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Oh the smell of the chase! The whine of the woo-woos! The scream of the pedestrians who stupidly stray into the path of your oncoming vehicle! APB had to be the first arcade game to accurately portray the US cop, driving like a lunatic and arresting as many innocent civilians as possible to get promotion quickly.

As a police officer, you have certain duties to fulfil during your day's beat, and as you go along, you get more and more responsibility dumped upon your shoulders. On your first day, all you have to do is 'arrest' two traffic cones. On your second day you get to arrest litterbugs, and so the load increases. Also, you are asked to help out when certain special criminals need arresting. You're the only cop on the streets during that particular shift.

Rather than the favoured eight way control, APB has 'rotate and push', which allows much more freedom of movement, but also takes a bit of getting used to. To arrest somebody, you have to place a token over them and hold down the fire button to flash the siren. The token appears in front of your car, and the faster you travel, the further in front of your car the token appears.

As you progress through the game, you can increase the capabilities of your cars by visiting such illegal locations as speed shops and armouries to buy physical enhancements such as better handling and higher speed capacity, as well as buying weapons to be used on some of the special criminals later on.

Graphically, it ain't bad. The city is large and quite well detailed, with lots of different locations to drive to, like the level crossing where it's all too easy to drive in front of an oncoming train. The game scrolls well in all directions and all sprites are clearly defined. Sound is good too, with a nice intro tune and in-game FX, though it's a shame they had to lose the sound of your boss talking to you after each beat.

The real problem is the playability. The car is easy enough to move around, but the response time is slow and the collision detection is terrible. It's all too easy to try and overtake a vehicle and still end up hitting it, even though you gave it an incredibly wide berth. A vehicle can often turn onto you and there's no way of shaking it, meaning that it takes all your lives and loses you the game in a really frustrating way.

A nice game idea, poorly executed. A bit more of mom's love and care next time, perhaps?