Richard's Online Journal
Alpha Protocol
“When you’re a spy, yoghurt is…” “Oh, just shoot me.”
Alpha Protocol fails at everything. Almost every game system it has is poorly conceived. The graphics are, at best, passable, and are usually worse. It’s sloppy. The writing is very confused. The RPG stats system is an embarrassment. The shooting is a joke. The stealth is a bad joke. Its minigames border on outright torture. Individual sections had me longing to have a DVD copy instead of my Steam one, because then I could have microwaved it. It’s one of the most disappointing games I’ve played in ages.
…and I kinda like it.
It’s a struggle to explain why. Do I recommend it? Did I finish it? Yes, and ten or so hours is a lot of time to spend with a game that is, by any realistic standard, more than a bit rubbish. Here’s my thinking. Deus Ex was a fundamentalist broken game whose every individual element was frankly pretty bad, but it had a genius at the tiller and somehow became awesome as a result. Alpha Protocol has no genius at the tiller, but when it works, when it clicks, you can almost feel the spirit of the amazing game that once existed on Obsidian’s whiteboards struggling to break free.
(UPDATE: After reading other peoples’ experiences, this is only more painful. The amount of player-driven variation in the RPG sections isn’t just fantastic, it’s exactly what I’ve wanted to see for years. If only that level of attention to detail had extended throughout the entire game…)
Getting to that point takes work. The opening mission, set in Saudi Arabia, is a perfect example of a game opening that should have been removed from the master disc with an arc welder. It’s sub-Splinter Cell trash starring a useless main character, instantly drop-kicking the whole “Your Weapon Is Choice” concept by revealing that really, Alpha Protocol is a series of mostly linear levels complete with painted-on doors and impassable waist-high fences, with psychic guards, dismal weapons and atrocious pacing.
Even the all-important scene setting areas show a pathetic lack of care and attention. The main character starts with a QR code on his shirt, but it doesn’t actually work if you scan it in off the screen – the first thing I tried. Your boss, played by Half-Life 2′s Eli Vance, draws your attention to an e-mail that takes up most of the screen and is patently just Lorem Ipsum text. Alpha Protocol itself is the stupidest, most self-defeating excuse for a secret agency since La Femme Nikita walked into Section One. The tutorial missions do such a bad job of explaining the game systems that it wasn’t until near the end, many agonising mini-games later, that I realised I could skip most of them with an EMP grenade. The mission ends with a Metal Gear Solid style boss fight against a tank.
Rubbish. Most other games, I’d have stopped playing right there.
Thankfully, it picks up when you get into the cities. But we’ll get to that.
“So then I said, Gordon, you keep giving me the silent treatment and I’ll be ramming that crowbar right up your… but I digress…”
I could go on for hours about all the things Alpha Protocol does wrong, and that’s not just highlighting the negative: Obsidian should be embarrassed by how this one turned out.
By far my worst moment involved the security-breaking minigames. They’re all appalling. The hacking one blasts your eyes with shifting numbers, the lockpicking one requires precise trigger-squeezing that turned my sphincter into a vacuum every time, and bypassing circuits is fine until it scales up to ludicrous difficulty, like giving you 20 seconds to map 10 circuits with a slow controller. With no EMP bombs, one of these doors took me – no kidding – over 20 attempts. It was immediately followed by an incredibly hard lock-picking puzzle in a subway tunnel, which gave 15 seconds to snap open five different tumblers, while being shot at and flashbanged. There was literally no margin for error. None.
(Adding insult to injury, the only reason you’re up against such a tight time-limit is because you’re not allowed to either hop over a waist-high barrier to safety, or run back and climb back on the subway platform. You’re told there’s no time, but that’s a lie – you could easily make it if you didn’t get auto-killed for trying. I stopped counting how many times I had to repeat this mission and skip its cut-scene, but let the record show: if you’re the one who implemented it, I will find you and I will punch you in the cock.)
