Ranting Review: Alpha Protocol

Alpha Protocol

First off is Alpha Protocol. Now, there are these rules concerning game enjoyment. At least there should be. This seems like a good idea to start if they don’t exist. So, in a random order, let’s start with some mortal gaming sins that alpha protocol is committing. First, and topmost and by god what were they thinking, the minigames. More specifically, the hacking minigame. Now I’ve been to forums and read all kinds of opinions, and I don’t care if they become more easy to manage after you’ve invested skill points or whatever. This just sucks. A minigame’s purpose, is basically to liven things up a bit, in between the shooting. To have a different experience inside the game, that’s fun. It can be difficult, sure, but the keyword should be challenging, not frustrating. I don’t believe that games should be mindnumbingly simple. But a game should never, unless the player is just awful at the game, frustrate someone so they start throwing things and make their roommates nervous with all of the swearing. My advice? Just spam emp grenades.

The back of the box says you can “Accomplish your mission with stealth, firepower, sabotage and charisma.” And while those may exist in the game, as a whole, you complete your missions by going from checkpoint to checkpoint, and leave behind dead people.

The second thing is the actual combat. The developers went on for some time about the choice you had in approaching these levels, making me expect something like Deus Ex in terms of level design. Basically your choices range from killing (or choking them unconscious) everyone either with them knowing you were there, and without them knowing you were there. I, having thought about this for some time, opted for the latter. My reasoning was thus, as long as I have to kill them all anyway, I might as well not get shot at myself. And that worked, by and large, getting the shadow operative power, I could literally turn invisible and crouch through an entire room, choking everyone to either death or the loss of their consciousness. The difference between those isn’t really visible, they change to lifeless corpses on the ground, and disappear in seconds.

It’s when you switch to combat with firearms that things change. Since it’s an rpg, accuracy and damage are things that upgrade. This means that despite you having a reticule, and you aiming it exactly at the head of some luckless mercenary, you might instead miss completely, instead of getting the headshot you might feel you rightly deserve. Headshot are replaced by critical hits, very rpg-like. This consists of loading points into your weapon of choice, and then pointing at the enemy long enough for the reticule to turn red. Thing is, when you’re in a firefight, it’s rarely wise to stay at the same spot for long, lest you get holes in your new outfit. So naturally you’ll want to do so behind cover. Good luck with that. Whether or not something can be used as cover is not only hard to detect, it’s also hard to pull off in actual combat. With bullets flying and you desperately trying to get in the right position hoping that the game will recognize that you are trying to cover yourself.

Ofcourse being a snealy kind of character, I was expecting to either have those kinds of encounters only when I was stupid enough to actually be seen, or trip an alarm, what with all the choice going around. Wrong. Boss fights cannot be sneaked around. Fair enough you might say, they are boss fights after all. Yeah, that’s all nice and well, but for someone who pumped his points in sneaking, full blown machinegun battles weren’t exactly my thing.

Now something completely different, the story, and the choices available therein. This is where the game really shines, the story itself could have come straight from a cheap spy novel, it’s about a spy who is with a rogue organization, that he then goes rogue from, but with their resources. The overarching plot features betrayal, and evil weapon manufacturers. That was good in its own way, but the way you interact with people, and the choices you make in interacting with them, well, that was actually really good.

Each next conversation option has a timer, when the person opposite you stops talking it either selects the standard option, or the one you clicked on. Too slow? Too bad. And that’s a good thing, it keeps the flow in the conversations, you can’t spend hours watching all the options and weighing their possible consequences. It’s an action game, and in the spy game, where quick decisions need to be made, the game does an excellent job of reminding you of the urgency of your mission.

The choices aren’t your characters words spelled out, they usually consist of words like professional, aggressive, or flirtatious. And every person that you interact with reacts to different things, and your next mission, or even missions are affected by the way you interact with people. Make friends with someone and they might give you some intel. Piss them off and he might warn everyone your coming. In one sequence I bashed in someone’s head to get the information I needed. I then got an alert that the authorities were now onto you. I reloaded and played nice, and he gave me access to his weapons cache on the black market.  Each character also has a like Mike meter. The more they like you, the more bonuses you get. Of course you can’t be friends with everyone, and when meeting a new character you don’t know how they’ll react, so you’re not pandering to each character. This is something that actually promotes role-playing.

So what we have here is a game with a good plot and conversation options with interesting characters, but somewhat flawed gameplay in the missions themselves. I’ve seen reviews land on the negative side on this game and I feel it’s somewhat undeserved. The combat and the minigames need some work, but otherwise I enjoyed playing it. If you like role-playing games, and don’t mind the stat-based shooting, I’d definitely recommend it. Don’t expect an extremely polished shooter, and be willing to overlook some flaws, and you’ll have a blast.

- Iamdude