Alpha Protocol

Ooof... might be because I played it a straight up third person shooter, or because I got lost in all the twists and turns of the plot, or because I found the dialogue with other characters (especially the "flirting" with the females) to be quite cringey, or even because I am not looking at this through nostalgia goggles. but... very rough. Choices count, sure,but I never felt fully in control of it: dialogue choices, even important ones, are timed, and you are never quite sure what you are actually going to say, as instead of sentences to use you get "attitudes" that will be used by the main character when replying. Really bad game design choice, imho, even though it does lead to some unpredictable funny moments. Tough to recommend nowadays to be honest, but there is some fun to be had.

This game is totally overhyped. I believed it 10 years ago (on PC) and have been very rarely so disappointed in 30 years of gaming. It has terrbile combat, terrible stealth, bad controls, clunky movement, confined and utterly boring leveldesign and and some very questionable UI-design choices. The story is half-way decent but the dialog-consequnces-syste, ist just laughable. E.g. unlike Mass Effect were giving a negative answer often brings up some very -and more - interesting consequences (Paragon vs Renegade) this one is very single-sided to get oin the good side of the girls. And lets not talk about that final boss fight. All in all this wasn't good to begin with and has aged very well. Yes the had those ideas an mixing of genres but it they are not coming together and definitely not in a way that is fun! This is Obsdian's totally worst! I only played it to the end becasue I paid money for it. So the most positive thing to say about Alpha Protocol is that you _can_ play it through, technically.

The game is clunky. It responds to mouse movements like it's 1999. You sometimes can't even see where your character is or is going. The awareness skill does nothing, and the hacking puzzles are bloody annoying. And when you fail, you have to do a whole bunch of things over again. The whole thing is not inspiring to pursue all that hassle. It's way, way, way too expensive for what it is.

While the story and amount of freedom in dialogue may create intrigue, the awful frankly, baffling gameplay drags this game down into being not worth playing. This is a stealth game where the meer act of sneaking around barely works, where guards can insta-detect you from 20 meters away and sometimes miss you mere centimeters from them, where trying to shoot someone takes upwards of 6 seconds for your accuracy to recover, where the AI seems to forget you exist or will ignore alarms if they feel like it. It is simply not an enjoyable experience to play and i'm shocked this made it past QA testing.

Writing and concepts aside this game is utterly borked in execution. Aiming does not work. Stealth does not work. The way you level up and gain 'cool powers' is boring. Functually nothing in this game is working as they are supposed to. Yes, taking the espionage genre mixed with RPG elements with multiple choices that impact or change the story is a highly entertaining IDEA. But it fails to be entertaining. I'm playing on the normal difficult and I'm struggling with stealth, you cannot, I'll say again, YOU CANNOT STEALTH. It is impossible. When you end up shooting (basically 90% of the game) you will find it clunky, slow, unresponsive. For some reason, they thought that a secret agent wouldn't have the capability to shoot more than a single bullet in an accurate manner. Obsidian's catalogue has always been busted. I do appreciate the restoration of dead games. But, having restored a game that is essentially a failed execution which does not play as intended is a waste of money. Waste of money IMO