Alpha Protocol Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on June 26th, 2010

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Another nice touch is that they've done away with the generic good / evil slider. Instead of putting all of your actions onto some sort of universe-wide karma scale, you simply earn or lose favor with the various individuals you meet. Instead of the game passing judgement on you and calling you a jerk, it's telling you that the person you're talking to thinks you're jerk. You can't punch Bob in the face but then go and rescue ten kittens to make Bob magically your best friend. If you want Bob to like you then you have to do things Bob likes and he has to have some way of knowing about it. It's elegant, it leads to less metagaming, and it just makes sense.

Alpha Protocol is getting a bad rap for dated graphics, slow first act, and its bug collection. While it deserves to take a few lumps for buggy gameplay, I'd really hate for that to be what people remember about it. Lionhead, BioWare, and Bethesda are always selling their games on the "choices have consequences" idea, but that often ends up being more talk than anything else. But Obsidian has actually delivered on that promise and given us a game that almost demands repeated playthroughs. I'm really hoping they make an Alpha Protocol 2.

I could go on like this for quite a while, if I thought it necessary. Alpha Protocol fails on multiple levels, from its completely inappropriate boss fights down to its absurd Looney Toons-style stealth creep. Nothing about this game suggests its makers have any acquaintance with sound design principles or even quality control. Flawed in its conception, impoverished in its design, and thoroughly inept in its execution, Alpha Protocol is an unmitigated disaster.

Yet still other times the action gets to such a frenzied chaos where either I got used to the controls, or I simply ignored them subconsciously in order to continue the game. I ignored the ugly texture loading, or the annoying camera. Underneath the ugliness lies a really good game. When all the dust has settled and the disc finally stopped spinning in the PS3, I could sit back and say that overall I actually enjoyed Alpha Protocol. Like the runt of the litter it has lots of character and is very lovable. Don't expect a Mass Effect heir or a Splinter Cell double agent, and you will be pleasantly surprised.

With the game being priced at $60.00 I can rate it and compare it against other recently released games in the same price range like Splinter Cell and Mass Effect 2. Compared to those games there is more wrong than there is right with Alpha Protocol. However if the game was priced slightly lower I wouldn't have been as hard with some of the criticism discussed earlier in the review. After spending a lot of quality time with this title I do think it is a diamond in the rough and I plan on eventually playing through it several more times and I look forward to a sequel.

The free choice system might almost save the game if it had any sort of compelling story for you to mess around with. Sadly, they took the decision making a little too far and give the player the option to betray, join and kill literally every NPC in the game. You'll note I said (and) in that last sentence instead of (or.) That's right, these options are not mutually exclusive, and there is an enormous concentration of them in the last 20 minutes of the game. This final sequence involves the game bending over backwards to give someone of any moral standing a valid reason to kill, spare, betray, join and have sex with (if applicable) every single character ensuring that nothing you did prior to this point mattered and anything you're about to do will end in an incomprehensible mess with no clear resolution or goal. At one point, I tracked an average of 5 plot twists per minute for almost 10 minutes consecutively. They cease to be twists at this point, Obsidian. I wasn't making choices anymore so much as sucking bullet time animations through a novelty children's straw.

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