It’s decision time.  Who is going to die?  The evil man behind this Bond movie?  Or the girl behind my intel?  I didn’t think it was a tough decision.  My girl was a pretty cool guy.  So I made up my mind.  Couldn’t let her go down. Then the game client shat its pants.  Why?  It was trying to load the next area.  I tried to reorient myself.  Big mistake.  By walking forward, I triggered the point of no return.  My girl got metal in her mind.  Yeah, that sucked.  Time to load my previous save file?  At this point, the game crashed.

That’s Alpha Protocol for you.  She is a fluxxom.  The shooting?  Iffy.  The stealth?  Crap.  The level design?  Awful.  But Obsidian Entertainment got real role-playing in my third-person shooter.  The same achievement that gave Deus Ex and Planescape Torment a place in the computer role-playing Pantheon.  Yup.  Alpha Protocol is a Game of the Year candidate stuffed in the shell of a horror show.

A true-role playing experience should analogous to an action figure.  After you’re done bending and smashing Captain Stabbo, he should still have all of his limbs.  That’s a tough task for a video game.  One piece of sloppy dialogue can shatter the entire experience.  The most prominent role-playing games of the modern era have been the Bioware Interactive Experiment™, where you know the consequences before you even pick a choice.  It’s “I can spare the shekels for your husband’s funeral” versus “You’ll be joining him if you don’t stop bothering me.” Morality doesn’t cut it.  Deus Ex got things done by stripping the player’s own conscience from the decision-making process.* J.C. Denton is a billion-dollar war machine.  Not his job to shed a tear for the fallen.  So it’s not yours, either.

Alpha Protocol writes its own standards.  Conversations unfold in real time, meaning the player has to think quickly about the next moment he opens his mouth.  It’s best described as “political play”.  Sure, the conversations can become black-and-white affairs.  But “Russian mobster” black-and-white is different from “pragmatic journalist” black-and-white.  It’s enough blacks and whites to paint any shade, and it’s up to the player to paint the canvas.  This isn’t Dragon Age, where Morrigan seemingly objects to your every move on principle.  If you say something stupid, you will know why it was stupid.  And that’s very rewarding.

This one decision will mean a lot.  And that’s a very good thing.

There’s no denying the results.  Alpha Protocol is a stealth-action Choose Your Own Adventure Book with enough endings and variants-of to shame nearly any game in the forty-year history of the industry.* It’s an incredible achievement.  The writing itself?  Sure, it could use some subtlety.  Liberal conspiracy wet dreams are more fun that way.  But it’s good enough.  It’s tough for wordplay to be creative when every dialogue tree needs to sound like a real conversation, lest lead character Michael Thorton begins channelling sentence-to-sentence mood swings.  The voice actors don’t overstep their boundaries, either.  Nothing fancy and nothing awful about it.  And given the no-nonsense context of the Alpha Protocol universe, that’s fine.

So it leaves one question to ask: Is the gameplay worth more than one romp?  Enough to spur on the satisfaction of discovering the Alpha Protocol universe through several separate playthroughs?  Only if you can distance yourself from a broken combat system and its broken everything.

The premise is truly computer role-playing.  Select your class, upgrade skills, develop specializations, buy loot.  Alpha Protocol is looking to be Deus Ex or Metal Gear Solid 4, where the player can plan their method of attack.  Stealth?  Trinkets?  Guns blazing?  It’s supposed to be your call.  After all, Alpha Protocol was advertised as the game where “Your Weapon is Choice”.  The reality is that all of your weapons suck ass, regardless of choice.

You’re not even fronted the bare essentials to play the game as a knife-to-throat affair.  True stealth is not an option.  Period.  You can’t close doors.  You can’t carry bodies.  Enemies in adjacent buildings?  They won’t be ears to your vaudeville re-enactment of Normandy.  But God-forbid you jog to the front of their hideout and open the door.  They’ll hear you before you get the damn thing open.

Try looking up, stupid.

Metal Gear Solid doesn’t give the player a radar to dumb down the experience.  Stealth is about pattern recognition.  And you’re getting all the criteria for how a player is detected by the enemy.  If you don’t do that?  You end up with Alpha Protocol, where the rules of reality change with every room.  The artificial intelligence isn’t merely frustrating.  It’s picky about when it wants to be frustrating.  It would be tolerable if your opponents had a reset button.  But if your scent slips, you might as well pull out the assault rifle and make your foes pay for hearing your footsteps.  Peyton Manning doesn’t have defenses stacked against him in the way Mike Thorton: Stealth Operative does.

