Good ideas need good gameplay to ultimately matter
I want to like Alpha Protocol. The premise of an espionage RPG is great, and there are some meaningful and brilliant ideas in terms of the game's conversational cause-and-effect system. But everything else about the game is so ridiculously subpar that it's hard to recommend this game to anyone except game industry scholars looking for some great ideas for a better game.
The premise of Alpha Protocol begins its bland tailspin into bargain bin doom. The player is enlisted in a bland black ops group going after bland Middle Eastern baddies. You spend the first few minutes of the game getting acquainted with the terrible gameplay, stealth elements, and the droning, bored dialogue between your cookie-cutter protagonist and your cookie-cutter allies. That dialogue does get better throughout the game, mostly thanks to a colorful performance by Nolan North as a future compadre/enemy.
Let's examine that terrible gameplay, shall we? Everything has a balls-out wrong feel to it. Walking and aiming the reticule at the same time feels like one of those arcade claw games, where you're trying to line up everything just so but the natural mechanics of the thing are designed to fight you. That should never, ever, ever be the case with a video game, and yet, for the initial hour or two, I constantly fought the game's controls to navigate the also-bland environments. Shooting mechanics have been lambasted by everyone and their mother in reviews of Alpha Protocol, and for damn good reasons. Even with your abilities at maximum levels and top upgrades placed on your weapons, you'll still be spraying and praying. The cover system for shooting is done poorly. Sometimes your character will duck out and aim properly, but other times, without provocation, he'll simply spray from cover with no aim at all. Clicking away from cover is also a damn chore.
Graphically, the game has no real glaring faults, except for dips in framerate, but there's no sense of style or real enthusiasm here. All the characters look like generic Ken and Barbie dolls. The environments lack any real significant detail and practically scream generic 21st century shooter. Same goes for the sound effects and music. The guns lack any punch, the music is okay at best, and most of the voice actors sound like they were phoning it in.
There are some positives to be found in Alpha Protocol. As stated, Nolan North does fantastic voicework. There are some nice RPG elements, such as fully upgradeable guns, armor, and equipment. The dossier system is actually kind of neat, in that information you find often has tangible effects in conversation and gameplay.
The highlight of the game, though, is its cause-and-effect dialogue and faction system. All the dialogue choices and the way you approach certain missions ultimately affect something, be that a person's relationship with you, a faction's outlook on your actions, the hostility of NPC's... the list goes on and on. It's an awesome system, to be frank, and it makes the faction system of New Vegas and the dialogue trees of Mass Effect look like chumps. I played the game pretty honestly the first time through, and since stealth was optional, I played the game like a bull in a china shop. My violent tactics ultimately led to the hatred of an NPC I genuinely liked, as well as led to some pretty severe repercussions with a faction. All these choices lead up to the game's final act, leaving the player with all sorts of possibilities. It's truly a remarkable tool, and one I hope is implemented in games in the future - hopefully, with a much better game wrapped around that core.
