Alpha Protocol

It's amazing in how many ways you can alter the story. But the gameplay is a hot mess.

This game WANTS to be Human Revolution combined with an Obsidian RPG. It’s not that, but it's a decent effort. The result is more like Mass Effect 1 with stealth elements. It has similarly janky 3rd person cover shooting with decent action RPG progression and (unfortunately) the same needlessly vague dialogue options, made worse by adding a timer to choose your response. It’s also not a very good port with menus being quite clunky (and sometimes buggy) with the mouse. This sounds pretty negative but I actually had a lot of fun for 2 reasons. 1) The mechanics may be jank but they do a good job of letting you feel like your character, whether that's a sneaky guy doing pistol headshots, a juggernaut with a rifle or a karate master. 2) The actual story is an average dime-store thriller with a side of camp, but the PACING is great: snacky missions that feel substantial without dragging, a good pace of new clues and events and a fun grab bag of spy cliches. "Snacky" is a good word for Alpha Protocol: it's a snacky stealth-action game, a snacky spy story and a snacky Obsidian RPG. If you're expecting Bloodlines or Deus Ex or Splinter Cell, you'll be disappointed. But if you're up for a snacky spy RPG, it's pretty unique.

I need the music, gimme some more

This game is a solid 4/5. It has a very good story and RPG elements, entertaining characters and ok (needs a little time to properly learn) gameplay. Now to be fair...there are some minor graphics and gameplay issues but nothing game breaking and the story more than makes up for it. If you like espionage and RPG you will enjoy this game and you will most likely be interested in playing the story multiple times to get all possible scenarios and achievements. I recommend it.

Story and characters are quite good, and the same goes for the dialog system. Gunplay and melee combat are okay-ish, but could've been a lot better. Stealth kinda works (except when enemies can see you through walls), but the maps aren't really designed with stealth in mind. Even the original "Deus Ex" (a game released 10 years prior) was way better in this respect. And then we have the timers. Not just the hacking and lockpicking minigames are infested with timers, but the dialog is as well. While I would agree that from a narrative perspective it does make sense to have a time limit on some dialogue that doesn't mean every line of dialogue has to be selected on a timer. Not to mention that the timers tend to be rather short (ridiculously so for the hacking minigame). This is compounded by the save system, which is checkpoint-based, meaning if something (like, say, a hacking minigame) goes wrong you'll have to start over from the last checkpoint instead of just re-doing the minigame (or dialogue for that matter). I wish Obsidian would do a remaster or remake with better graphics, better combat, a proper save system and significantly less timers.