As for combat, it’s less annoying, but just as badly implemented. The more you play, the more the system breaks, albeit usually in your favour. The Assault Rifle is the only weapon worth a damn, backed up by Martial Arts and Toughness. Enemies all use the same basic pattern, of shooting, running up to start punching you, then nipping back for more shooting. The idea is that every weapon has its ideal firing range, but that’s nonsense – the Assault Rifle has no real weaknesses. With Toughness, you become comically resistant to damage. One of the possible final enemies is a guy with a rocket launcher. I didn’t even have to dodge as he blasted them into my face. Without a single medkit, I just calmly stood out in the open, headshotting him with a million bullets. Had I died, I’d have come right back to life, with a health-boost and temporary invulnerability. And great shame, because really, the whole second half of the game felt like playing with God Mode on until that bloody train showed up and made me long for the apocalypse.
God help them if New Vegas ends up like this too.
But for all this crap, when you get into those cities, there’s a good side to Alpha Protocol as well – and it’s entirely found in the character based RPG elements. Here, Thorton is forced to go rogue by his agency, assembling contacts to help him first survive, and then fight back against the evil Halbech corporation’s attempt to both kill him and destabilise the world. This brings him into contact with several other agencies and their representatives, and more importantly, the fun dialogue system.
(Amusingly, the opening screen of the game has the usual ‘any resemblance to any people or organisations is purely coincidental’, which is nonsense – Halbech is so patently a stand-in for Halliburton that they couldn’t even be bothered to disguise the name.)
In a game with almost no visual character customisation, they let you go around with this beard on your face. What. The. Frak?
Dialogue is clever, innovative, and pretty cool. You don’t choose what to say, but rather a stance – Suave, Flirty, Bored and so on – and if you don’t choose one in time, one is picked for you. It’s incredibly easy to say the right thing to everyone, if only because that’s almost inevitably choosing the ‘be professional’ options. Occasionally a character will flinch at that, like German commando Sie preferring the more aggressive options or photojournalist Scarlett getting annoyed if you try to use her for her looks rather than journalistic skills, but the basic rule throughout is to avoid jokes and face-hitting.
In practical terms, the only difference is that if they like you, you get a bonus (your handler’s being the awesomely named ‘Constant Encouragement II’) which is too small to mean anything at all, or (apparently) a debuff that you’d really have to work at being an asshole to be lumbered with. At other points, you get branches, typically of the Sadistic Choice variety – rescue the girl or stop the bomb, delete the data or sell it and so on – but they don’t mean a lot in the grand scheme of things.
Here’s the thing though: they mean something.
The one thing I genuinely love about Alpha Protocol is that characters remember what you do, and call back to it on a regular basis. They mention previous missions and previous decisions. One helpful contact will back you in a key mission because you spared the life of his bodyguard. Another agrees to a deal because “I know of you. You are a man of your word.” Near the very end of the game, one potential ally pages through your accomplishments to decide whether to work with you. Another holds a murder from the start of the game against you. Another, who you might not even have met at that point in the game, sabotages one of the tougher bosses for you. Great swathes of the game changes and adapts, morphs and warps based on your decisions, and in clear, verifiable ways. In these moments, Alpha Protocol finally comes alive.
As with everything of course, all this is riddled with implementation problems, especially when you hit the final mission, but it largely justifies the game’s existence. You’re not just completing three isolated areas to unlock the finale, you’re leaving a trail and people are taking notes. It’s exactly what I missed when playing Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age, and what kept me ploughing through the crap. It gives the game a real sense of personality, and I like a lot of the individual sequences – cold, professional Albatross, psychotic nutcase Steven Heck, even M. Bison look-alike Omen all representing different spy-archetypes in a silly but amiable way. It really should have had a more tongue-in-cheek like No One Lives Forever to truly get away with a lot of it, but it’s fun. I looked forward to seeing what came next, especially when I was able to slap people in the face with some knowledge I may or may not have found in a different playthrough.
Mute killer Sis is one of the most stylish of the game’s characters. And never spoils it with dodgy dialogue. Which is a plus.
The downside is that it’s just too easy. You’re rarely put into a situation where competing factions are at work or you have to choose one over the other. Everyone you deal with is too damn nice, too damn predictable, too damn trustworthy. There are a couple of character twists which anyone with a pulse will see coming (although I quite like how they’re handled) but not a lot in the way of actual tension between the different factions and competing interests. Halbech is so unquestionably evil and dickish and their plan so stupid that nobody has any real reason not to be on your side, to the point that you can call in one of their own agents to help you take them down in the last mission.
