Alpha Protocol is the Great RPG of Last Gen

I’m not sure that many people will give Obsidian Entertainment’s spy-themed RPG Alpha Protocol quite as lofty of a title as Kotaku has in this new editorial piece, but given the fact that I enjoyed the game immensely, it kept my attention for two entire play-throughs, and the role-playing game scene was a bit sparse on last-generation consoles, I suppose I can get on board with their sentiment. An excerpt:

– It’s very short. If you look at HowLongToBeat, you’ll see the average completion time is like 13 hours. And people on the forums and in Steam reviews often claim it’s upwards of 20. Those estimates are largely incorrect, though I suppose if you go full stealth it will lengthen the game. My normal playthroughs of Alpha Protocol, though, are under eight hours. The key there is to always always always play on easy, because that minimizes the irritation of the brokenness of the (game stuff.) What makes Alpha Protocol great isn’t stealth karate chopping or shooting bad guys anyway. Like all the great Bioware RPGs, the (gameplay) is what you suffer through to get to the good stuff.

– The ways the game changes based on how to treat people and the tactics you use during missions are super interesting, and make the game feel worth playing multiple times. There are major characters you might never even meet if you play the missions in a certain order. This is why it’s good that the game is so short the longer a game is, the more prohibitive it is to play more than once, which is clearly a bad thing for games which have (branching story = replay value) as a marketing hook (coughmasseffectcough). When I played Alpha Protocol for review at FileFront back in the day, I played it through three times. That’s the only time I’ve done that in my career writing about games.