Alpha Protocol, the latest espionage RPG from Obsidian, years in the making — so how bad is it really after seeing all the harsh reviews from so-called professional reviewers out there? That isn’t the right question to ask at all. One should ask just how good is it? And it is good, it is even bloody brilliant. Alpha Protocol is a spy game that is every bit an RPG in its tiniest details, from character-building, stats, dialogue choices with moral ambiguity, and heavy storyline in vein of every game Obsidian has ever worked on, and it lives up to that high standard of storytelling in every way. So why do reviewers dismiss this as a bad game? Because they probably only played it for an hour, or less, and they can’t even distinguish the difference between an RPG and a 3rd person shooter. Sure Alpha Protocol at times play a lot like Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid, with the exception that everything is governed by stats, very much like the first Mass Effect. Your gun is likely to miss if you are not skilled at using it. The game does start off slow, maybe a little slower than we would have liked, the training session at the Alpha Protocol headquarters made the game feel more of an action game than an RPG, and the story doesn’t kick in until a few missions into the game. Yes, the graphics are not state-of-the-art — it looks like a game that should have been out 3 years ago, and it probably should have, since Obsidian has been working on it forever. And occasionally the protagonist got stuck in walls and there were some long loading times even when you are walking across a room. We played the 360 version so we are unsure how much better the PC version or how much worse the PS3 version is — so take our words for it that whatever technical problems the game had, it doesn’t really hamper the experience, not by a long shot.
The best selling point of the game, to RPG lovers, is the dialogue system — which is the most complex system to date on any game we have seen. You take a stance out of 3 — aggressive, suave, professional, sometimes a 4th option appears, mapped brilliantly to the 4 face buttons of your controller, and you have a short time limit to choose to react — you can’t really pause the game but you can cheat that by pressing the xbox 360 button or the PS3 button, which we did a lot, to give us some time to ponder our actions — nevertheless, depending on whether you want to play Jack Baur, James Bond, Sydney Bristol, or simply the guy who always wears the poker face at all times… the NPCs are going to either like or dislike you and the story changes, they either become your allies, your enemies, and every decision in the game spurs a chain reaction towards every branching paths of the game’s story, all the way to the ending. Figuring out which stance you should take towards which character is really the core of the game. In ours, we played mostly the suave and professional agent, and we ended up scoring all the ladies in the game, figuring out what makes them tick is genuinely fun — you could kill most of them too, but what is the fun in that? Alpha Protocol features the best sex scene in a video game ever, well not that the game shows you any skin at all, but it is in context of actually what is happening in the game. You can turn most of your enemies into allies, or you can make enemies out of all of your friends. The game constantly feeds you choices, and it is insanely fun to reload saves and respond differently to situations just to see what consequences play out later. If a reviewer doesn’t give extra points for effort and ingenious execution, I don’t know what business they have reviewing games.
Praises aside, we DO have complains bout the game, and that isn’t poor graphics, wall collisions, and poor shooting mechanics. The complains mainly is about the options to build your character — in our game we started off with some sabotage and stealth skills but at the end game we ended up with most points in toughness, martial arts, shotgun and assault rifle. The stealth approach is fun and all but it doesn’t pay off to be the sneakiest guy around for you have to fight mandatory close quarters combat with almost every boss in the game. This reminds me a lot about the problems with System Shock 2, the game lets you go the route of a pure hacker but hacking doesn’t last you to the end — you can’t kill the final boss with hacked terminals and turrets. We also thought that if the game actually branched off its lock-picking and hacking skills, that you had to sacrifice combat skills to pick up, provided the game gives you option to get by with those skills alone, would have been a much more balanced RPG experience. For in Alpha Protocol, you start off with average hacking and lock-picking skills which would last you the whole game all the way to the ending. Wouldn’t it have been a better decision to have your character not able to hack a computer at all if no points were invested into hacking? In the original Fallout, the protagonist can talk the way out of every situation, even boss fights. If only Obsidian did the same with Alpha Protocol, it would have made this an instant classic game.
The interface of the game isn’t perfect as well — we wished the game show the player a mini-map instead of requiring 2 clicks away from viewing the map file at the intel option. And the 3rd complain we have with the game is the minor details with the Taiwan section of the game — we don’t know for sure whether this persists in the Rome and Moscow section, but because we can read Chinese — it bothers us that when the signs in a building is poorly translated. Like for example in the hotel section in Taiwan, there were signs which said “Penthouse Floor” and big simplified Chinese words above it literally translated into “Floor Boards of the Top Level”, ridiculous if you think about it, as if the developer plugged that phrase into Google translator, and they didn’t even know the fact that Taiwanese uses traditional and not simplified Chinese. I am sure this problem was caught by Obsidian’s staff who can read the language at some phases of development, but then no fixes ever made it into the release. Sure this is pretty minor complain, but with such a professionally-made game with such an experienced team, something like this seems inexcusable.
Alpha Protocol’s main plotline is great — a lot like watching Alias in video game form. It has layers and layers of conspiracies, some you may not find out if you don’t experiment with different branches of the story. There is no doubt that Alpha Protocol is a good game, one that may be plagued by some technical issues and dated graphics. It reminds me of Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines, a PC first-person RPG which also focused on character building and branching dialogues over action, a game which was hampered by so many technical problems that we almost threw our laptop against the wall when the game slowed to a crawl and crashed every 10 minutes, but we ended up loving it so much that it became one of our favorite games of all time. Alpha Protocol isn’t even remotely close to that in the problems department — it isn’t flawless but entirely playable, and delivers a solid and unique espionage RPG experience — there is nothing quite like it out there. The game won’t sell like hotcakes because of all the negative reviewers out there, but we hope Obsidian won’t be discouraged and continue to make great games. For you readers out there, don’t hesitate and go out and get your copy today, if you haven’t already; craft your own spy and make your own decision on Alpha Protocol.