If this doesn’t sound like much compensation for all the bad stuff, it’s not. The bad stuff is infuriating. The more powerful you get, the less annoying it is simply because you just blitz through without really having to pay attention any more, but it never becomes good. What it is though is something original, a glimmer of what Alpha Protocol was clearly meant to be like, back before things like buying intel on missions and building up a web of contacts started taking second-fiddle to the shooter part of the game. In my eyes, the whole game should have been set in one city, with the spy networking a whole strategic layer on the top of it, in much the same way as X-Com’s Geoscape added so much to the tactical combat. It should have been about betrayals and empire building, about planting bugs and hunting for intelligence, not just straight shooting and punching with the option to buy some maps (that you’ll never need or use) off the spy equivalent of eBay.
Mike thinks he’s funny. The world rarely agrees.
Alpha Protocol is one of those games that I give a bit of leeway to because it’s at least different, but even at my most generous, I can’t put it next to Bloodlines, never mind Deus Ex. Still, for all the frustrations, all the missed opportunities, all the cack-handed design and irritations, I was surprised by how warm I felt about it when I finished it, not least because I did actually finish it. Should you go buy it? Hell no, not at full price.
Still, it is an interesting game, and one that might be worth checking out in the sales, just to see the cool stuff it does have. Judging from the early reviews, I don’t think you’ll have long to wait. Keep an eye out for the man with the gun for a penis.
There are 29 Comments on this story
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I was playing with a controller because Henry on PCF had said that some of the minigames weren’t possible with keyboard/mouse (John’s been having trouble with the controls too). By the final city mission, I was routinely getting boards with 10 circuits to cut. I hadn’t put any points into Tech, and since I hadn’t had any problems with that minigame before, had completely forgotten about the EMP thing. The Xbox controller was too slow and imprecise for both. I wanted to specialise in pistol. Pistols are the perfect fictional-spy weapon. After Saudi Arabia though, I respecced away all those points. I didn’t even try stealth after that section. In a game where the enemies can not only see you through doors but actually punch you through them, I figured I was better off sticking with a gun. Even if Thornton did refuse to pick up fallen enemies’ ones, even when a mission objective revolved around him losing his guns and having to retrieve them. Can’t touch any of the ones on the floor though! They have NPC cooties! Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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(Did appreciate the lack of a conversation god-stat, mind.) Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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Can you elaborate on the “missing from Dragon Age” bit? I’ve just finished DA:O (yeah, I know) and was pleasantly surprised by the ramifications of some of the decisions I’ve made (or could have made, according to the DA wiki). Posted by zipdrive on May 30, 2010 |
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Sure. In Dragon Age, there are repercussions, but a lot of them follow the ‘after the game’ pattern (although there are exceptions, like Anora’s treachery, the Alistair romance and the lead-up to the final fight – I’m certainly not saying DA didn’t do it, just that I was never that bothered about comeback after making decisions) and the only people who seem bothered are the ones who are directly involved – nobody outside of a particular quest won’t trust you because you shafted the Mages or put Harrowmont on the dwarven throne, for instance. In Alpha Protocol, you get specific feedback from characters in other areas while actually playing the game, and not just on the big scale stuff. For instance “I don’t trust you (in Moscow) because you shot that guy (in Rome).” which makes the risks and rewards of building a reputation feel more direct. Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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It’s gonna be a while before I can play this but I still really want to, nice to see your impressions in the meantime. Is the writing seriously not up to par? Avellone how can you have failed us How does the respeccing work? I was totally planning to go Stealth/Pistols the first time round but now I’m not so sure. Posted by nabeel on May 30, 2010 |
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The writing’s not horrible, but it’s not for the most part that interesting. It’s a weird mix between trying to be taken seriously, going for balls-out 24 stuff, and going “screw it” and having a boss fight with a knife wielding guy in a disco. It’s like everyone who worked on it had a completely different vision of the game. Respeccing – you pick points at the start. After the first mission series, you get to respec and choose a character class (which just determines a few lines of dialogue and how the costs balance out). After that, you’re stuck with your choices. But there’s a bit at the start of it where you get to play with all the weapons and gizmos, so you’re in a better position to make informed ones. Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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On the whole ‘not paying full price’ thing, is £20 acceptable, or are we talking ‘wait until it’s a tenner’ cheaper? Posted by The_B on May 30, 2010 |
