Alpha Protcool Reviews

In the event that you’re still holding out on Obsidian’s espionage RPG, there are over a half dozen more critiques for you to sift through.

GameShark gives it a “C-“:

When playing Alpha Protocol there is no shortage of times when everything is absolutely working on all cylinders. Sneaking up on a lone guard and silently taking him down, climbing up to a roof and then zip-lining over the heads of two more to gain access to an electronically locked building that contains a locked safe with crucial dossier information is an exhilarating experience. Getting to the end game and finding that a decision you made twelve gameplay hours earlier is now coming back to help or hurt you is, quite simply, awesome. Unfortunately, not ten minutes can go by in this game without a reminder of its complete and total lack of polish. The abysmal AI, the absolutely disastrous PC controls, boss battles that all but throw out the gameplay style that got you there in the first place, and the complete and total illogic of some of the gameplay systems (like the aforementioned (shields)) all serve to derail what should have been as memorable a game as I’ve played this year.

The A.V. Club gives it a “C”:

Protocol flops hardest in its action sequences. The convoluted controls never feel natural; even switching guns is a clumsy chore. The camera pushes in too close, limiting your vision. And the behavior of your bumbling enemies can hardly be called (artificial intelligence.) The game complements their Keystone Kops hijinks with hilarious graphical glitches, like Day-Glo madness glittering across the hero’s torso, or an entire mansion wing disappearing altogether. Moments like these not the less-frequent flashes of ingenuity define the tone of Alpha Protocol, a game daunted by its potential and resigned to falling short.

TheSixthAxis gives it an 8/10:

Alpha Protocol has been delayed for 9 months before finally getting its release, and you do have to wonder why they didn’t spend the time fixing some of this stuff or how bad it was 9 months ago but seriously, if you like espionage and the idea of Heavy Rain-style dialogue being applied to a shooter with RPG-like levelling, don’t worry about the downsides: you’ll eat this game right up. As an adventure in storytelling, it’s totally solid.

The Game Fanatics gives it an 80%:

Sega has a great idea in this original IP, no doubt about it. But if a sequel is to come to light, Sega and Obsidian have some major catching up to do with the rest of this generation’s graphics, as well as the controls.

Game Vortex gives it a 68%:

Alpha Protocol is a good idea crippled by half-baked ideas. There are a lot of really neat things going on throughout the game, particularly the story system. However, just about everything feels like it was developed to work, not work well. A few tightly working ideas are better than a bunch of cobbled together concepts.

Xbox Live Addicts doesn’t do the scoring thing:

Alpha Protocol is a hard game to judge, as you play you can feel and see the games potential and the right ideas are all there from its superb multi branching storyline and dialogue system to the idea of combining espionage and rpg. But many of its core mechanics let it down leading to a rather meager experience, it’s far from a bad game but it should have been so much more.

And then Scars of War developer Gareth Fouche shares his NSFW impressions (thanks, RPGCodex):

Seriously, what the fuck Obsidian? What. The. Fuck?

You’ve all probably played the game by now, so I’m not going to bother talking about the premise much. You’re a spy dude who signs up with a secret covert outfit called Alpha Protocol, missiles have been stolen, shady corporations are selling to both sides of the conflict. At first blush, this sounds much better than the standard ‘save the world/universe from marauding orcs/aliens/robots’ RPG plotline, even if it is fairly pedestrian by spy-genre standards.

The problem is that, as shocking as it is to say for an Avellone title, the delivery of that initial premise is bad. The introduction to the plot is just a fuck-up.