Alpha Protocol
- Choose your words and actions carefully in a living, reactive role-playing world. Experience the “ripple effect” as encounters with your allies and enemies change relationships, reveal storylines, and unlock new missions.
- Mold Thorton into the secret agent you want to become with lethal close-combat techniques, marksmanship abilities, spy gadgets, and much more.
- Access an arsenal of weapons and customize their many add-ons to create the perfect weapon load out.
- Form relationships via dialogue and action choices within an intriguing cast of allies and enemies to get data for missions, new weapons and more. Remember who to trust and decide when to trust them …
- The game reacts to every decision you make. Will you let a terrorist escape to follow a lead, or eliminate targets against the mission agenda? With no right or wrong choices, every player can create their own storyline and ending.
Product Description
The year is 2009. Hundreds of innocent passengers and crew are killed after a commercial airliner is shot down over Eastern Europe. The culprit? A high-tech U.S. defense missile which had somehow fallen into the wrong hands. As government agent Michael Thorton, you have been chosen to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Become the spy of your choosing in a modern-day conspiracy plot. As you progress, decide how to develop abilities such as devastating physical combat moves, customization of your weaponry, and the use of ingenious gadgets and traps. Stay vigilant though – the cast of Alpha Protocol will react intelligently to your every move, resulting in the most exciting and unpredictable role-… More >>
horrible graphics, bad stealth system, bad AI…just a bad game for the price. splinter cell, any in the series, makes this look and feel like a atari game.
Rating: 1 / 5
Overview: A ton of wonderful ideas, but incredibly shoddy execution. Don’t buy it unless it receives some serious patching.
At its most basic level, Alpha Protocol attempts to take much of the gameplay of Mass Effect, such as the 3rd person shooter/rpg hybrid style, cover mechanics, and the dialog system (it even looks like ME’s radial menu), and add stealth gameplay and a more branching story. Honestly, the basic design of Mass Effect meets spy thriller is interesting. Unfortunately, the game is brought down by incredibly flawed and erratic execution.
Before we talk about the horrible, lets talk about the merely annoying. First, my most minor complaint is that Alpha Protocol has fairly bad graphics. This is fairly unimportant, however. Second, Alpha Protocol has very stiff, clunky controls. It is simply unintuitive and clunky. That holds for most of the UI, as well. Third, Alpha Protocol on PC suffers from its console-centric design. In particular, the mini-games (hacking, lockpicking, etc, which are an essential component of completing missions) are not very responsive to the keyboard and mouse control system. This is especially true of hacking, which is incredibly awkward when using a keyboard and mouse. If the above were the only problems, Alpha Protocol would get 3.5 stars and would definitely be worthwhile. As I said, the previous complaints are things I consider minor. Also, the skills your character can invest in are not well balanced.
Now it’s time to discuss what went horrifically wrong.
First, the enemies AI is erratic and bizarre. Distant enemies will come running straight towards you, not firing a single shot on the way, punch you in the face, and then slowly run away. They will run in circles, like a dog chasing its tail. I only got a B in my AI class at college, and I’m pretty sure that I could program a better game AI. Actually, I think my cat could, as well. Seriously, the AI is bad.
Second, stealth and cover don’t work. More precisely, they don’t work consistently. While in stealth mode, I could sometimes sneak alongside an enemy and they don’t notice, other times I’m behind cover on the other side of the room and they spot me. Basically, enemies stealth detection is random and unpredictable, and it makes stealth mostly unplayable. Meanwhile, the cover system is really wonky and makes maneuvering in combat range from annoying to impossible. Because of these two flaws, it is excruciating to attempt to play a character that isn’t an assault rifle wielding shock trooper or grenadier.
That covers the biggest or most annoying of the technical flaws. On the bright side, they all seem like they could be fixed via patching, excepting the graphics. On the downside, the game is simply terrible until it gets fixed, and who knows when that will occur. Basically, the high level design is intriguing, the story is interesting and there are many bifurcation points, the cast of characters is delightfully colorful, and the voice acting is well done… but the game is entirely unplayable because of clunky controls and broken systems, and the interface is poorly designed, unintuitive, and makes doing anything that isn’t a conversation annoying.
Rating: 1 / 5
Spy games don’t come along too often, so when I heard that Obsidian was developing a spy RPG, I was fairly excited. At the same time, I was also a little weary. I used to LOVE the talent behind Obsidian. This, after all, is a studio formed by many of the top talent that formerly worked at Interplay and the much-venerated Black Isle Studios. Between 9 and 12 years ago, I went through some of the best gaming experiences thanks to the original Fallout games, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. Despite this rich history, starting with Star Wars: KOTOR II Obsidian’s products have become progressively worse. KOTOR II had a great story but was mired by several bugs and, well…depending on how you made certain choices, large chunks of the story towards the endgame unfolded without a shred of logic. Then they delivered Neverwinter Nights 2, which again had everything going for it, except for some horrendous bugs. At least one bug was game-breaking.
