Alpha Protocol
6/10
Third person modern-day espionage shooter! Run around the world and shoot people, what's not to like?
Alpha Protocol gets awesome points for:
- Having good writers, for the most part. A-
- Being ridiculously complicated and giving players unprecedented choice and freedom to affect a story line
- Having really good voice acting, except for the main character who sounds like a douche
- Having *extensive* voice acting performed - I can only imagine how much audio was actually recorded, because even the guards say different things under the right circumstances. I was impressed with the variety of it all
- Being challenging with only a normal amount of frustration
- Having semi-unique mini games for things like "hacking" and "bypassing circuits"
- Having an in-depth stats system with "perks" and story-related power ups
- Decent graphics, what you'd expect from a current generation game
- Very good sounds and music. I was really impressed with the audio portion of it
Alpha Protocol gets lame points for:
- Being buggy. Just as an example, at one point a guy was trying to go up a ladder as I was trying to go down it, and it teleported me off and made me stand there and get shot. I was frozen and couldn't do anything, I had to die to get to the load screen. Apparently even the "load game" option in the escape menu is turned off when you're climbing ladders.
- Not letting me jump. What the fuck? I can't hop over this 4 inch wall that used to be a window? How secret agent is that?
- Having a horrible, horrible aiming system. I mean yeah, it's realistic to say that an assault rifle isn't going to let you get a headshot from 100 meters, but come on now. The amount of time I spent waiting for my sights to home in and be accurate in this game is probably more than I spent moving.
- Being ridiculously complicated. I lost my grasp of the story about 30% of the way through and started just blowing shit up. Honestly, I had no care for the characters at all because I didn't understand what was going on for the most part.
- Not letting me see what my character is about to say - the dialog options are cryptically labeled, and on top of that there's a countdown above it forcing you to make pressured choices that could drastically affect the game.
- For all of its effort in realism, Alpha Protocol bosses amount to guys with so much HP you'd wonder that they're not God. I don't know how you can justify a person wearing a bad jacket taking 4 full clips of assault rifle to the face and laughing about it, and then dying from a single pistol shot. I mean come on.
Conclusion:
That about sums it up.
Alpha Protocol is not worth $50, but it is worth your time if you like spy novels. The voice acting is done well, the story is wildly complicated and hard to figure out, and Shit Doesn't Happen Like You'd Expect From A Video Game (That's a new feature they should put on advertisements).
The complicated stats and perk system is all fine and good but it doesn't matter very much. You don't have to keep track of anything to complete the game, and if you do gain some kind of edge from it it's not significant enough to really matter. From the moment you get an assault rifle and learn how to use the aiming system, you've beaten the game. You can tweak out your weapons too, but I found that it didn't matter a whole lot.
There are traits and skills you can get with points, and I filled up the stealth bar. Stealthing was mostly just an invisibility cheat, it didn't really feel like I was a "shadow agent" as the description says. Sure, stealth is nice, but it doesn't do you very much good the moment someone sees you, and takes too long to execute when they don't, so I just used it as a way to bypass troublesome sections of the game and walk straight to my objective.
Alpha Protocol gets 6 out of 10 for being unique, having excellent audio, an involved story and for clearly putting a lot of effort into pleasing us gamers.
It also gets 6 out of 10 for being buggy, not polished very much, and having some pretty bad animation in spots - some of it was a little better than passable, most of it was just passable, and a lot of it was horrid.
TL;DR:
Buy it when it goes on sale.
--Locane
