Review: Alpha Protocol

Alpha Protocol is the latest in a long line of RPG games that have a “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect to them. Over the past decade, these RPGs have dominated the western market with a lot of success. The developer, Obsidian Entertainment, is an experienced veteran of the genre. They have produced two successful sequels to popular franchises with Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2, but Alpha Protocol is their first original game. After spending nearly four years on the game let’s find out how they faired without a popular license backing them up.

Presentation

Alpha Protocol’s presentation has its positives and negatives. The game world hud looks good and is unobtrusive to your vision. It’s not cluttered and remains informative. Overlays, such as enemy positions and their alert level, are easy to see and don’t blend in to the background. The menu system is another thing entirely, however. It is often bugged and unwieldy. Sometimes you click on one option and it takes you to another. The game also does not do a good job explaining all the controls in the control menu. The buttons for bringing up the map and your skills are simply not in the list. They are not hard to find on your own (example: the map is M) but by not listing them it is an inconvenience to the player.

Story

The story in Alpha Protocol is about a new recruit to a secret United States black ops program named Mike Thorton. The game is set up that it is played as a flashback. The game opens with Thorton in an interrogation room having talks with a man named Leland. His role in the story is unclear at first, but you jump between conversations with him and the missions you are on which reveals more and more about what his role in the whole thing is. In the early game, Thorton is brought through various training courses and meets many of the players in the story early. You are then sent on your first mission, to stop a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia from using stolen missiles to blow up civilian airliners. What you learn on that mission sends everything spiraling out of control and Thorton quickly has to turn rogue. From there, Mike decides to unravel the mystery around what happened in Saudi Arabia which leads to many twists and turns a long the way. Even with the turns, the story is fairly easy to follow. Obsidian did a good job of not over loading the player with too many characters and only a couple of them were underused or superficial.

Graphics

In short, AP looks good most of the time. The animations all look excellent, whether it be a character’s reaction to your snarky comment or a jab to throat take down. It all looks good and flows very smoothly. The textures are high quality, though sometimes slow loading. Hair and clothing look like real 3D objects and not like a flat painted on surface. Backgrounds are similar as well as they do not like flat pictures but rather objects in the distance. The draw distance in the more open areas is also very good. There is no fog that an enemy can pop out of and you’ll never find yourself running somewhere before the area can fully load. It is not perfect, however. During quick movement of the mouse or quick character movement, a blur effect comes on the screen that is less than ideal. During the same quick movements you not only have the blur but can also be subject to stuttering graphics. There are various fixes out on the internet for the PC version to fix these, but that’s not really an excuse for them to in the first place. These slight flaws do detract slightly from what otherwise is a good looking game.

Sound

With a game like Alpha Protocol there is a lot going on with the audio. From footsteps of guards to the voice acting of the characters audio is very important for this game. When out on a mission, the ambient noises are also done well. In one particular mission, a passing train can be used as cover for your gunfire and in another, the roaring of a crowd can be used to the same effect. There are also various gadgets that mimic radio noise to confuse guards. Gunfire varies from weapon to weapon, as well. One assault rifle might not sound like a different one. But the meat of the audio in this game is the voice acting. There are a lot of conversations and a lot of responses from every character you meet. The voice acting is up and down, depending on the character. Certain characters, such as the main bad guy, are voice acted very well. You believe he is a cold and manipulative, looking out for his bottom line and no one else. Still, others fall flat, such as your boss. The VA attempts to come across like a police chief from an eighties cop movie but it misses the mark and can be dull to listen to. Thorton can be compared to the male version of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series. The voice actor portrayed Mike as though he is constantly a smooth talker, no matter which speech options you select. For a game that lets you play in various styles, it would be nice if the Aggressive options didn’t have the same tone of voice as the Sarcastic ones. As with all voice acting, though, your mileage will vary.

Game Play

Alpha Protocol’s game play can be broken down into two parts; the missions, meaning the combat and the actual player control, and the conversations with the characters that you meet. One of these is very strong, the other could use improvement.

Let’s start with the missions and the combat around them. The first thing to note is that almost all of AP can be played without killing a single character. When you sneak up behind someone, you have the option of knocking them out or killing them. If you use a Pistol, you can also employ tranquilizer ammo that renders enemies unconscious instead of killing them. The stealth element of AP plays similar to Metal Gear Solid. There are soldiers on patrol paths, alarms that must be shut off, moving cameras that you must avoid and turrets that all must be avoided. For the most part, stealth works well. Entire rooms of guards can be snuck past with clever use of traps and skills gained. You don’t even have to fire a shot or knock someone out at times. Stealth unfortunately fails on boss fights. Some of the boss fights render it completely worthless and you’re forced to engage them head on. This can be frustrating for a player that specializes in melee combat and stealth, as some bosses can not be fought that way. Melee combat is a very powerful way to go through the game. With higher skill levels you can take down enemies in a few amounts of hits before they can even harm you. Unfortunately, as noted before, some bosses can not be fought melee and there are no bosses that can not be fought with guns, so the balance there is a bit off.

Speaking of guns, weaponry in Alpha Protocol is broken into four classes. Pistols, Sub-Machine Guns, Shotguns and Assault Rifles. You can carry two weapons at a time and specialize in one or more of these classes. Sadly, this is where AP loses a lot of points. Recoil in the weapons is completely unforgiving, even with high skill levels in a particular weapon. Pulling the trigger more than once on a pistol causes the reticule to blow up huge, and that has nothing on the SMGs which are simply impossible to aim at a single target no matter what the range. They are a spray and pray weapon from beginning to end. Ranged combat disappointingly is all about relying on your cool downs and special abilities to be effective at it at all.

What Alpha Protocol does right are the conversations Thorton has with the people he meets a long the way. For these style of games having good dialogue and, more importantly, good choices for the player is absolutely key to making a memorable and good product. AP pulls this off better than any game that has come along so far for one simple reason: your choices have a real effect on the game and not in a superficial manner, as some other games in the genre do. Different characters respond to different actions in different ways and will often remember what you did at various points in the game, effecting the conversation and the subsequent actions. This game is very thorough and very thought out with its options. Every character you meet has a different set of rules of what they like and dislike and learning those, to use them to your advantage, is important to the story. If you are too crass to someone that could potentially help you, they will not show to help out. Subsequently, if you make another character angry it could cause them to make a mistake and allow you to more easily beat them. Everything about this game’s player choices and its decision making process is the best to date.

Final Thoughts

For Obsidian’s first attempt at an original product, Alpha Protocol is a good game. The combat and menu system drag the game down from being truly excellent but AP does a lot of things right. The player choices and their outcomes are phenomenal, the graphics and audio are also very well done. Despite its flaws, Alpha Protocol is a good and enjoyable experience that should be on everyone’s list of games to play.

Note: This review is based on the PC version at max graphics settings.

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