Random Retro Review: Alpha Protocol

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IamLEAM1983
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Random Retro Review: Alpha Protocol

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Alpha Protocol.

Otherwise known as “FUUUUU, THIS STUPID FUCKING GAME, AAAARRRGH”. I found my cracked install in my old CDs, popped it in, gave it a whirl – and wept.

Yeah, Karl gives it heaps of praise. It's an Obsidian game and those generally don't suck so bad, as evidenced by the bizarrely excellent Fallout : New Vegas. The problem is, Alpha Protocol isn't anywhere near New Vegas' polish levels. It isn't anywhere near the point where Knights of the Old Republic II or Neverwinter Nights 2 redeem themselves with the smart and engaging way they handle their lore. This is Obsidian scrambling with BioWare's Mass Effect engine, desperately trying to pull anything that even vaguely resembles a playable game out of it all – and failing miserably. Lack of time, lack of experience, lack of whatever it is, I don't know – but Alpha Protocol smacks of tons and tons of effort wasted in all the wrong places.

Karl likes it, there's a few odd birds around the Web that'll profess their love of that game to whoever cares to listen – but I just can't. I really can't join their ranks, seeing as it took me forever and a day to finish the tutorial mission and as everything feels depressingly clunky.

If you want a TL;DR version, there it is : Obsidian have been and always will be the absolute fucking masters at writing coherent and multi-layered plots. See New Vegas and the refreshing moral grayness of it all for refenrence's sake. Here, though, probably doped up on too many Robert Ludlum novels and post-Jason Bourne spy flicks, they've put together a setting and series of circumstances that doesn't so much defy logic as it comes apart at the seams. You have to accept that a ton of conflicting agendas are going to collide in just the right way, allowing for your character's experienced events to unfold in exactly the right manner. What they aren't, though, is QA wizards.

They really, really aren't. Whoever heads the Quality Assurance department at Obsidian needs to go all the way in the Spy Treatment – and get a cyanide-laced fake molar plugged in. Seriously.

What's really sad is I remember thinking I was in for a disappointment when the game was first announced. I figured that this was yet another Obsidian product where there's a ton of moxie shoved in and very little actual competence. Is this why they keep working with someone else's tools, I wonder?

In any case, this is The Near Future. Governments are teetering on the edge of obsolescence, corporations are stepping up to the batter's mound, PMCs are fattening up wallets around the world and things are generally so tense that the United States have to pull an MiB and create the roguest of all rogue security agencies – the titular Alpha Protocol. You're essentially part of the dudes who step in when any other kind of action or oversight would be construed as a political statement – apparently a powderkeg notion in these perilous times. In true Spy Game fashion, you'll have your Bourne moments and your Bond beats, your Ethan Phelps-worthy buddies of ill repute, a globe-spanning conspiracy and, obviously, betrayal by the buckets.

I mean, come on. It's not even Spoiler territory, here. Alpha Protocol is made up of greedy and self-serving bastards with skewered notions of Good and Evil. Can you spell cliché, folks?

Michael Thorton, your surrogate for this journey, apparently can't. Fairly fresh-faced no matter which starting class you roll, he's yours to shape into a one-man commando, a suave superspy or a slick techie. You can also play as an out-of-his-league “Recruit” for a hardcore experience, or roll a second save as the Veteran, a class that's so badass the boys at AP rang you up precisely because you're super badass.

Yeah.

In almost every way, this is mechanically identical to your usual Fantasy getup. Just replace the Soldier class with a sword-wielding type, the Field Agent type with a rogue and the Techie with a wizard. You've got some basic hand-to-hand chops to start out with and some root-level access to keypad-bypassing techniques and general Security Console jiggery-pokery. A bit like Deus Ex, you have to stay out of the sightlines of most cameras in stealth-oriented levels, while there's generally always an option for gunning the room down Jason Statham style.

At best, the conversation wheel system now has a timer, because things wouldn't feel all spy-worthy and tense and shit if you didn't have a dialog timer à la Telltale Games.

The premise is reasonably fun, I like the idea of hooking up with gentlemen and ladies of fortune for the sake of getting better gear – but the execution makes me want to bash my head on my desk until my tempered glass panel breaks and I reduce my face to a bloody ruin.

Exhibit A : the PC port. It does its job on the most mundane of levels, but does it in the most imperfect of ways imaginable. Textures are unremarkable when compared with games from its era, loading times are choppy and inordinately long, stuttering happens all too frequently and the game is ridiculously unstable. Some elements of its default keyboard layout are strangely unintuitive, but even when things do sort of fit together and deliver an ounce of fun, some future level segments might not load. You're stuck in-between doors, between your lost progress and the last saved game you inevitably have to reload.

