Why You Should Care About Alpha Protocol

Shogun Gamer cooked up an editorial dedicated to Obsidian Entertainment’s oft-criticized modern day espionage RPG Alpha Protocol, and the reasons they believe you should care about it. In short, while they don’t deny the game’s many flaws, the replayability and branching deserve mentioning, and other developers should take note. Obligatory sampling ahead:

I lost my mind when I approached my first boss fight in Alpha Protocol with a character that I’d specifically stacked for ‘sneaking around without ever being seeing and snapping peoples’ necks in the dark’ and the game actually allowed me to one-hit kill a boss. From a technical/critical/cynical stand-point that might seem like a bit broken and I understand all of that. But what needs to be noted is that Alpha Protocol dared to make the game that ever ninja/spy fanatic has dreamed about since the dawn of video games: One where the story/character were more important than the mechanics the team had built in for the boss battles.

The team of Alpha Protocol checked their collective ego at the door, allowing you to have the experience that you wanted… regardless if it was the story they wanted you to see, or if it was the mechanics they spent hundreds of man-hours on.

On a second play-through I realized that the first fight was actually a pretty standard boss fight. If you went at him directly, there were mechanics and patterns to memorize, and you had to get yourself into position to take pot-shots, or whatever you’d stacked your character for class-wise, and it could go on for a while depending on how much damage you can deal out. – So I can’t emphasize enough how balls-crazy it is to know that in my first play through, I snuck through his base, disabled all of his minions and then eased up behind him, snapped his neck, and threw him off a fucking bridge.

One. Hit. Boss. Kill. – That’s why you should care about Alpha Protocol. Because they dared to dream, and let you do the same. Because it is one of the first games I’ve ever spent time with that chucked “video game making 101” straight out the window and allowed you to break the game in whatever way you stacked your character to do it.