Alpha Protocol Review

This game was a surprise, I was expecting the game to be terrible and one of those random convention vendor game buys that I would regret considering I impulse buy a lot at them. The fact that the game also has a cult following and it isn't because of the gameplay and more so because of the writing didn't help. I also don't consider Knights of the Old Republic 2 to be the epic masterpiece that some Obsidian fans do and that is the only game from that I played before this one.

With all said, I liked this game more than I thought I did going in, however, while I do like the concept of the game on paper, the game clearly needed more polish and time in the oven before it got released since you can see this in every part of the game.

I'll start with what I liked with the game. Well that is basically the moment to moment writing and choices the player makes throughout the game.

The story overall is very much your typical fast paced pure thrills quick and at the same time convoluted presented spy story. The dialogue between Micheal Thorton and the people he talks to is entertaining and fun to listen to. Micheal despite being a character where you choose his responses does have a certain witty way of talking that kind of reminded of JC Denton from the first Deus Ex, in fact that is something I like about the game is that while the setting is more grounded and takes place in the real world, it has far more in common with the first Deus Ex than the sequels do. Like how you need you need to spend skill points to be proficient with certain weapons even how the story while leading to the same destination can widely play out different before getting to that destination even the awkward and poorly designed stealth mechanics which ripped off other games at the time is present here. With the first Deus Ex, it was a poor man's Thief while with Alpha Protocol, it's a poor man's Splinter Cell. I'll describe the stealth more later.

I also think the choices the player has to make very interesting. There is one choice in near the end of the Rome mission that actually even got me to kind of think of what I wanted to do next and this is coming from someone who doesn't give a shit about choices in games. A lot of the choices, I tried to spare the NPCs or make sure many of them lived so they could help me later, and with these kinds of games I just go with whatever happens. It's also cool how you don't get a "good or bad" choices in the game and instead you get multiple personality types to choose from, I chose to remain professional at all times like me roleplaying as a spy version of Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs. Some elements of the story still feels half baked like the character of Westridge and Parker to name some examples. Westridge shows up at the start and at the end of the game, and Parker hardly has any screen time for the late game twist with him to be impactful.

With all that said, this is where my praise ends. The game is still as awkward to play and unpolished as many of the WRPGs that I have touched.

Combat is terrible and below the standard of even the cover shooters at the time. I am not even a big fan of Uncharted but I can say that even Uncharted's combat felt more satisfying than AP's does. Guns in AP are inaccurate even with the pistols tree maxed out, you can aim a gun at an enemy's head and fire the shot 3 times, and you will still miss.

Cover doesn't even work very well since you need to be crouched to get into cover or press the cover button multiple times and it's a 50-50 chance he will get into cover.

Stealth is also terrible and this is where the game enters into the realm of, "so bad it's good". I tried to play the game stealth, and the guards would either spot me from behind cover, spot me from far away, or would just randomly see me. The game didn't have a stealth indicator which doesn't help. The only way I could effectively stealth is when every enemy's back was convienently turned for me to a takedown on them. However this where the, "so bad it's good part" I previously mentioned comes in. 

On easy mode at least, I got caught and then played as a drunk John Wick and beat up everyone up through fist fighting and fired guns only on occasion, the fact that melee was more effective than shooting and the AI was so dumb made it so easy to punch my way out of most situations except bosses. The game also checkpoints well and has lots of healing stations making this style of gameplay even more reliable.

Bosses are terrible but that is to be expected with a game that takes place in a grounded setting with human enemies. You can eventually brute force them by taking advantage of how dumb their AI is and later in the game, you can use the quick shot ability to kill them even faster. It was annoying at first that I couldn't beat them through martial arts considering some of the bosses in the game should theroretically be weaker than Throrton but I am willing to let this slide. 

Hacking mini games are annoying since the game uses a checkpoint system and you can't reload from the point before you failed the hacking mini game but I eventually got used to them and stealth in the game was already badly designed to begin with so I didn't really care about maintaining stealth. 

Overall, this game surpassed my super low expectations, and I will give the game credit for that, I do think a remake or a sequel with more polish could help the potential this game had to be realized. As it stands outside of being a spy themed RPG, there are better cover shooters at the time and there are better stealth games. Deus Ex Human Revolution would later do "shooting and stealth" being connected to a cover system better than this game does.