It is the same story with Alpha Protocol. While the plot is serviceable, and the dialogue system is fairly engaging, the rest of the game leaves much to be desired. Graphics, character models and animations are clunky and laughable. From the very first trailer, the game looked long in the teeth. What is shocking is the fact that they used the Unreal 3.0 engine and still botched it up. No its not the best engine out there (*kaff* Crytek *kaff*), but its capable of building some pretty nifty looking worlds.
The sound is very average. Personally I’ve heard worse voice acting, especially in some of the European imports. The music fits the mood (some plain Bond/Bourne rip-offs) but doesn’t have much character.
Gameplay is mostly bad, but there are a few bright spots. The gunplay is wonky – and is particularly frustrating if you, like myself, spent a couple of months earlier this year with Commander Shepard and Co. Mini-games like hacking get old fast, but that’s a complaint I have about mini-games in a lot of RPGs. Surprisingly I like the time-limit in the dialogue choices. It really makes you feel like you are a spy under pressure and its quite a thrill to decide someone’s fate in the space of 5 seconds. I also like the weapons/skill customization – which is fleshed out properly enough.
A glaring hole is the (non-existent) artificial intelligence. My favorite bug is when baddies keep on climbing up and down the same ladder for no reason whatsoever.
As far as plot goes…its okay. But then again story has never been Obsidian’s weakness. I can see two reasons why Alpha Protocol turned out the way it did. One: Obsidian just wanted to shove this out the door when they inked the deal to develop Fallout New Vegas. And two: They just don’t have a good game development process in place. Which is a pity, given the good writers on staff.
I hope Obsidian is taking note as I am certainly not the only individual feeling this way. After this mess, I doubt I’ll blindly go out and buy Fallout New Vegas – original developers or no (I am so bloody scared about how it turns out!) From now on, Obsidian is going to have to work hard to get my hard-earned money.
My advice to prospective buyers: wait till the game hits the sub $30 mark – give it 6 to 12 months. Actually you are better of re-visiting an old RPG like The Witcher or something. Hell, fire up Dragon Age for the third time if you must! I know I did just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
Rating: 2 / 5
I’ll be honest, I didn’t play that much, but I have so many titles waiting to be played, and not enough time for them all, I don’t usually give a game much time to grab my interest. This one failed to do so. What I hoped was going to be an exciting and fresh take on the single character RPG experience really seemed to be content with following in Mass Effect 2′s footsteps, simply replacing the science fiction for “reality” if you will.
Waking up in a medical room on an examination table must be the vogue way to kick of an action RPG, but unlike Mass Effect 2, which had the benefit of an entire previous installment, I found nothing engaging about Mike Thornton’s (I think that’s his name) initiation into the Alpha Protocol organization. I had no reason to care about the character. Even Red Dead Redemption followed the basic idea, but at least your character was involved… I mean, you got shot, and in the old West, there was only one answer for that. Going from an opening cinematic of a random plane being blown up by a missile to waking up in a pair of scrubs in an unsupervised medical room, left with the assumption that you are going to be the one to do something about it because its really the only logical conclusion you can make.
The customization was basically selecting what package of skills to start with, what kind of hair product you use, how much time you spend in the sun and what kind of razor you shave with. Roleplaying games have the capacity to really create large online communities. I don’t see that happening with this game. This game is more like going to a gaming convention and spending four hours playing a GM select pre-made character. You have fun, but you don’t end up really feeling a sense of connection, and when it’s over you don’t spend must time thinking about it.
Being introduced to the game’s mechanics did nothing to really stir my interest. No special classes, none of the abilities really sounded interesting… basically the same general categories of abilities one would expect. The variety of guns and grenades were all standard fare. The characters were just too much of what you’d expect. They just seemed to try to hard to make the game feel “real” and it ended up reducing my enjoyment and interest because it really felt like I wouldn’t end up discovering anything imaginative by playing through it.
The roleplayers aren’t going to be drawn into the game and the world like the Mass Effect series. Fans of first person shooters aren’t going to be willing to put up with the poor controls. This game will certainly appeal to some people, but it feels like they were going for a niche of a niche market. After Fallout 3, I was expecting quite a bit more.
Rating: 3 / 5
The mouse sensitivity is skewed between two parts of the game: the running around and firing works best with a low mouse sensitivity, but the mini-games are impossible without high mouse sensitivity because you cannot move your cursor across the screen fast enough to complete them. I had the same problem with the dialogue: I couldn’t move the (terribly directed) cursor to the conversational option I wanted in time (that’s right: conversations are *timed* and you lose the opportunity to play as you like if you cannot react fast enough).
I found the frame rate to be terrible–lots of skipping. My computer runs smoothly when I play Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, or Unreal Tournament 3, but Alpha Protocol (despite having inferior graphics to all three of those titles) is clunky and headache-inducing. It is hard to believe this game runs on the Unreal 3 engine.
It is possible that switching to a controller would fix these problems–but I play on a computer because I prefer the precision of the mouse. As is, I find the game unplayable.
Rating: 1 / 5