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You could certainly do worse for £20. Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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Good-o, and I think I’m presently surprised at Game being the first to be the cheapest. Even the usual places like Play and Shopto are more expensive than that. Posted by The_B on May 30, 2010 |
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It was £24 on Steam. And that was less palatable still because you couldn’t opt out of the free copy of Space Siege. Brr. Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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Excellent review and lovely having your blog back. BTW, have you ever tried designing a game? I’m pretty sure you’d do great. Posted by gnome on May 30, 2010 |
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Heh, I’m not arrogant enough to think it’s easy, and I’d drown in pain even thinking of the maths on an RPG Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
But I’d love to do something more narrative focused like an adventure, or the world/plot/script side of things, yes.|
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You can’t microwave Space Siege, but you could subject it to that freeware game that deleted files. Win-win! Posted by The_B on May 30, 2010 |
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Aha! Got you! So, uhm, start working on it please! Posted by gnome on May 30, 2010 |
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Haven’t finished the game yet, but your review seems mostly accurate. What makes me sad is the thought of how the game would’ve improved if they just ripped off Hitman for their gameplay and bolted on their branching conversations on top. Also, I find it really annoying that the Suave options are inevitably Archer*, instead of Bond. I just wanted to be a smooth ladies man, not the douchey guy who makes jokes about MILFs! * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49y1ywVkmLE Posted by Megazver on May 30, 2010 |
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Uh, his name is Thorton not Thornton. Sorry. Although Thorton is a silly name and it really should be Thornton. There’s a joke about the spelling of his name if you earn a certificate from the training range. It’s a brave failure of a game made glorious by the ongoing consequences of your actions. I played Thorton as an arrogant, wise cracking jerk (just like Sterling Archer) and the plot got very interesting towards the end. Posted by Aaron on May 30, 2010 |
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Yes, I agree. It’s a much better fit for a spy game than Mass Effect.
The random appearance of sexual tension at that point didn’t help much either. Sorry, when did that start, exactly?
You are of course correct. I choose to believe he spells it wrong to confuse his enemies. They’re not very bright, so it’ll probably work. Incidentally, today’s search string of choice: “alpha protocol +sis”. I am Amazed. Really. Never saw that coming. Totally surprised… Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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A couple of folks have asked about this, so here’s a copy of something I said elsewhere about the RPG system:
Posted by Richard on May 30, 2010 |
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It’s interesting what a supposed developer from Obsidian had to say on the state of the game on Joystiq’s comments: Posted by zipdrive on May 31, 2010 |
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Yeah, I saw that. Certainly sounds plausible. Posted by Richard on May 31, 2010 |
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Actually pistols are great fun and do major pwnage as a secondary weapon, when you get the timed shot ability. I forget its exact name but it lets you line up a number of shots in slow mode mode, similar to convictions execution. This means with unarmed targets you can take down several guys instantly. Additionally, as a silenced weapon it is great for stealthy insta-kills. I suggest you not dismiss it so fast! Posted by 7Seas on May 31, 2010 |
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Yeah, RichMC said that too. I played the entire first mission as a pistol specialist and used them as a secondary from that point on (mostly shooting tranqs to avoid annoying Mina every time she felt sorry for guards). But only when I was out of ammo for my all-consuming Assault Rifle, which starts off powerful and never gets rubbish. Pretty much any gun in an RPG will scale up eventually, but not knowing the scaling system at the start of the game, using a weapon that had proved itself to be closer to a pop-gun just wasn’t a good gamble. Ditto with stealth, really. I wanted to like the pistol though. It was my weapon of choice throughout most of Deus Ex, and it’s the iconic spy weapon. Posted by Richard on May 31, 2010 |
