Alpha Protocol™ Reviews

awesome

Good.

Nostalgic from my old xbox 360 days. Still a great hidden gem

finally back in store no controller needed best stealth game!

People can say what they want about it, but the reality of the situation is that you've probably never played a game like this before. This is one of those older games you can feel the passion that was poured into it. Despite it not being well received around launch and even now, I enjoyed my time playing this. The story itself may have gotten a little bit stale/dragged out towards the VERY end, but nothing that completely deterred me from finishing it. Games aren't made like this anymore. Obsidian doesn't make games like this anymore. An Alpha Protocol 2 would slap. It'd be nice to see Obsidian take a direction like this again someday.

I have way more hours on the 360 version. GET THIS GAME. It wasn't available for a while and now it's back. This is an amazing RPG and the amount of (silly) ways to go through this game is outstanding!!! Please! Fucking play this game!!!

Alpha Protocol is a very mixed bag. The gameplay is awful, pairing a horribly clunky and unresponsive stealth system with combat that ranges from comically buggy to frustratingly janky depending on your difficulty level and preferred approach. There’s very little positive I can say about anything that doesn’t involve the story. But that story is really impressive and almost single handedly makes Alpha Protocol worth oplaying. It's not the novelty of the premise (this is essentially just a standard Hollywood spy premise where you travel across the world to uncover a giant evil conspiracy), but how it's structured and integrated with the rest of the game. Alpha Protocol is almost completely non-linear with missions split between three cities –Moscow, Rome, and Taipei– that you can move between at any time and take missions in whichever order you please, even swapping between cities so that you start one chain of missions before resolving a previous one. . But more importantly, the game responds to your choices with great frequency. Going into a mission might be your first time meeting someone, or you may have run into them before giving you the opportunity to fight or work together depending on your previous actions. You might encounter a spy in Rome whose organization you betrayed in Moscow, making collaboration more difficult (but still not impossible) or characters will have opinions of you before you’ve even met them thanks to your reputation among other characters and how you handled previous missions. The dialogue also works to take advantage of the game’s non-linearity and choice-driven structure, taking into account much of the same stuff as before with extra dialogue options unlocked depending on info you’ve learned and characters reacting differently according to your relationship and prior actions. Depending on what you personally want and what effect you think it will have on the person you’re talking to, each choice will have a different effect on your reputation, relationship, and outcomes of the conversation. Picking options the other character agrees with will agree with will make them like you more and vice versa if you annoy or anger them. In fact it can even be beneficial to get somebody to hate you, throwing them off guard and making them more driven by anger rather than cold rationality. While the dialogue itself isn’t anything fantastic, the system behind it is impressive and helps keep scenes engaging even when it's just characters talking back and forth to one another. Even if I have complaints about specific aspects of the story, I think the overall structure and design of that story are enough to compensate for some of the more micro-level issues. It definitely sets Alpha Protocol apart from other shooters and brings it much more in line with the kinds of RPGs and other story-heavy games that Obsidian is known for while still remaining incredibly distinct thanks to the setting and tone. Supposedly, Obsidian had originally wanted this to be the start of a franchise but the development hell this game went through followed by poor sales and critical reception killed that dream, a real shame considering most of the things I dislike about Alpha Protocol are largely fixable. This could have been a rough start to an otherwise great series, but instead it's just a standalone showcase of missed potential. Alpha Protocol is far from the best game I’ve played, but it is one of the more interesting ones on a mechanical level. Whether that makes it worth playing is much more a matter of priorities rather than tastes given how inconsistent it can be. But if you are intrigued and are considering playing, the best advice I can offer is to play on Easy when starting a new game (importantly, you can’t change the difficulty on an existing save file) and sink all your skill points into stealth, pistols, and sabotage. It won’t make the gameplay good, but it will at least be easy enough that you won’t get screwed over by the jank. I don’t know if I can outright recommend Alpha Protocol, but I can at least say I don’t regret playing it myself.

Maybe the most bittersweet game I own. It goes hard as an RPG Obsidian knew what they were doing in that regard. The sneaking, shooting and so on is "a bit" yank but this game beats more polished RPGs outthere. If you always wanted a spy-thriller RPG - Obsidian made one and this is it. Its very much flawed but you can see the brilliance in it if you search.

this game is just good it has great choises you can make that achualy make a difrence in the story the gamplay dose feall dated but the game still holds up.