Very glad this game is actually available again regardless of its quality, by any metric it's got a ton of interesting ideas, and nothing this innovative should be completely removed from digital storefronts because of, as far as I can tell, a rights issue regarding a single song that plays for like three minutes total. Everything you've heard about Alpha Protocol's narrative structure is absolutely true. I played through it once, making most of my choices instinctively without much of a plan, and it was already clear just how much you can do differently on repeat runs. You can miss out on entire characters and storylines based on your dialogue choices, actions taken halfway across the globe will come back to bite you or reward you hours later in a different country, you can befriend and join some of the main villains of the game and you can brutally murder some of the main side characters in the game and the narrative changes to suit any of the potential decisions you make. You can play as a complete psychopath asshole who everyone hates and still be rewarded, or play as a complete kissass who everyone loves and still get screwed over for it. Of course, Alpha Protocol's story completely buckles under its weight by the end, but there were plenty of games from its time with endings just as limp that didn't attempt even a quarter of the things AP does.
However... that's where the problems start to appear, and there are a lot of them. Take Deus Ex for example. Plenty of narrative complexity up to the final level, where it turns out the only choice that matters is one of three endings, all of which are available regardless of your actions up to that point. Sure, Deus Ex came out a decade earlier, so it isn't the most fair comparison, but that's actually worse for Alpha Protocol. Deus Ex doesn't quite stick the landing with its narrative freedom, but what's there in the gameplay is still leagues ahead of basically every major game trying to mimic it for the past two and a half decades. The level of freedom in Alpha Protocol's gameplay isn't bad, it just flat-out isn't there. More than the broken AI and the janky movement, this is the most blatantly rushed and unfinished aspect of the entire game. Like, it's meant to be an RPG. They put that on the cover art! But half of the possible stats to level up are just weapon proficiencies and another quarter are taken up by Toughness (how big your health bar is) and Stealth (this was probably meant to do something but enemies detect you no matter what so don't put anything in it, seriously). Another one is just faster healing, which means there's only one actual skill, Sabotage. In Deus Ex terms, that's Electronics, Computers, and Lockpicking all in one. So in that game you probably spec into one or two of those, and depending on which one you picked you will progress through any given level in a completely different way. The missions and objectives are largely the same, something Alpha Protocol somewhat eschews by making entire missions missable depending on how you play, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is completely different depending on your build. Lockpicking and various forms of hacking still appear to block off different paths in Alpha Protocol levels, but if you leveled that one aforementioned Sabotage skill you can breeze through all of them. Actually, you don't need to do that at all, since it's just minigames you can access regardless of what skills you choose! the only thing being tested is your hand-eye coordination, every single level is completely open to you from the start of the game to the end! how did this ever happen? why would you ever design a game like this? if everyone can brute force through the locks regardless of their character build why not just cut them entirely and accept it's just a third-person shooter and not an RPG? You'll notice this probably in the first real level and from there the entire game starts to fall apart. You could justify the inclusion of locks and computers and alarms to hack if there was at least a binary decision between stealth and shooting. But there's one stealth skill to five combat skills, and stealth is embarrassingly broken if not outright impossible in the game's design at multiple points. Beyond all of that, your skills don't affect your dialogue choices at all (although in the grand scheme of things, this is a good decision), so it just isn't an RPG, or even an immersive sim, at all.
