Worst. Final. Boss. Ever. – I wanted to kill the Crawler, some big evil tentacle thing that would use crazy Darkness attacks or blind me or some such. When he took control of Walter, I thought it was a mini-boss, when killing Walter ended the game, I thought it was a joke.
    

Overall, and using my standard for all games, these are the ratings I would give Fable 3:

Attribute	Rating
Overall	3/5 ★★★☆☆
Plot	3/5 ★★★☆☆
Character Development	3/5 ★★★☆☆
Gameplay	4/5 ★★★★☆
User Interface	2/5 ★★☆☆☆
Video	3/5 ★★★☆☆
Sound	2/5 ★★☆☆☆

Basically, it is a good game, but not worth $50, maybe $20 (Overall); the plot was decent yet predictable (the evil monarch committing evil acts for an ulterior good cause); the character development between Walter Beck/Ben Finn and a few other characters is decent; the gameplay was not phenomenal but it was fun using firearms and spells; the user interface failed in not having things like the inventory; the video was good but I thought it was only slightly better than Fable: TLC; and if I try to think of the music, Fable: TLC music comes to my head.

In conclusion, I've told this to many people, but if you ever hear this you can know I started it:

Lionhead Studios should make a Fable Ø based on the events detailed in books from Fable: The Lost Chapters. It would be the tale of William Black, the first Archon of the Old Kingdom and the Hero who defeated the Court (The Knight, Queen, and Jack of Blades), with creatures such as dragons as normal mobs or mini-bosses as well as the return of Trolls (which Fable III removed), and possibly ogres and other such mythical beasts not in the Fable universe yet.

Forgive my use of a vowel for a slashed zero, but the actual Unicode 0̸ does not display well.