I gave this title a try after your enthusiastic review so I can complain now a bit too ;). Though I haven’t yet finish the game I agree with all of your points here but also with the points JKjoker made.

I went with Adept on normal difficulty and went to Moscow first. I can imagine you laughing at my attempts to kill Brayko with a single point in Pistol skills and no point in Shotguns – yeah, I picked a shotgun instead of my usual AR because I read intel reports about many close combat outnumbering situations. I bought a terribly expensive shotgun to realize that gun’s stats make little to no difference in the actual gameplay. I had too little ammo considering that it is prety hard to get a headshot with a basic pistol. Shooting a shotgun three of four times right into Brayko’s face made him laugh. The only thing that kept me alive was using melee button to stop some of his knife combo damage. It took me about 10 attempts (10-15 minutes each) to get the finally lucky strike of inflamatory bombs and melee to get him down. I can’t believe I haven’t wiped the game from my hdd at this point.

After reading your followup and comments here I’ll probably finish this to get more of the story. I will certainly not replay the game so I’d be glad for more details about the decision system ;).

My initial feeling was that Alpha Procotol is a ME2 ripoff but not that well thought-out. And it haven’t changed much during first 2/3 of the game (with maybe 1/3 of in-game time spent on an idiotic boss battle).

The flaw list (bigger flaws first):
– Incredibly stupid movement limitations, NO jump etc. – no wonder that PC gamers hate consoles because this kind of stupidity went along with those (ME2, DE unfortunately included here)
– Idiotic AI – in Cannon Fodder and Doom 1/2 probably acceptable but this is just lazy design. Troops coming right into gunfire, standing still when everyone is shot with a sniper rifle or even a machine gun, “closet monsters” … WTF?
– Stealth _completely_ broken and outright horrible in a spy game is unacceptable. Even such old games as Commandos got it right. No body hiding, no covert ops … what about at least changing clothes? Well maybe it is not needed when all NPC have lower IQ that a bowl of salad.
– RPG – this is not really an RPG, more likely TPS (third person shooter). Most choices wasted + there are a few horribly overpowered … it would play the same without all this.
– Weapon upgrades – waste of time with a cherry on top (Clearinghouse)
– Generally unballanced gameplay
– Your decisions don’t affect the gameplay in any meaningful way but only dialog options which is kind of shallow
– Stupid minigames all over again – ok if there have to be minigames (is there a reason?) why only three? At least if there were new logical puzzles for each important goal.
– Vague dialog options with unecessary time limit comes probably the last I could live with it even though I’d like ME2 or better Monkey Island style much more.

nice post, every point is dead on

im surprised you didnt say anything about the rpg system, stealth, the AI in general tho

I played Splinter Cell Conviction recently and the AI was pretty pathetic but they did their thing, they searched for you, they walking patterns werent completely set on stone, and they sort of tried to flank you, if you messed up and showed yourself for half a second or made any noise they would go into an “alarmed” state and go looking for you before raising the alarms (i could swear the AI in older SC games was a lot better but memory might be playing tricks on me)

in Alpha Protocol, if an alarm is up everyone has a psychic lock on you no matter where you are, if they happen to see a hair sticking out of a crate they will raise the alarm and swarm like bees at your position, they do have an “alarmed” state but they always go intermediately from green to red, yellow is reserved from when you turn off the alarm of they see indirect results of your actions (read: bodies) and but the only change is that they stay static instead of following their patrol routine

the way bodies work is a whole issue on its own, you cant hide bodies (SCC had that “feature” as well, in a stealth game not being able to hide bodies is STUPID), then bodies desintegrate the second you dont look at them (which i guess is to conserve memory in those pitiful consoles, but i remember SC keeping bodies in much larger levels in the ps2 with a lot less ram, try harder, it can be done, NOLF dealt with this by having other enemies find the body and use the “body disintegration” gadget on them before raising the alarm, it made sense in the context, a little imagination guys), also the bodies are the best damn traps in all the game, in the few open areas there are kill someone in the middle of the area from long range, if enemies dont raise the alarm immediately theyll start going in file to SLOWLY check the body letting you put a bullet in their brains and theyll keep doing it until they run out of men or you of bullets

now, when there is no alarm enemies are completely oblivious of you, even if the alarm was raised but you turned it off, you can have a matrix shootout in a room and none of the 16 guards next door will ever come (in most cases because they wont even spawn until you open the door, again probably because of resources issues), you can shoot keypads (you cant hack them to disable them tho) but while enemies kind of run to the keypad to start the alarm they dont really need to touch it to do it and they often dont even move while they raise it (im guess they had a pathing problem with this and gave them remote control alarms)

the way they notice you is pretty strange, they see you at a certain range, anything else and you could moon them in the open, they wont care, but be into their sight range and they can count the number of pimples on your butt unless you put a few points into stealth then you might as well be the invisible man, youll never be spotted, the game also tries to have a noise level thingy but it also either always hear you or never

and this takes me to the rpg style character development, it fails, some skills are gamebreaking (the gun skill is just ridiculous, a nice get out of boss battles for free card tho), other skills are things you expect out of the box (like shotgun knock back, or the critical aiming taking less than 50 hours) and the rest are just useless, weapons just feel weak and while that works perfectly in turn based it blows for real time, buying new weapons and improving your skills never seem to improve them beyond pathetic, you quickly learn to compensate by using criticals and aiming to the head but im guessing this is a pretty big issue for console players and inaccurate gamepads and makes the guns ho approach pretty frustrating (not how i play but it was supposed to be a viable option)

like it was said before the game is still fun and worth checking out (compared to other recent games it definitely stands out) but you cant help being haunted by the thought that it could be sooooo much better, i find it sad that Obsidian often seems to be one step away from a blockbuster, they scratch success but cant quite grab it, Kotor2, Mask of the Betrayer and now Alpha Protocol joins the list