Exhibit B : the minigames. Whoever designed these needs to be told that while sticking to the superspy ethos does mean a lot of beeps and boops and cutting-edge-looking circuitry-hackery, this is still a game that needed to sell. The bypass mechanics for alarm panels weren't so much difficult as needlessly obtuse, the grid of crisscrossing circuits being nearly impossible to visually read. Lockpicking hasn't been fucked up, thank God, but the hacking minigame is a complete waste. Its PC controls don't make much sense and the idea of drowning the sensitive bits of info in a sea of blinking and cycling letters and symbols is absolute murder for someone like me. Being unable to focus on those two strings that didn't flit around like WPA network access keys on crack, I kept throwing my eyes left and right, hoping I'd spot at least one static number.

I never did. Not consciously, at least. Brute-forcing the hacking segments by simply spamming the validation keys for each string whenever and wherever I pleased, I got through about a third of the game. Past that, I threw my towel in. Never before has a set of minigames completely soured my appreciation of a greater product. Of course, I said “greater product” but – eh.

Exhibit C : the scrawny Features list. This being based on a BioWare engine, I expected a crazy amount of customization for my Thorton dude. The tutorial mission packs exactly nada in that department. No facial customization, no wardrobe, no nothing. Come on, Obsidian! If BioWare can pull it off, so can you! Sadder still is the fact that the game fundamentally suffers from the same numbers-to-bullets syndrome as Vampire the Masquerade : Bloodlines. You can push a ton of points into any given category of firearms over time, but the best of all sniper-enabled head shots will only trigger the loss of a third of a strong enemy's health. Everything to draw out the boss fights, I guess – with confrontations sometimes lasting several tens of minutes than should be feasible, based on the amount of time I spent headshotting SIE.

Of course, this betrays a systemic dilemma. We're used to RPG sword slashes and bow shots missing their targets or grazing them. We aren't used to hitscan boxes not being present and on an enemy's life being determined by a shrinking numerical value. The Borderlands series works in reverse and solves this problem – hitscans determine the random rolls for damage dealt – but Alpha Protocol didn't. As in Bloodlines, you're hypothetically left with a crack shot at pistols who still inexplicably needs to land SEVERAL INDIVIDUAL head shots on a single opponent in order to fell them.

Absolutely brilliant.

What really doesn't help is the idiocy of the game's combat-oriented AI. Games as early as the first Half-Life had baddies running for cover and attempting to flush you from your own dugout. They'd try and dodge incoming fire while storming forward, they'd seek out cover intelligently, etc. In Alpha Protocol, everyone is a Storm Trooper. Everyone runs straight forward at the merest sight of you and everyone wants to attempt a point-blank discharge. Once they have, they'll sloooowly back away, firing the whole time, leaving you ample opportunity to fill them with hot lead. Being as dumb as a doorknob, these idiots are far too easy to dispatch in the average Pure Stealth method. Hiding two seconds or so confuses their widdle artificial brains, leaving you free to Karate chop or Silat your way through their torso or spine. This being one of the rare games where a stealth run is honestly too easy even on Easy, I ended up going all Tom Cruise on the fuckers.

All of that assumes the AI doesn't think it's made up of Krogan for a second or two and has five or six shotgun-wielding guys charge you all at once. When that happens, you're fucking dead. No question about that.

That means guns, though, and guns mean Bloodlines Gunplay Syndrome.

It's a feedback loop from Hell. In any case, the enemies look goofy while patrolling, you look goofy while skulking about and they all look especially goofy when they're all pressing against a concrete block, staring you in the face with a raised gun and no rounds being ejected.

The biggest offense the game commits, honestly, is the defilement of its own potential. We simply haven't had a decent spy narrative in games since GoldenEye 64, and even that was a pure FPS in James Bond trappings! Setting RPG mechanics on top of a modern-day covert intelligence drama à la Person of Interest would have been an awesome idea – if it had been intelligently realized. Human Revolution scratches the itch if you're in a pinch; but it's no Modern Day setting for sure. What I'd like to see involves today's Internet-based version of the Cold War, a hot-button rights or free trade issue culminating in simmering tensions that lead the implicated governments into a kind of wordless and threat-free clutch, wherein one of the sides dispatches its blackest of all Black Ops guys to go dig a little. I'd love something like an RPG rendition of a Splinter Cell game, for instance.
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