Sitting down to play Alpha Protocol we wanted to feel like spies, but we ended up feeling like somewhat awkward soldiers simply because the RPG and stealth systems aren’t robust enough to support player choice. Alpha Protocol may be a RPG/shooter hybrid on paper, but in practice it just feels like a dodgy third person action game and the brevity of most levels means that you can easily spend more time getting ready for assignments than actually enjoying them.​

Like Worcester Sauce, Alpha Protocol's separate ingredients might be slightly unappetising, but they come together in a quietly effective manner. Unlike Worcester Sauce, it will certainly frustrate you more than it should, and in between the deathlike character models and bizarre misapplications of things like depth of field effects, it will struggle to convince you the team had enough time to finish it up.

But, if you're willing to put in the effort, it can steadily win you over. Obsidian can't really compete with the bigger boys in the RPG field, then, but it's carved out a little space to call its own. With ambition instead of budget, and integrity instead of polish, in the end the choice of whether to persevere or not is pretty easy to make.​