Alpha Protocol Review
Alpha Protocol is a game that sounds really good, in theory. Playing as an international super-spy with lots of cool gadgets and resources, a branching storyline that changes with almost every choice you make, and a blend of stealth, third person shooting and RPG elements all sound like lots of fun. It's just too bad that in practice, the game isn't fun at all.
In Alpha Protocol you fill the shoes of Micheal Thorton, a man who, as the game starts, is being inducted into a top-secret government organization called, coincidentally, Alpha Protocol. You can pick one of five back-stories for Mike, each of which specialize in a different set of skills. No matter what class you pick, though, you'll have access to all of the skills, so your choice in background doesn't really matter. After a brief tutorial segment, Agent Thorton is sent off to track down the leader of a terrorist organization. Without getting too much into the story, you'll be traveling to different parts of the world, unraveling a clandestine conspiracy and, depending on what path you choose, either preventing or instigating World War III.
In Alpha Protocol you'll go to a location, such as Saudi Arabia, and then embark on a certain number of missions gathering intelligence until you can fulfill your goal in that region. Each mission feels disjointed and poorly explained, so that more often than not I found myself wondering what I was doing and why. Thorton will meet different individuals who seem like they should be important characters and then never hear from them again. It wouldn't be such a problem if the game play was fun enough that the story takes a back seat, but Alpha Protocol falls short here too.
The game play is a mix of stealth and third-person cover-based shooting. The stealth is brutally hard and unforgiving, and it's practically inevitable that you will be spotted, and have to fight your way out of bad situation after bad situation. The gun-play is just as bad; all the weapons feel underpowered and are laughably inaccurate, especially when you're on the move. There are four types of guns: pistols, Sub Machine Guns (which Thorton constantly dual-wields for some reason), shotguns and assault rifles, as well as an array of gadgets, which are a fancy name for the standard grenades, EMP charges and health kits. Each weapon type has its own critical hit system, and they all (except for SMGs) revolve around looking down the sights for a period of time before you shoot. As you aim at a target, your cross-hairs will shrink, and if you wait long enough you can shoot for critical damage. It's an idea that sounds alright on paper, but the thing about cover-based shooting is that you want to be able to pop out of cover, squeeze off a couple of shots at someone, and then get back into cover before they have a chance to shoot back. In Alpha Protocol, you to have to pop out, aim at someone for five or six seconds before you can shoot them, all the while getting shot by his buddies. It drastically breaks the flow of combat, and quite frankly it sucks.
Alpha Protocol's other main mechanic is the conversation system. When you're in a conversation, instead of picking a reply from a list, Thorton can assume one of three different “stances”: Professional, Aggressive, and Suave. Each character will respond differently depending on which stance you take, and the idea is that Thorton can manipulate other characters into liking him by acting in a manner they appreciate. You don't know exactly what Thorton will say for each stance, so it's hard to tell if he's going to say something that will be well received or not. There are a lot of people to interact with in the game, and some of them you will only meet once. It's hard to know what stance someone will favor the first time you talk to them, and it's easy to make a mistake and consequently never see them again. The game does do a good job of tailoring how the story unfolds to your specific actions, though, and it feels like things could turn out very differently if one could endure playing the game a second time.
The game's got a stack of technical issues, from obscene texture pop-in to clipping issues, sluggish menus and a janky camera. The visuals look dated, to say the least, and all the characters animate really stiffly and look like they're made out of plastic. The writing isn't very good, and the voice acting ranges from decent to horrible. There are so many different characters that it's hard to keep track of them all, and none of them feel fleshed out, even the ones you'll be in contact with throughout the game. Alpha Protocol's biggest flaw, though, is that you never feel like the James Bond-esque super-spy that the game wants you to believe you're playing. At best, I felt like I was playing a Sam Fisher wannabe, one who's bad at being stealthy and has lamer gadgets.
Alpha Protocol is a neat idea, but it's not fun to play. The stealth is brutal, the combat is slow and frustrating, the boss battles are atrocious, and the one thing that the game comes close to doing right, it's conversations, other games like Mass Effect did better. Three years ago.
