Review: Alpha Protocol (360)

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I am having a difficult time coming to a final judgment on Alpha Protocol.  Is it a broken game as other reviews have suggested?  In some ways, yes, absolutely.  Most certainly.  Without a doubt, broken.  Did I enjoy myself along the way despite the rampant flaws? Yes I did.  Will I play through it again to unlock more achievements and see the different ways the story will unfold? Begrudgingly yes, I will.

Alpha Protocol describes itself as an “espionage RPG”.  A better way to describe it is a “C.I.A. skinned Mass Effect“.  You play as Mike Thornton, an elite operative with a skillset of your choosing who gets involved in a global conspiracy involving stolen rockets and political assassinations.  Along the way you can make both loyal allies and hated enemies, fall in love (or lust as it were), and kill lots of bad guys.  The story can go in any number of different directions based on the decisions you make, resulting in a very high replay factor.

Like the first part of Bioware’s outer space trilogy, you make choices throughout the game and interact with characters via vague dialogue options that in Alpha Protocol‘s case are mapped to the controller’s main buttons.  Unfortunately you only have a limited amount of time to make a decision as to which emotion you’re going to convey.  Sometimes you know exactly how you want to react, but other times it depends on what the other person has to say, and you don’t know exactly what they have to say until they’re done talking.  By then the timer has run out and you’re stuck on whatever emotion you were already using.

Hello, I'm a mute emo. A memo, if you will. Giggle! BLAM!

Also reminiscent of the original Mass Effect is that it takes a few seconds for the texture of anything to pop onto the screen.  You’ll enter an environment and suddenly think you’re in a 90s computer simulation of some kind until a moment later when the details of all the objects finally appear.  It’s as jarring as it was in Mass Effect, but at least Mass Effect made up for it in so many other ways whereas here it’s just another complaint on a list.

There is an abundance of lockpicking, alarm disabling and computer hacking, all of which launch simple, timed minigames.  These work fine but quickly grow tiresome as they’re never much different than any of the ones before it.  Then there are components to the game that seem as if a lot of time were spent on their creation and implementation yet I never used them.  For example, pressing the back button on your 360 controller brings up your PDA, something I did not know even existed until after I had completed the entire game.  Obviously it’s not a crucial tool.  Also you have upwards of a dozen different gadgets available to you over the course of the game, but except for grenades which were equipped simply because I picked them up, I never saw an occasion to use any of them.

This brings me to the game’s interface, which feels like it’s fighting you every step of the way.  Not once could I get the hang of getting to the inventory screen I wanted to get to, or how to navigate around it once I got there.  You press the directional pad to bring up an inventory menu, then either another direction on the pad to change it or you can cycle through them with the left and right triggers.  You then select something with the left thumbstick.  Usually though my fingers were still on the D-pad, so when I’d try to move to select something it would take me to an entirely different screen.

Weapons are purchased online through a computer interface in your safe house, which is somewhat confusing since all the dudes you kill in the game clearly have guns that you should be able to pilfer.  Instead all you’re able to get is money, ammo and supplies, which goes flying out of them when they die.  Irritatingly, you always have to hit ‘A’ to pick something up, even though there’s never an item you’d want to leave behind.

Only once did I come to a point though where one of the game’s shortcomings rendered it completely unplayable.  Somewhere in the ruins level the game crashed on me repeatedly.  Never exactly in the same place, but in the same general area after the same checkpoint.  After 10 or so attempts, I started doing all the nonsense developers usually mention when there’s a problem like this.  I disconnected from Xbox Live, unplugged the hard drive, tried it on another Xbox 360, etc. Finally I was able to get back into things after both installing the game to my hard drive AND moving my save files to a memory card.  Good times.

$60 is a joke for a game that’s been pushed out the door well before it was actually completed.  And yet despite all the negatives I still enjoyed my 10 or so hours through the game (which I played on Easy for the sake of this review).  Melee combat is particularly entertaining, and a boss battle with a coked up Russian mobster who has a penchant for 80s music was a memorable highlight.  I think it’s a game worth playing (and replaying given the vast amount of variables in the story along the way), but with another six months of development time this could have been a triple-A franchise for Sega.