But if you have to look at Alpha Protocol as a plain third-person shooter, it gets even worse. For one you have the meaningless tedium of the minigames to open doors, but worse than that are the Deus Ex/Mass Effect-style weapon proficiency stats. With any given weapon your reticles start out massive and you have to wait until you level your chosen skill way, way up to actually use it well. This works in Deus Ex because stealth works in Deus Ex. You can progress through a lot of the game slowly leveling up your chosen weapon skill(s) without having to deal with the weak low-level combat since A: hacking, electronics, and computers open up alternate paths in levels and give you more resources, B: you can avoid combat much easier in the main gameplay until later when you have probably leveled your weapon skill to a usable degree, and C: the game never forces you into a combat scenario (as far as I can remember) without giving you an alternate option. This extends beyond just boss fights, as well. Don't want to sneak past robots or mechs in the later levels? Well, you've probably picked up some explosives by now, and you don't need to aim at those things to get a kill. Or just use an EMP, or just hack them to fight for you. Don't want to fight the scary cyborg lady in UNATCO? just hack her computer and learn that if you call her a "flatlander woman" she’ll explode into red chunks like that guy in Scanners. While it isn't nearly as good of a game as Deus Ex, this sort of low accuracy and weak damage output works in Mass Effect too since you have teammates backing you up and probably a variety of space magic attacks as well to save you when you're out of ammo on your good weapons. In Alpha Protocol, you have to put up with shitty aiming for most of the game regardless of your level and you are constantly forced into unavoidable fights in and out of boss encounters. I played pistols only since I was deluded into thinking this might function as a stealth game (I mean, they put "espionage" on the cover as well...) so my only real option in boss fights was using the quick shot ability to instantly headshot them and avoid the awful fight entirely. It's not even that annoying but it obviously wasn't intended since like half the fights hard cut to an in-engine cutscene of my character punching the boss up close even though I was sniping them in bullet time from across the map a second ago. It's not even the difficult sort of bad since the broken AI makes every mission embarrassingly easy regardless of how unfun it is to actually play as a third-person shooter. I thought bumping the difficulty up to hard might make it a little more fun, despite the basic mechanical and structural issues that difficulty can't fix, but I went into the final level with no armor on accident and it really just made it more irritating. At least on normal you can appreciate the jank. Alpha Protocol doesn't even remotely function as an RPG or a stealth game, and is completely pointless as a third-person shooter, especially when you remember Uncharted 2 came out a year BEFORE this did.
Unfortunately, even the story can't save Alpha Protocol. For all its impactful narrative choices and structural freedom, the actual plot is incredibly weak and the characters are very hit-or-miss. You'll probably lose track of it among all the little regional subplots but from what I could gather the actual spy story here is just Tomorrow Never Dies but longer and more drawn out (and without Pierce Brosnan or Michelle Yeoh). Except it can't even manage "kind of bad version of the second best Brosnan Bond movie," it has to be "genuinely awful version of the second best Brosnan Bond movie" because they switch out the villain from a charismatic news mogul to a generic businessman with the same motivation, not understanding the fact that Elliot Carver just being a media mogul guy was what made him interesting, not that he wanted to start WW3. That's a fun spy movie plot! "Generic businessman is willing to start WW3 for profit" is barely one step removed from real life! It's not just the villain either, almost all of the side characters are one-note and boring. Most of them blend together completely. I finished this yesterday and I can remember maybe ten names out of its massive cast, fewer still if I'm just counting the characters I ever actually cared about while playing. Maybe I didn't get to see the actually cool stuff because of my playstyle, but that sort of narrative freedom is only really effective if all of the material is interesting. You shouldn't be able to lock yourself out of the good stuff if the characters you meet instead are all insufferable or forgettable. Omen Deng, who you meet in Taipei, is probably the coolest character in the entire game. He feels more like a character out of Metal Gear or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex than someone who should be in a sub-Tom Clancy spy story like Alpha Protocol. Except... he's barely in the game and you'll see him even less if you accidentally kill him after his boss fight, a completely pointless option since it can only lock you out of content and killing him doesn't actually lead to anything unique. I've heard Conrad Marburg and Albatross are also some of the more interesting characters here but I made the mistake of pissing both of them off before even meeting them so I didn't get to see their stories through. If the gameplay was passable I could forgive stuff like that, but as fun as the potential story branches I missed could be I just can't convince myself to push through the awful combat for another 10 hours to see them. At least not anytime soon.
