Alpha Protocol Review
If I had a nickel for every game that told me my choices in the game would matter, I could afford to play EA’s latest Star Wars game. If I had a nickel for every game where that was actually true, I couldn’t even buy anything on a Steam sale. Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol is a game where your choices do matter, a true RPG like Mass Effect or Fallout. It’s rare to see a game commit so hard to being a role playing experience in this day and age. So often, the RPGs of today are merely action games with light RPG elements. This is not so in Alpha Protocol. From the very beginning, what the main character Michael Thornton is and does, is almost entirely up to you. You can choose a preselected build, or assemble your own. Different skills include pistols, martial arts, gadgets, sabotage, and stealth. You enter the world of espionage, taking you from the Middle East, to Italy, to Taiwan, and Russia, as you dismantle a conspiracy to start a new cold war, masterminded by the “please don’t sue us, Haliburton” corporation. One of the most interesting attributes of the game is that after the Middle East level, you can choose where to go next, and where you go influences your reputation and how people will react to you. For example, if you go to Taiwan first, and befriend the local gang leader, he can poison the cocaine used by an enemy in Russia, sparing you from an agonizing boss fight (more on those in a bit). Or if you give a reporter information you find in Italy, she’ll be more inclined to offer you help in Taiwan. And this is just the tip of the roleplaying iceberg.
Throughout the game, you can choose how you interact with various characters, and what you end up doing with them. Your dialogue choices are referred to by the developers as “the three JB’s”. One response, suave, is an authentic Bond style flirty and sarcastic personality. If you choose Professional, you will be blunt and straightforward, like Jason Bourne. If you choose aggressive, you will verbally waterboard everyone you meet, like Jack Bauer. Different NPCs respond better or worse to different answers. For example, a member of the Chinese secret police appreciates frankness, but a Russian informant likes some small talk before business. If people like you, they’re more inclined to make things easy for you, doing things like reducing security, opening doors, and providing armed backup. But there are benefits to having people dislike you as well. For example, if you anger an enemy enough, he’ll attack you instead of escaping, giving you a chance to kill him. There are very few times when you feel railroaded or forced to go down a certain path.
The RPG mechanics are undoubtedly impressive, but the gameplay is lacking. Gunplay is done by a computerized dice roll, meaning that even if your handgun is right against someone’s face, there’s a chance you will miss. Not a good chance, but still a chance. And the boss fights can be truly excruciating, especially the Russian boss I mentioned. I had a martial arts build, but the game forgot to tell me that the boss is immune to melee attacks. There are many oversights such as this, with bugs that are almost as frequent as Fallout: New Vegas, another Obsidian work. Also, due to the game being so shaped around your choices, you can lose swaths of gameplay. An example of this is that in my first playthrough, I missed the final level of the Russia area, because I had not figured out that the man helping me was actually working for the bad guys. I suppose that generous players may add this as a bonus to the “replay value” category, but I’m not sure if a game hiding parts of itself from you is a great idea.
If you can forgive the bugs and errors (and I wouldn’t blame you if you couldn’t), Alpha Protocol is an engaging game, with a strong amount of replay value. The bevy of choices you can make and customizations you can do make it stand out, even among other RPGs. I hope that in the future, we can get more games like Alpha Protocol that have the kinks better ironed out.
