Alpha Protocol is an amazing game. It lasts long enough to have some substance, but short enough as to make a replay plausible - which you should absolutely do, because people are still discovering things in this game today. You can kill basically any NPC you wish (and you will certainly have to), and there are some you can persuade to kill each other. Even the order in which you meet NPCs will impact your relationships and the way certain missions go down. Piss off the wrong NPC, and your next mission site might be aware that you're coming - but if you show up in full combat gear, but just talk to the guard, they might assume that you're additional backup sent their way. The order in which you do missions will impact what appears in a given mission, as will the choices you made, and may influence the way in which you first encounter a given faction or NPC. Your relationships with NPCs will influence their behaviour, be they friend or foe. Alpha protocol is a terrible game. Stealth is effectively a required skill to purchase because it gives you a wall hack. The pistol is by far the best weapon in the game, because with a high investment you can do incredible amounts of damage to various bosses; far more than you could with any other weapon. The AI isn't great, the gunplay is awful, the stealth is laughable, and the mini-games are at best boring and at worst infuriating. Alpha protocol is both of these games. If the action elements were removed entirely, you'd have the best CYOA ever written. If the NPC dialogue and relationships were removed, you'd have the worst stealth action game ever made. I love this game, and yet there are few I can truly recommend it to.
This is an excellent sequel to an excellent JRPG. Combat relies on positioning and timing (not so much in terms of reflexes, but in being able to work out whether your attack will land before an enemy's when deciding which attack to use), which means that even when overleveled, you can run into difficulty in the boss fights if all you do is throw your most powerful techniques at them over and over again. I'll be honest, I'd have preferred to see the original here, but if that isn't an option, the sequel is very nearly as good.
Dear god, I haven't played this in ages. A friend of mine gave me his copy of it some years ago, and it was amazing. It has a good story (that doesn't involve Jedi - a rarity for Star Wars games), it has some really fantastic set pieces, the interface is well made and the game play has a lot of depth. In other words, classic Lucasarts. The graphics don't hold up particularly well (although some enterprising souls have made replacement models and skins for the ships, which greatly improve things), but this is an excellent space combat game that easily deserves to stand alongside the likes of Freespace 2 as being among the best in the genre.
I bought this from Game a few months after it first came out, and holy christ this is my favourite space based game ever (with the possible exception of Homeworld 1). Why? You command a small fleet of star ships, and you have full control over their movement, weapons and so on. If you want a ship to divide its fire between multiple ships, go ahead. If you only want it to fire specific weapons, fine. Graphically, this game has aged exceptionally well, and if you like to think your way through a good strategy campaign, this is well worth your time. Not to mention how easy it is to make mods for this game (I recommend one of the Battlestar Gallactica or Star Trek mods). Don't get me wrong, however, this game has its problems. The stealth missions (yes, this is a space game with stealth missions) can get really annoying if you're not sure of exactly how to go about them, and on higher difficulty levels, some of the fleet battles can get frustrating. Also, the multiplayer can only be played via LAN (or Hamachi or similar), because the company that made this game has since gone under because of how badly this game first sold. Pity, really, because this game deserved far better sales than it got at the time. Even the levels in which you only get one ship make you feels like you're the captain of your ship, rather than the pilot or the gunner; a feeling lacking from many games in which you command a capital ship, while when you get command of a fleet, you can either use basic commands, or you can give very specific weapon and movement orders to any and all ships within that fleet.
