Alpha Protocol - The Review

[Trolldor]

So I picked up Alpha Protocol for the Xbox 360 yesterday, and I was quite impressed by the game.
Certainly it lacked polish, but there was nothing about the game I found unnecessarily tedious - not the picklocking minigames, not the hacking minigames and not the bypassing minigames.

Ok, so the game opens up in to a small introduction to some of the basic gameplay mechanics - stealth, combat, lockpicking, hacking and bypassing.
You will also, very quickly, get accustomed to the use of the firstaid cupboards which heal you while you're getting the hang of the controls.

It's a little unnecessarily difficult while you're getting used to the controls - you're given a gun which is, to all extents and purposes, useless against your enemies. You're given no real hint as to how to use the stealth function, which is really as simple as pushing the left analog stick and press either the A button for kill, or the B button to knock your enemy out. Along the way you'll become very familiar with how the gunplay mechanics are going to workout. Guns are pretty useless, and I quickly developed a tactic of either stealth killing enemies, or engaging them in melee and using wildfire when they blocked my attacks.
If you have the patience, though, the assault rifle is definitely a handy gun to invest some time in to, capable of taking out even the toughest of opponents in a single shot if you wait for the critical and you level up the appropriate skill. If you're ever at the point where you need to fire your weapon, then you'll want the range of the assault rifle over anything else. At certain distances you're more likely to hurt yourself with a misthrown grenade than by enemy fire.

After this initial level it became pretty clear that every playthrough I made would have to be stealth-based. You're not a super soldier, and you can be taken out by the very first enemy you encounter if you're not careful. That said, there is a skill you can raise which will raise your maximum health at certain intervals, to a max of 250 from the default 100. I found, though, that I got by just fine without that skill at all.

The second thing made clear by this first little bit is that it really is a stealth RPG. It is not an RPG with stealth elements like Oblivion or Fallout 3, or a stealth game with RPG elements. Your stealth, your ability to pick locks, takedown opponents, hack computers, bypass doors, use gadgets, set traps - they're all tied heavily to what skills you level up, what your equipment is, and what decisions you make along the way.

After this part, you're given a tutorial on the rest of the weapons, the gadgets and abilities, and on the environment (Using ziplines, avoiding cameras etc.) Even if you do abysmally in these tutorials, you still get the hang of how things function quite aptly.

The things that stuck out most during my playthrough was that the characters really had an impact. You reacted to them in a way that you don't in a lot of other RPGs, and this was because of the way they responded to you. I found that some characters I really wanted to impress, and had to breakdown walls before I could joke around, while others I really didn't care for because of their expectations of you.
There are moments when your previous actions influence greatly what occurs later down the track, while some are quite obvious.
For example, I was courteous and casual with an informant and he gave me information for free. At the same time, a later contact of his was only too happy blurt out all the information he could because of how I treated this informant.
On the other side of the spectrum, in sticking with my own handler instead of accpeting someone else, I had to fight through a heavily armed squad of soldiers that otherwise may not have been there, or may have been on my team.
There is one particular character, Sis, who I found I became quite protective of, but on the other hand everything I did managed to enrage her counterpart.

I'm only just finishing Rome, having finished Taipei and Moscow, so I haven't completed my first playthrough yet. What I have found has been very impressive though, and already I know that I'm going to be playing through the game again, maybe two or more times in the next week or so. The gameplay is a bit clunky, and if you don't focus on stealth you're likely to have a much harder time getting through it, but once you get the hang of it you'll be taking out whole rooms of men without them even knowing you were there. The combat plays out as if you were simply a highly-trained agent, and not a supersoldier capable of flipping tanks and ripping apart miniguns, that's one thing to take in to consideration. This really is a stealth RPG.
Your decisions have to be very carefully made - do you act on what you feel? Or what is better for the mission? Do you try and endear yourself to everyone you meet, or do you prefer to shoot first and ask questions later? What skills will you focus on? What equipment are you going to take with you - an emp charge in case you come across a difficulty to bypass door, or maybe some grenades if you get in to a heavy firefight. The actual visual character customisation is weak, a gimmick, but that doesn't matter. Your character evolves along with the decisions you make both in levelling up and in the world, and the world changes right along with you.

People spoke about 'choice and consequence' with Mass Effect, and with Fable, and with The Witcher, but Alpha Protocol actually delivers here.