Alpha Protocol Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on June 2nd, 2010

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Obsidian's Alpha Protocol offers an original setting and the power of choice. It's a game where you decide the fate of a majority of the cast, giving you the sense that the story is guided as much by you as it is by the designers. With a number of ways to customize the experience you can play as a stealth agent with a silenced pistol or bullet-spraying berserker it initially seems like everything should be in place for an entertaining role-playing experience. But Obsidian fumbled this one, badly in spots. A more rounded cast of characters could have helped out immensely because it's difficult to build up any emotional investment with the stereotypical personalities wrapped up in this twisting tale of conspiracy and global domination. Imbalanced skills, glitches, dim-witted enemies, and repetitive encounters further undercut the entertainment, making Alpha Protocol a game you can safely pass by.

Alpha Protocol allows you to pick and choose the skills you spend points on as you level, and does a great job of laying out the game's levels to take advantage of the skills you've chosen to hone. If you're a fan of straight-up shooters, maxing out your weapon and body skills turns you into a tank, perfect for running headlong into battle, guns blazing. Sneakier players (like me) can opt to level up stealth, sneaking up on opponents and silently dispatching them before they can raise an alarm. More strategic players can use the game's gadgets to take out their foes placing mines and then luring enemies into them. It's a game that nicely accommodates all sorts of players.

Alpha Protocol is not a terrible game by any stretch of the imagination. Instead it is a collection of truly next-generation ideas wrapped in a last generation package. It is hard to ignore all the faults and technical hiccups the game brings with it, even if the dialogue system is truly revolutionary. If you know what you are getting into before taking the plunge the game definitely can satisfy your number crunching RPG need. Everything is based on stats and dice rolls, and as mentioned the branching story and interactive dialogue truly is amazing to see pan out. Alpha Protocol is a game with fantastic ideas that simply falls victim to the staples of poor game design and shoddy production values.

Character customization is bafflingly basic and bosses can be annoyingly cheap. On the other hand, the game is gorgeous, with top-notch production values and voice work. It's fun to develop relationships between Mike and the game's various other characters. The stealth gameplay is pretty good, if a little too easy sometimes. The game makes you feel like a real spy, complete with all the research-based legwork. In those respects, there are few games like it. Whether or not you like Alpha Protocol is probably going to depend on your proclivity for spy lore itself. But if you've ever wanted to be a secret agent, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

With some heavy editing and revision, I could have seen this title becoming one of the greats, but unfortunately, it doesn't look like Obsidian got the chance to do a lot of that, even after pushing back the release date several months. An entertaining storyline and good RPG mechanics can't make up for all of the things that were just plain bad in the action-oriented portions of this title, but they do make it worth at least one playthrough, in order to experience the novel way that even simple dialogue choices can affect your game.

I hope it doesn't sound sexist if I refer to Alpha Protocol as the kind of gal you'd want a long term relationship with. She can be a little irritable and might not be the best looker of the bunch, but deep down she has a heart of gold. It's worth thinking about whether she's your type or not though. Do you play games for the story and role-playing? If so proceed to your local games outlet and pick up Alpha Protocol. You won't be disappointed. If your favourite aspect is the bit where you shoot said villain in the face, then you'll be better served by a few more hours on your favourite FPS. At it's core it's sturdy and solid, but it lacks a certain polish that many will find off-putting. If you can get past this aspect, Alpha Protocol has enough memorable moments to justify the expense. I'm certainly glad I took the time to enjoy its rather unique charms.

Alpha Protocol fails at everything it tried to do regarding the actual gameplay, horrible animations with just abysmal AI behaviors along with terrible shooting mechanics, sadly, the story and narrative is so good that its almost hard to recommend this game to anyone, if you are willing to suffer the terrible gameplay to experience the narrative, its up to you, just be aware that is one of the worst games out there, even if the game have one of the best narratives.

Eventually, though, all the severe problems began to pile up and infect most every movement I made. Nothing seems catastrophically bad but at the same time, nothing seems right, either. This game feels and looks very, very outdated and anyone who plays it will recall many games that did something better; we've seen far better role-playing, action, and stealth mechanics and in all honesty, I doubt this game would've been considered anything special even four or five years ago. We've already heard bad things about the development process and in the end, this is one project that should've been nixed. I just can't figure out why someone somewhere didn't stand up and say this would bomb.I mean, it's painfully obvious. I just don't get it.

There's much more worth mentioning here - the lobotomized AI, the nonexistent collision detection, the bare-minimum sound design, and cliché characterizations - that make Alpha Protocol feel like a four-year old game. Not even a bug-free release or patches to help make it more playable would save it. If that were so, and the asking price was thirty dollars, I feel I could recommend the game. Sadly, this isn't the case, and there are so many games under sixty dollars that succeed where Alpha Protocol failed - GTA IV, Mass Effect 2, Mercenaries 2, and Splinter Cell to name a few. The developer couldn't finish it; in fact, it doesn't even seem like they played it. Why should you?

AP has the appearance of a high budget, high quality title but fails in execution from being toppled over with the weight of what it tried to accomplish. Ideas were stacked on ideas without any real care to finish or remotely polish anything. The game is a RPG but that can't excuse it for featuring poor shooting mechanics since it was obviously an area of gameplay the developers wanted to include. Something went horribly and drastically wrong during the development of AP because all that is left over now the game is complete are a bunch of unfinished ideas that had potential but were squashed under mountains of technical deficiencies that make it hard to pick out the good parts.

It apparently takes about 12hours to complete the story without doing side quests and simply blasting through it but with the different options in the game it is one you could easily play 2/3 times before it gets boring. On the whole it is a good game and definitely worth picking up if your in to rpgs at all. Hopefully game developers will see the possibility behind combining RPG games with other styles of games like spy/espionage and improve where alpha protocol has begun.

Overall, this is a fun game. Sure, it has some flaws just like every other game, but the good outweighs the bad. If you need a new action RPG to kill some time with this summer, this one would be a pretty decent choice.

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