Alpha Protocol is buggy, that needs to be said before anything witty is written here, you might play the game through and have no issues; you might load it up and be greeted by a game breaking glitch before you even finish 1 mission. It’s like a red headed stepchild, it acts out and you want to beat it for it, but if you give it some attention and just forgive it its flaws the game will leave you pleasantly surprised.
Alpha Protocol is a 3rd person espionage RPG, which see’s you taking the role of Michael “Party Animal” Thorton or as he was when I participated in assisting him, Michael “How am I this bad at being detected” Thorton. AP before you even step in to a tutorial allows you to customise your character, with 10 different skills in the game for you to put points in that unlock abilities as you go along. You can play a gun toting super spy, a stealthy hacker or a mix in-between. One of the other aspects the game throws at you, is the multiple choice conversations akin to Mass Effect, each one of the three different attitudes you can take during the conversations according to Obsidian is based on one of the 3 spies that you might be familiar with, Jason Bourne (professional), James Bond (suave) or Jack Bauer (aggressive).
With these three options available to the player but only one choice being allowed at each conversation multiple playthroughs will be needed to achieve each route, combine this with the multitude of side missions available to the player and the game becomes a veritable sandbox of choice.
The game lacks a little in some gameplay aspects, take down a guard with an overly excessive melee attack and you will remain undetected, fail to hit someone with a silenced tranq gun and you’ll have the entire room alerted to your exact position instantly. This combined with a hacking system that can leave some players frustrated could mean you never truly click with this game just from mechanics alone. But if you do manage to get along with Alpha Protocol, you’ll be taken on an spy story that will keep you entertained from start to finish and with multiple endings available to you and character customization options as well, you might see yourself coming back for even more when it’s all said and done, that is of course, if the game doesn’t cause you to uninstall it in a fit of rage from one of the many bugs.