I can't tell because of the awful tiny box backloggd makes you write reviews in, but I think this might be the longest one I've ever written. Second place after Demon's Souls, at least. I didn't expect to write this much about Alpha Protocol, but there are so many angles from which I SHOULD love this game that I just don't. I love espionage/spy stories, but AP pales in comparison to even the weakest of Bond movies. At least those tend to have fun! Even the later Craig films, self-serious as they were, had competent visuals and direction. I like stealth games, but I don't think it's fair to even call this one in its released state. I've even got a sort of guilty pleasure appreciation for trashy WRPGs from around this time, but Mass Effect has an engaging story and fun characters, for all its weaknesses, something AP can't claim at all. Still, it is an incredibly interesting novelty, and there is a lot of fun to be had in seeing all the crazy directions the story can go in at your whim before it all crashes down in the final mission. It's absolutely a win for the preservation of games in general that this can come back on GOG fourteen years after it flopped critically and commercially, and it might be worth buying just to support this sort of thing happening more often. I think there are plenty of reasons someone might genuinely like this game, and similarly to something like the Shadow of Mordor games, I wish the innovative aspects of it were in a better game. But if you're considering playing Alpha Protocol for the first time because it's getting somewhat of a critical reappraisal now, I can't recommend it. If you're here for a stealth game, try the recent Hitman World of Assassination. Sure it costs like 130 CAD for the whole game, even if you own the other two already, but even on a light sale it's absolutely worth the price. You can play Freelancer mode alone for thousands of hours and never get bored. If you want a good spy videogame, you might be out of luck. I'd say just rewatch Casino Royale, which never gets old. However, speaking of IOI, I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll be the ones to finally make a decent spy video game with that Bond game they're working on.
Maybe I've been a little too harsh on this. It always feels worse to trash something blatantly unfinished like this than just outright bad games. The problems with Alpha Protocol are major and often game-breaking, but I doubt most of them are representative of Obsidian's original intent. The stuff they did focus on and implemented in a complete form is incredible. I know I just said I can't really recommend this game to anyone, but I can't help but appreciate anything that takes swings this big, even if it misses more than it hits. That's what makes this a two-star rather than a one. The gameplay isn't fun, but watching the game break down around you is very funny. The story isn't well written, but progressing through it in a completely unique way is very compelling in its own right. As a completed product this is not very good. But as an example of the sort of things Obsidian could have done in the canceled sequel, there was plenty of potential here. Again, it is fascinating as a novelty. Maybe even essential, because outside of 100+ hour games like Baldur's Gate 3, you'll never see something with impactful choices like this again. So if you're coming for the game, or the aesthetic, or the characters, or the plot, don't bother. However, if you want to play maybe the only game that lets you team up with an explicit Osama bin Laden stand-in just minutes after you were sent to murder him, and then somehow actually continue the story while taking that choice into account, then Alpha Protocol is for you.
However... that's where the problems start to appear, and there are a lot of them. Take Deus Ex for example. Plenty of narrative complexity up to the final level, where it turns out the only choice that matters is one of three endings, all of which are available regardless of your actions up to that point. Sure, Deus Ex came out a decade earlier, so it isn't the most fair comparison, but that's actually worse for Alpha Protocol. Deus Ex doesn't quite stick the landing with its narrative freedom, but what's there in the gameplay is still leagues ahead of basically every major game trying to mimic it for the past two and a half decades. The level of freedom in Alpha Protocol's gameplay isn't bad, it just flat-out isn't there. More than the broken AI and the janky movement, this is the most blatantly rushed and unfinished aspect of the entire game. Like, it's meant to be an RPG. They put that on the cover art! But half of the possible stats to level up are just weapon proficiencies and another quarter are taken up by Toughness (how big your health bar is) and Stealth (this was probably meant to do something but enemies detect you no matter what so don't put anything in it, seriously). Another one is just faster healing, which means there's only one actual skill, Sabotage. In Deus Ex terms, that's Electronics, Computers, and Lockpicking all in one. So in that game you probably spec into one or two of those, and depending on which one you picked you will progress through any given level in a completely different way. The missions and objectives are largely the same, something Alpha Protocol somewhat eschews by making entire missions missable depending on how you play, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is completely different depending on your build. Lockpicking and various forms of hacking still appear to block off different paths in Alpha Protocol levels, but if you leveled that one aforementioned Sabotage skill you can breeze through all of them. Actually, you don't need to do that at all, since it's just minigames you can access regardless of what skills you choose! the only thing being tested is your hand-eye coordination, every single level is completely open to you from the start of the game to the end! how did this ever happen? why would you ever design a game like this? if everyone can brute force through the locks regardless of their character build why not just cut them entirely and accept it's just a third-person shooter and not an RPG? You'll notice this probably in the first real level and from there the entire game starts to fall apart. You could justify the inclusion of locks and computers and alarms to hack if there was at least a binary decision between stealth and shooting. But there's one stealth skill to five combat skills, and stealth is embarrassingly broken if not outright impossible in the game's design at multiple points. Beyond all of that, your skills don't affect your dialogue choices at all (although in the grand scheme of things, this is a good decision), so it just isn't an RPG, or even an immersive sim, at all.
