Big picture thrills misses out on little details
I was excited when word of Alpha Protocol hit me. It was the union of two things that I really enjoyed: Obsidian RPGs, and the espionage/spy genre that you rarely see in the role-playing arena. And having been bombarded by ads for it while keeping up with 24 Season 8 on Hulu, well, I just had to get it when it came out.
It was a pretty big disappointment.
Before I get into anything, I have a message for Obsidian Entertainment: Guys, come on. You've made hit RPGs all over the place. How'd you drop the ball on this one? There are design aspects in your other games that you totally missed using in Alpha Protocol that could have really saved this title.
In brief:
Pros:
- High octane storyline
- Stunning visuals
- Sweeping environments make you feel like a globe-trotting secret agent
- On-the-fly conversation system
Cons:
- Interspersed flash-forwards makes the story a little hard to follow
- THOSE @#*(%$@# ALARMS!!!
- The VO for the main character was terrible, and you hear him the most
- Lack of customizeability for the main character (Done before in KotoR II and NWN II)
- Clunky stealth system
- Those damn doors that magically lock behind you
- Shooter system rewards slowness over action
- Poor controls (PC Version)
In Alpha Protocol, you play Michael Thorton, new recruit to the Alpha Protocol unit. One thing you can be sure of is Obsidian can deliver a story. Which was why I was unhappy to discover that the story they delivered was hard to follow. Something I learned a long time ago as a writer is that a plot twist can't be a twist just for the sake of turning around perceptions. It has to mean something to really hit home. And one of the first things they try to saddle you with is the flash-forwards.
I won't go into details to keep this review spoiler free, but try to imagine being a secret agent not knowing who the villain really is, and then seconds later flash-forwarding three months to a conversation with the villain. Now, generally, lets say in a movie, this wouldn't really be a problem. But Alpha Protocol is not a movie. A lot of players it might induce meta-game thinking. Armed with knowledge from the future and able to make a difference in the past, you immediately set your sights suspecting certain people. While there's some certainty in this method, what really becomes of it is this: if you're right, then the game just gave you the answer. If you're wrong, then the game planted a very, very cheap red herring, and wanted you to delve into meta-game thinking to be purposely mislead. Moreover, it's always disorientating to hop forward three months to have a discussion after being in a pitched gun fight with terrorists. Neither of this is very becoming for the writing team. The game wouldn't be lessened without these disruptive interludes.
As for gameplay itself, it suffers on several fronts. Apparently, the game gave me some perk of being some genius of stealth, but I've tripped at least four or five alarms every game. And why? Because as soon as you engage an enemy in a room that has more than one (which is fairly often), at least one is guaranteed to go rushing off to hit the alarm. Now, it's true, you could go for the silent takedown, but at best you've got a slim chance of making sure the others in the room don't notice the body hit the floor, bullet holes in the head. The only real way to silently take someone down is to engage them at melee from behind, which begins a rather well-animated set of martial arts moves, whether it be throws or chokes, to silently disable an enemy. Which puts you out in the open and out of stealth after you complete it. So you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. Also, more often than not, you will find that you can approach an enemy in stealth mode, and they will see you at the last second and magically their guns will appear at ready to blast your face full of shot. And you will have swung in hopes to actually trigger the takedown attack, but instead you just backfist the air and take another load of shot in the face.
So, screw the stealth system, you say? Then come the alarms. They'll screech at you all level. There will be a brightly flashing icon in your screen while they're on. And then you have to play a minigame where you trace numbers down convoluted lines in the right order to shut the alarm off. And you will play this game a LOT.
Another point to touch upon is the shooter aspect, which tries to marry the RPG element with a shooter system that just doesn't quite hit the mark (excuse the pun). While you are in a fire fight, a hail of bullets flying over your head, to get a successful shot you need to wait. Yes. Wait your turn. Wait for the tiny triangles to slowly crawl to the center of your reticle while wildly firing squads of enemies spray walls of lead your way. There are ways to decrease the time it takes to line up the shots, but they're at RPG scales instead of shooter scales, and shooting really just doesn't lend itself well to the RPG element. It needs to be fast, because all around you, the action is even faster.
And as a blatant slap in the face to the RPG genre, there are areas where doors will lock leaving the places you just passed through suddenly completely inaccessible. Just remembered you had a side objective to do? Well, it's too late now. You can't go back. Ever. You just have to reload, or wait until the next run through. For a game that tries to get you to live with the consequences of your actions, locking doors is a little extreme.
Personal note: As a martial artist, the skill that I invested in the most heavily was the martial arts skill. I was sad to find that no matter how advanced I reached in that skill (and apparently the character you played had even done well in the Olympics), the coked out mob lord with his tiny coke knife gave me more trouble than the Olympic boxer bodyguard. Why? Well apparently, in all of his years of martial art-ing, Michael Thorton has never learned to block.
And apparently snorting coke gives you temporary invulnerability to incendiary devices, hollowpoints, and shotgun shells.
The Final Word
Alpha Protocol is an ambitious project. It tries to run the line between shooter and RPG, but pitfalls of both genres that were easily issues of oversight in the past come back to haunt you in this game. Combined with an awkward combat/stealth system that really slows down the action in what was supposed to be a pulse-pounding thriller of an espionage game, and you get down to the reason why the line between the two genres was drawn in the first place. While it was a great attempt at what it was going for, it often fell short of its mark--but for reasons that could have been avoided on its way to discovering the real pitfalls of why these two game types have rarely been able to meet in the middle.
