A broken mess of glitches, amalgamated ideas, unfinished mechanics but I love it.
Alpha Protocol is such a weird game. an attempt to make a spy role playing game funded by Sega and made by Obsidian. How this ever came to be I doubt I'll ever know but I love so many things it does.
The story isn't anything to particularly praise but a lot of the content on the way is still pretty unique to this day. The dialogue system doesn't give you exactly what the main character Jason Bourne, I mean Michael Thornton will say but instead gives the type of response like "confident", "aggressive", Suave" etc. he will give. These responses can be amazing, hilarious or disastrous but you'll never truly know until you select it and to add to that you have a limited time to select your response to keep the conversation flowing rather than staring at the person dead eyed for 5 minutes weighing the choices up like in other rpgs. It's a really unique system and it works surprisingly well, i'd love to see more versions of it in other games.
Some of the character's are genuinely great and depending on how you treat them it has a surprising amount of endings that gel together in various combinations pretty nicely. This is surprising considering how unfinished the game clearly is with one faction in particular having a part in the game clearly destined to be more that never show up again in the game later.
The combat is kind of the biggest aspect of broken I found in the game. First playthrough I had to start the game again as I got to an unbeatable boss. Is the boss hard? no. The reason being I'd put points into weapons other than the pistol. Best and only good weapon in the game. The level up system and skills are generally a broken mess a lot of people never got past and it's a shame because there are great moments, characters (Sie!) and systems here that are often overlooked due to the troubled development it had.
Overall I highly recommend trying it. It must be cheap to get hold of by now and it's great despite it's rough edges (Only level the pistol!)
+ Dialogue system is still pretty unique over 10 years later.
+ Surprisingly cohesive ending combinations.
+ Sie is great.
- Combat and leveling up is dreadful.
- Parts feel unfinished.
Alpha Protocol is such a weird game. an attempt to make a spy role playing game funded by Sega and made by Obsidian. How this ever came to be I doubt I'll ever know but I love so many things it does.
The story isn't anything to particularly praise but a lot of the content on the way is still pretty unique to this day. The dialogue system doesn't give you exactly what the main character Jason Bourne, I mean Michael Thornton will say but instead gives the type of response like "confident", "aggressive", Suave" etc. he will give. These responses can be amazing, hilarious or disastrous but you'll never truly know until you select it and to add to that you have a limited time to select your response to keep the conversation flowing rather than staring at the person dead eyed for 5 minutes weighing the choices up like in other rpgs. It's a really unique system and it works surprisingly well, i'd love to see more versions of it in other games.
Some of the character's are genuinely great and depending on how you treat them it has a surprising amount of endings that gel together in various combinations pretty nicely. This is surprising considering how unfinished the game clearly is with one faction in particular having a part in the game clearly destined to be more that never show up again in the game later.
The combat is kind of the biggest aspect of broken I found in the game. First playthrough I had to start the game again as I got to an unbeatable boss. Is the boss hard? no. The reason being I'd put points into weapons other than the pistol. Best and only good weapon in the game. The level up system and skills are generally a broken mess a lot of people never got past and it's a shame because there are great moments, characters (Sie!) and systems here that are often overlooked due to the troubled development it had.
Overall I highly recommend trying it. It must be cheap to get hold of by now and it's great despite it's rough edges (Only level the pistol!)
+ Dialogue system is still pretty unique over 10 years later.
+ Surprisingly cohesive ending combinations.
+ Sie is great.
- Combat and leveling up is dreadful.
- Parts feel unfinished.
3 Comments
@molochthagod - With how janky This game is I can see that being that way for a lot of people ha ha. Like if you invest in pistol and only pistol it's utterly broken on bosses. I honestly didn't think any other weapon was actually viable lol.
@FallenGrace I actually put most points into assault rifles and was doing fine. Then again, on bosses I made sure to land headshots, which is more difficult to do on a controller. But yeah, the game is pretty janky, so the outcomes might be very unpredictable.
molochthagod
4 months ago