Alpha Protocol

Alpha Protocol, developed by Obsidian and published by Sega, is a game I'd heard absolutely nothing about. I don't know how it escaped my radar, but the game was a complete non-entity for me. I borrowed it from a friend of mine a month or two ago for the sole purpose of reviewing it, and it has been sitting on the cluttered table which holds my TV ever since. Between borrowing games I actually cared about from other friends and buying games I actually cared about from various retailers, there has been simply no room for Alpha Protocol on my docket. Then, I woke up on Tuesday morning and realized I didn't have a game to review. So Alpha Protocol  it was.

At first, I was excited. Again, I had heard nothing about this game and the prospect of finding a hidden gem is always intriguing. However, from the second the title screen came up, I knew this was going to be bad. You cannot get more generic than the title on a three-color screen with a glitched-out theme song playing that sounds like it wants to be a Street Fighter song when it grows up. After I got past that screen and started playing, I realize that Alpha Protocol can best be described as Mass Effect without the squad, the sci-fi setting or the polish. It's a third-person action title with some RPG elements and dialogue options (but now in quick time!) Mass Effect in the real world isn't a bad idea, but everything in this game is executed so poorly.

The story is that your character works for the government and then the government betrays said player character because a weapons manufacturer said so. There may be more to it, but I stopped caring the second I realized that this game was going to be told in flashback. Telling an entire story in flashback is annoying, especially when it is so horribly written. Oh and video game writing does not get much worse than this. Besides the plodding plotting and an espionage story that feels more Michael Bay than Ian Fleming, the dialogue sounds like it was scraped off of the bottom of a giant vat of cliches that went bad in the 60's. If you try to be a stand-up guy, you sound wooden. If you try to sound casual, you sound like a smarmy prick. To be honest, I never went aggressive because...why? They say that being too nice might be a bad thing at the beginning of the game, but I never saw any proof. Maybe at the end of the game it becomes a factor or it affects what missions you you can play, but that isn't a punishment really. It's just silly.

Then, once you get past the ludicrous story, you've got a nice smorgasbord of technical problems to gnaw away on. In the interest of setting the mood, I can tell you that I was in the middle of a mission to do...something. I can't remember what, but it doesn't matter because the storyline and all of the situations are so generic that it seems like they just replaced nouns in other spy fiction to create their story, like the developers just filled-in a book of Mad Libs : U.N.C.L.E. Edition. To get back on topic, I was trying to get out of a room. This sounds simple, but there just didn't seem to be any way out. The room was a slightly more complicated box with seemingly two exits, but one was blocked by a gate I couldn't open and the other was just a big black spot on a wall in an area of no consequence that just looked like a door. After more time than I would care to tell, I realize a big black area that looked like a simple alcove was the way out, but I fell through the floor into a space I couldn't escape before I could finish the mission. I was pissed. This is just the most glaring in a series of technical problems. For one, the core system of the game, the upgrades, seem kind of pointless. You can put points into stealth, but sneaking is so hit or miss that you can crouch in plain sight and have NPC's miss you one minute and then have them spot you from across the map the next. The gun upgrades don't seem to do much, both in the character upgrades and the upgrades on the guns themselves. I've been told that martial arts are the most fun because you can simply run up and kick-punch the world into submission. Speaking of martial arts, the character animations are just too damn silly for a game like this. Hand-to-hand combat looks stupid, and whenever the player character is in sneak mode it looks like he is doing a weird version of the running man. Also, I don't like that game gives the player conversation choices, but times them and forces an answer. It's not a bad idea necessarily, but its handled poorly and showed me just how much I rely on conversations as natural bathroom breaks in Bioware games. Mix in poor graphics for this stage in a console's lifespan, very hit or miss shooting (no pun intended) and a general lack of polish and you've got a nearly broken game.

I realize I'm being hard on this game, but playing it is so infuriating because it could have been better. Obsidian promises choice, and in a lot of superficial ways it delivers. You can choose how you talk to people, who you let live, what guns you want to shoot, what to put on those guns, etc, but in the end it just doesn't matter. My friend played with pistols, fully upgraded them and said his character was never good with them. If you give someone a path like that, you need to let them succeed in that path. If you're pitching choice as the core aspect of your game and you allow players to choose to use pistols, then there should be doves flying around the screen from how much the game resembles a John Woo film. If they want to sneak around and be a debonair boss, like I did, then they should be able to, like I couldn't. Choice is a brilliant thing to have in games, but not delivering on the promise of choice is like shooting yourself in the foot. Yes, the shooting isn't totally broken in the game, yes the story is kind of fun in an extremely stupid way and you can certainly choose a lot of things, but when none of those choices really have any bearing on the game that has a myriad of technical problems, a forgettable story and atrocious voice acting (I forgot to mention that everyone in this game sounds like they were voiced by someone with a lobotomy), I have every right to be a little harsh.