So you’re left to become Michael Thorton: Small Army.  Do any of you remember Perfect Dark: Zero?  How the game deliberately restricted your accuracy to encourage a more conservative playstyle?  Obsidian Entertainment made the same mistake.  Numerous reviews labeled the role-playing nature of Thorton’s shooting skills as “I placed the reticle over the enemy and he didn’t die when I pulled the trigger.”  That’s a silly argument.  Alpha Protocol is role-playing.  The idea is that you’re gimped from the get-go and eventually unlock the assistance of a Counter-Strike aim-bot.  The problem is that this doesn’t happen.  Even with maximum proficiency, Michael Thorton can’t shoot a gun for shit.  Oh, if you’re taking your time with each shot?  Sure, the man is a machine.  Critical hits are fun.  But even with maximum proficiency, you have to delve into your “spellcasting” to reap the rewards.  Compare it with a game like Deus Ex (where maxing out a skill is akin to activating a cheat code) and it ain’t a whole lot of fun.

Not that it will prevent you from going all murderstorm on a room-to-room basis.  When your opposition got their special forces training, they were well-coached on how to hide directly in your line of fire.  And as for you?  Don’t worry about exposing yourself to enemy hail.  Their aim is worse than yours.  And with a health system ripped directly from the Borderlands playbook (regenerating armor to go with your static health bar), there’s no trouble parlaying one rack of armor into obscene amounts of punishment.  A tactical shooter that best plays like Doom?  Not good.

Even if the shooting and the stealth did their job, it wouldn’t matter.  It’s pretty Captain Obvious to state that level design is everything in a stealth-action platformer.  You can toss stealth aficionados with a silencer that shoots through walls and causes all the other guards to pee their pants, but it doesn’t quite matter if you don’t have shadows to work with.  In stunning contrast to the dialogue trees, the Alpha Protocol approach to level design is one-or-the-other: One door leads to a firefight, another goes around the urban warfare.  Sans some mandatory shootouts, that’s it.  And it becomes even more dreadful as you learn there’s nothing context-sensitive about the environments.  Don’t expect to take cover simply because you’re next to a wall.  Don’t expect to jump down from a balcony unless the game lets you.  You might as well invite your friend over and have him captain the movement controls so you can use the mouse and play the game like a rail shooter.

You’re left to take some comfort in the hacking minigames, and it is an understatement that your mileage will vary.  They don’t compensate for the skill of the player.  Not everybody won the genetic lottery or has room for a healthy diet of puzzle gaming.  So I may have an easy time cracking grids, but there’s a solid chance you’re fucked and only have a supply to EMP Charges to save you.

They got your mom’s Facebook game in your computer role-playing.

Take alarms.  It’s not a bad premise.  Navigate the wiring and punch out the circuits in the correct order.  Sound fair enough?  It’s timed.  As early as your second mission, you’ll be required to knock out seven circuits.  By the late-game?  Twelve.  No matter the number, you get twenty seconds.  And if you make a mistake?  You are damned, son.  To say there’s a difficulty curve would be disingenuous.  There’s no curve.  It’s like walking into Calculus on the first day and sitting down in front of the final exam.

In a video game review racket obsessed with “polish” (where Halo is an incredible game because it has no immediate flaws), Alpha Protocol got the shit kicked out of it.  And I don’t quite blame the critics.* Alpha Protocol is the truly ugly side of “we need another six months to work on this game, bear with us”.  I didn’t even have to spend a single second questioning whether I was the target audience for the game.  Sure, the minigames and the radial selection guide (very similar to the one employed in Ratchet and Clank) were clearly built for thumbsticks.  But in this modern, console-oriented development culture, I never felt that computer gamers were being given the finger.  Not beyond the design decisions and programming abortions present in every version of Alpha Protocol.

And when a small group of gamers declares this product a cult-classic, an example of what video game role-playing should be, I won’t be able to disagree with them.

At least not until the game crashes.

2 out of 5

(Games rated two-out-of-five will appeal to their target audience.  But against the body of work produced in this forty-year-old medium?  Against that copy of Beyond Good and Evil sitting on the rack for eight bucks?  Yeah, it has issues.)

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