It’s an odd game for me.
I can’t say I loved it, yet I beat it twice.
My interest in Alpha Protocol started 2 years ago when I was visiting my friends in Tennessee, they had the latest Game Informer sitting on a table. I started reading the article and I got it pretty quickly, the game was Mass Effect but set NOW. I was down for that, as I enjoyed the first Mass Effect, and I was also interested in Obsidian, the little studio that kept making these almost-great RPGs like KOTOR 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2. Obsidian’s other games suffered from being buggy as hell, and from being rushed. Everyone assumed the games were buggy and incomplete due to short development cycles, so when Alpha Protocol has taken 2 years to release since I first heard about it, I assumed it would be great.
The early reviews on AP, and the general consensus is that it’s a bit shit.
They are absolutely right. On almost every measure, the game is shitty. Yet, I think I enjoyed it some.
The graphics are a bit shit, with very small environments that manage to be extremely sparse with muddy textures that change in quality due to Unreal Streaming, but there just ISN’T that much to render, as I’ve seen other games on the same engine that had much more complex looking scenes that loaded much faster. The character models are fairly boring, and suffer from being kept too down to earth, as the G22 costumes looked nice and Splinter Celly, Sis had a cool model as well, so did Omen Deng and Championk. The rest of the characters while looking distinct from each other were fairly boring looking, being people in mid tier formal clothing, or wearing Heavy Tactical Armor. The animations are fairly ugly with poor transitions, fairly dead looking poker faced characters in a game with many, many many closeups on faces as well. The sneaking crouchwalk that Mike does in the game is fairly silly to watch, and looks fairly uncomfortable as well.
The sound isn’t that bad. Many of the voice actors do a good job of saying their lines and inflecting things properly, which is a big deal with games. There are some stinker lines delivered by the generic NPCs, such as guards. The music is fairly uninteresting, it changes up from location to location and has a few tunes, it never gets bad, but it’s not like the memorable Mass Effect soundtracks.
My real issue with the game are the choices, which there are many of them, and they do effect other things later in the game in interesting and logical ways, which is quite cool. There is also no going back in conversations, which is cool. The problem I have is the stance of the games creators, as going from the games ending, it’s a better idea to NEVER execute foes, and always befriend people and try and fuck women. Which, considering the tone of the game and how it throws up a vibe of distrust is fairly disappointing. As the endings for killing those who attack you and sacrificing the small people for the big picture, and turning out to be wrong, grates me.
Playing the actual game kind of sucks too. The aiming system sucks. Even though the accuracy cone isn’t too large, shots seem to hit less than 50% of the time on a guy who takes up over 65% of the aiming cone, and the shots that do hit do piss poor damage. It makes the guns very unsatisfying to use, as they don’t seem to really hurt people except when they do crits, but even with maxed out critting it still takes quite a while for the game to declare that the shot will hit. There is also the fact that the aiming just feels off, the acceleration feels sloppy and it’s a bit too hard to line up guys as the crosshairs lack any sort of tracking. I’ts hard to explain shortly, but the assist is nowhere near as good as any of the major shooting games of the last 4 years. The melee suffers from being tough to tell when you are within range, as the range is larger than armslength, but not that much more, and guys have a tendency to step backwards while shooting, and Mike stops his forward momentum when attacking, makes the melee frustrating, if his lunge was just maybe 1 or 2 meters longer melee would feel much better. There are also the gadget system which lets you take up to 6 gadgets into a mission, but you have to open a menu every time you want to use a gadget, and most of them are just variants on grenade, where it becomes boring to use them. The special moves are similar, requiring selection from a menu then hitting the LB to use them. Most of them just activate a timer power, like extra HP for 20 seconds or 20 second invisiblity. It would be nice to be able to tap A from this menu to instantly trigger them, instead of selecting them, and having to then hit LB. And if you want to use say.. Fury for hyper Melee and Iron Will for extra HP, you have to hit L-A-LB-L-A-LB before you can start beating guys to death. It’s not a major thing but it got tiring.
There is also the matter of cooldowns.. they simply take too long. Some of them can be brought down to 90 seconds, as the idea is that you don’t overuse them, but know what? I ended up sitting around waiting after fighting guys for my powers to refresh. If there is an Alpha Protocol 2, I’d like to imagine cooldowns becoming shorter and powers changing from being so overwhelmingly powerful. Such as the pistol power. I managed to use a silenced pistol to kill EVERY BOSS in 1 move. I run up fairly close, activate my Pistol Power ‘Chain Shot’ which lets me fire 6 bullets at once. I line up 6 headshots. that takes away about 90% of a bosses life. I then can use a special item to reset the cooldowns and DO IT AGAIN. But, using other weapons on bosses? They are extremely hard to kill. I ran out of SMG bullets when I had over 600 on 1 boss using a different save file. Shotguns did jack shit for damage as well. Assault rifles were okay, but getting guys to run in front of your crosshairs was a pain in the ass. Meleeing a boss to death is a poor idea, as most of them are better at melee or at least running away. So the game ends up being either Too Easy or A Bit Too Hard.
I do still feel the game was interesting, and the plot and setting made the whole thing worthwhile, the characters were fairly well written after the first area and the world of Spies really hasn’t been touched on too heavily in gaming, aside from the Metal Gear Sneaking Missions. The best mission in Alpha Protocol took me only 2 minutes to do, and it was intense, scary and I am not sure if I made the right decision and I never found out exactly what happened in that Gellato shop.
I did love the countdown timer on making choices for dialogs, except for a few where characters say something but only at the end of the sentence you find out what they are asking, like a guy says “Please do me the favor of..Killyourfriend” and I already have my selection over okay, as doing favors is a good thing, but I am not given enough time to decide as a player in a few of these cases, for the most part, there is enough time to make a snap decision and hope you made the right choice.
Thinking about it a bit more, I think the reason why ignoring the ‘important things’ in missions and focusing on the little guys is the right ending is because the villains planned on the main character making the choices for larger decisions, such as letting riots happen and saving a President, or stopping a bombing over saving a girl and killing the slimey weapons traders over convincing them to screw Halbtech. As if you do the larger picture choice, it results in the bad guys getting what they want, a global cold war and weapon selling. It’s a bit interesting to think of it that way, as the way to success and happiness is to not think like a big spy-type.
The game also feels dated in terms of the story, as the giant corporation with close ties to the government setting up situations to sell their products is supposed to remind us of Cheney and Haliburton, but the game came out a bit too late to really be relevant to the conversation. If the game had come out in 2008? It would have been a BIG DEAL for talking about the war in Iraq and the way corporations were a bit too cozy with governments, it just doesn’t ring as true at the moment sadly.
The game made me sad, as it was Obsidian putting their ideas out there, getting creative for themselves, on their own timeline.. and they made another disappointing game that could have been amazing.
42.662934
-83.387965
Posted by d3adend 