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I am rather glad people have written honestly about this stinker. I would be kicking myself for buying it. Instead I bought Halflife, which for my sins I have never played, (H2 I have played all of)amazed the game still plays so well. Posted by Lagwolf on May 31, 2010 |
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Thanks for your eloquent thoughts on this. I tried to get more than two hours into this, out of a general respect for Chris Avellone, however I had to turn it off whilst still in Saudia Arabia. This was probably the worst paced beginning of any piece of entertainment I have ever consumed. Games compete with lots of other things for my time, and although I accept that the pacing of a 10-20 hour piece of entertainment can generally be slower than a 2 hour film or a 5 hour novel, but Alpha Protocol’s pacing just made no sense to me. The game makes no attempt to suck you in with action, yet the beginning of the story is also bland and slow and exposition heavy. So I was left with something similar to what you described: a general feeling of “this should get better soon”. However, I ran out of patience, started trying to skip the dialogue entirely (another terrible design decision when they could have copied Dragon Age’s subtitles system which increased that game’s pacing to acceptable levels for me) and when I was left playing a shooter that was no where near as good as Hitman 1′s run and gun mode, let alone Splinter Cell Conviction’s ability to match gunplay with stealth, I gave up entirely. There’s probably some fun to be had in hours 5-15, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit through ham-fisted exposition through dialogue with my interaction limited to clumsy “no that’s not what I wanted to say” reactions. Honestly, the key thing missing in many failed projects like this is some editing. Manuscripts are re-written many times, by different people, and much of the original work is cut. Films have people working full time just to cut out the rubbish bits, to sort the pacing and the viewers’ experience. In games, I too often get the feeling that everything that was made ends up in the game. There is no where near enough time allowed after the content is complete to edit it, reorder it, cut it and create new content to better suit the overall flow. From the dev post from your link, creative control going from designers to executives and publishers is of course also a major hindrance. For Alpha Protocal, the entire first few hours of this game need to be tightened, the minigames scrapped and the emphasis on (stealthy) spy activities either reduced in the story, or heightened in the verbs the player gets to use. I write so much on this game because I had high hopes for Obsidian and Chris Avellone. I am disappointed that this game fell into so many obvious and oft-repeated pitfalls and ended up just another messy and broken game, when the talents behind it promise so much more. This is a great example of how not to do story in games, how the gameplay verbs don’t match the narrative experience and why the Creative Director of a project needs to have more power. Posted by Bjorn Bednarek on June 1, 2010 |
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It is worth plugging on. Ignore the optional missions in Saudi Arabia and just focus on getting out of the damn place and into Rome. I agree that games can’t afford to have a crap opening (the number of RPGs I’ve played where the first few hours are, effectively, “Get into the city where the game starts”…) but it’s worth seeing the hints of the game they actually intended to build. Posted by Richard on June 1, 2010 |
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i have a problem with the guy in the disco area and attacks with a knife how can u kill him i tried shooting and using fire bombs and got nowhere how do u kill him in alpha protocol Posted by michael on June 4, 2010 |
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Don’t attack him when he’s using the knives, just run away and wait for him to go back to the gun. If you’re friends with Steven Heck from Taipei, you can hire him to poison his cocaine and he’ll take damage during his fury state. Posted by Richard on June 4, 2010 |
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I enjoyed reading your review. However I like the game and I think it’s redeeming quality can be found in playing it a few times. That might be hard for people who dislike it initially however. The more I play and follow different dialogue choices in conversations, and really research dossiers it’s almost like playing a different game. Heh, except for the linear pieces of course. I’m not really a hardcore RPG player so maybe my expectations are more easily met. Posted by Bob on June 13, 2010 |
I had a similar experience, but found the lockpicking and bypassing favourable – I only had one with more than eight connectors to join, and with the mouse, it was no issue.
My big issue was the final mission. I made it through the main game having killed three people, tranq-ing or knocking out the rest. Then I – with full stealth stat – was spotted the moment I walked into an area.
Oh, and the pistol is also ludicrously lethal if you build it up: get the final stage of chain shot and you can stop time, line up six headshots, and execute them in an eye-blink.
Posted by richmcc on May 30, 2010