But if you have to look at Alpha Protocol as a plain third-person shooter, it gets even worse. For one you have the meaningless tedium of the minigames to open doors, but worse than that are the Deus Ex/Mass Effect-style weapon proficiency stats. With any given weapon your reticles start out massive and you have to wait until you level your chosen skill way, way up to actually use it well. This works in Deus Ex because stealth works in Deus Ex. You can progress through a lot of the game slowly leveling up your chosen weapon skill(s) without having to deal with the weak low-level combat since A: hacking, electronics, and computers open up alternate paths in levels and give you more resources, B: you can avoid combat much easier in the main gameplay until later when you have probably leveled your weapon skill to a usable degree, and C: the game never forces you into a combat scenario (as far as I can remember) without giving you an alternate option. This extends beyond just boss fights, as well. Don't want to sneak past robots or mechs in the later levels? Well, you've probably picked up some explosives by now, and you don't need to aim at those things to get a kill. Or just use an EMP, or just hack them to fight for you. Don't want to fight the scary cyborg lady in UNATCO? just hack her computer and learn that if you call her a "flatlander woman" she’ll explode into red chunks like that guy in Scanners. While it isn't nearly as good of a game as Deus Ex, this sort of low accuracy and weak damage output works in Mass Effect too since you have teammates backing you up and probably a variety of space magic attacks as well to save you when you're out of ammo on your good weapons. In Alpha Protocol, you have to put up with shitty aiming for most of the game regardless of your level and you are constantly forced into unavoidable fights in and out of boss encounters. I played pistols only since I was deluded into thinking this might function as a stealth game (I mean, they put "espionage" on the cover as well...) so my only real option in boss fights was using the quick shot ability to instantly headshot them and avoid the awful fight entirely. It's not even that annoying but it obviously wasn't intended since like half the fights hard cut to an in-engine cutscene of my character punching the boss up close even though I was sniping them in bullet time from across the map a second ago. It's not even the difficult sort of bad since the broken AI makes every mission embarrassingly easy regardless of how unfun it is to actually play as a third-person shooter. I thought bumping the difficulty up to hard might make it a little more fun, despite the basic mechanical and structural issues that difficulty can't fix, but I went into the final level with no armor on accident and it really just made it more irritating. At least on normal you can appreciate the jank. Alpha Protocol doesn't even remotely function as an RPG or a stealth game, and is completely pointless as a third-person shooter, especially when you remember Uncharted 2 came out a year BEFORE this did.
