Alpha Protocol Previews

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Written by BuckGB on August 29th, 2009

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There's a reason for these dialogue routes: they can earn you Perks and Experience Points. Perks are minor gameplay enhancers that are awarded for meeting certain challenges or hidden criteria. There are a lot of useful Perks to gain from picking the right dialogue paths that lead to important story waypoints. There's another way to earn Perks collect them in-mission by hitting hidden goals such as three critical hits in a row not quite as tricky as it might sound.

Experience Points are a little more traditional. Like Perks you are awarded XP for achieving hidden goals. The points can then be spent in your Safe House on upgrading your character's skills. There are around 10 skill paths to level up and they range from simple things like Pistols to Tech Aptitude and Sabotage. They generally govern your skill with weapons, explosives and gizmos, but you can also unlock Feats when you pay enough XP into a Skill path. Boosting Toughness earns the Hard to Kill Feat that means you get three seconds of life when your health is exhausted to perform a last-minute kill or to use a health pack.

You can essentially choose how you tackle a mission, so if you want to go in guns blazing, feel free, but Obsidian and SEGA were keen to show off their stealth elements of the title, so we went in quietly. There are various ways that Obsidian managed to infiltrate boat without raising the alarms or disturbing the guards. They ranged from disabling the alarms with an EMP grenade or you can choose to complete a short, simple mini game if you like and making use of a few handy perks. I kid you not, Thorton has more gadgets and abilities than any super spy I know, even that Bond fella. In the demo, we got to see the Shadow Op ability (which made Thorton invisible for a short time), the Awareness perk (whereby Thorton knew were enemies were), the Chain Shot (a Splinter Cell Mark & Execute-esque perk), the Overlock (which super powers grenades), Iron Will (which improves damage resistance), the Sound Generator (which allows you to project sounds) and a Shock Trap (which is like a proximity stun mine). As you can see, the stealth element is a theme that runs throughout the gadgets/perks/abilities I previously mentioned, and that was down to how Obsidian chose to load themselves up for that particular mission.

Halfway through the mission, and a few stealth takedowns later, we got chance to see Thorton level up his abilities a la the RPG aspect which is intrinsic to how your character develops. The level up & character progression mechanics remind me a lot of how Mass Effect does theirs whereby allocating a certain amount of points to one discipline unlocks abilities for Thorton to use. We're huge fans of this system and it fits perfectly with what Obsidian are trying to achieve the mantra that you shape Thorton taking into account how you want him to handle. As a result, you'll get rewards/abilities/perks that will aid your cause and fit in with your play style.

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