Unfortunately, even the story can't save Alpha Protocol. For all its impactful narrative choices and structural freedom, the actual plot is incredibly weak and the characters are very hit-or-miss. You'll probably lose track of it among all the little regional subplots but from what I could gather the actual spy story here is just Tomorrow Never Dies but longer and more drawn out (and without Pierce Brosnan or Michelle Yeoh). Except it can't even manage "kind of bad version of the second best Brosnan Bond movie," it has to be "genuinely awful version of the second best Brosnan Bond movie" because they switch out the villain from a charismatic news mogul to a generic businessman with the same motivation, not understanding the fact that Elliot Carver just being a media mogul guy was what made him interesting, not that he wanted to start WW3. That's a fun spy movie plot! "Generic businessman is willing to start WW3 for profit" is barely one step removed from real life! It's not just the villain either, almost all of the side characters are one-note and boring. Most of them blend together completely. I finished this yesterday and I can remember maybe ten names out of its massive cast, fewer still if I'm just counting the characters I ever actually cared about while playing. Maybe I didn't get to see the actually cool stuff because of my playstyle, but that sort of narrative freedom is only really effective if all of the material is interesting. You shouldn't be able to lock yourself out of the good stuff if the characters you meet instead are all insufferable or forgettable. Omen Deng, who you meet in Taipei, is probably the coolest character in the entire game. He feels more like a character out of Metal Gear or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex than someone who should be in a sub-Tom Clancy spy story like Alpha Protocol. Except... he's barely in the game and you'll see him even less if you accidentally kill him after his boss fight, a completely pointless option since it can only lock you out of content and killing him doesn't actually lead to anything unique. I've heard Conrad Marburg and Albatross are also some of the more interesting characters here but I made the mistake of pissing both of them off before even meeting them so I didn't get to see their stories through. If the gameplay was passable I could forgive stuff like that, but as fun as the potential story branches I missed could be I just can't convince myself to push through the awful combat for another 10 hours to see them. At least not anytime soon.
I can't tell because of the awful tiny box backloggd makes you write reviews in, but I think this might be the longest one I've ever written. Second place after Demon's Souls, at least. I didn't expect to write this much about Alpha Protocol, but there are so many angles from which I SHOULD love this game that I just don't. I love espionage/spy stories, but AP pales in comparison to even the weakest of Bond movies. At least those tend to have fun! Even the later Craig films, self-serious as they were, had competent visuals and direction. I like stealth games, but I don't think it's fair to even call this one in its released state. I've even got a sort of guilty pleasure appreciation for trashy WRPGs from around this time, but Mass Effect has an engaging story and fun characters, for all its weaknesses, something AP can't claim at all. Still, it is an incredibly interesting novelty, and there is a lot of fun to be had in seeing all the crazy directions the story can go in at your whim before it all crashes down in the final mission. It's absolutely a win for the preservation of games in general that this can come back on GOG fourteen years after it flopped critically and commercially, and it might be worth buying just to support this sort of thing happening more often. I think there are plenty of reasons someone might genuinely like this game, and similarly to something like the Shadow of Mordor games, I wish the innovative aspects of it were in a better game. But if you're considering playing Alpha Protocol for the first time because it's getting somewhat of a critical reappraisal now, I can't recommend it. If you're here for a stealth game, try the recent Hitman World of Assassination. Sure it costs like 130 CAD for the whole game, even if you own the other two already, but even on a light sale it's absolutely worth the price. You can play Freelancer mode alone for thousands of hours and never get bored. If you want a good spy videogame, you might be out of luck. I'd say just rewatch Casino Royale, which never gets old. However, speaking of IOI, I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll be the ones to finally make a decent spy video game with that Bond game they're working on.
Maybe I've been a little too harsh on this. It always feels worse to trash something blatantly unfinished like this than just outright bad games. The problems with Alpha Protocol are major and often game-breaking, but I doubt most of them are representative of Obsidian's original intent. The stuff they did focus on and implemented in a complete form is incredible. I know I just said I can't really recommend this game to anyone, but I can't help but appreciate anything that takes swings this big, even if it misses more than it hits. That's what makes this a two-star rather than a one. The gameplay isn't fun, but watching the game break down around you is very funny. The story isn't well written, but progressing through it in a completely unique way is very compelling in its own right. As a completed product this is not very good. But as an example of the sort of things Obsidian could have done in the canceled sequel, there was plenty of potential here. Again, it is fascinating as a novelty. Maybe even essential, because outside of 100+ hour games like Baldur's Gate 3, you'll never see something with impactful choices like this again. So if you're coming for the game, or the aesthetic, or the characters, or the plot, don't bother. However, if you want to play maybe the only game that lets you team up with an explicit Osama bin Laden stand-in just minutes after you were sent to murder him, and then somehow actually continue the story while taking that choice into account, then Alpha Protocol is for you.
NovaNiles
1 month ago