Missions very quickly devolve into a rinse and repeat formula. Early on, your player gets access to a safe house. While that initially appears to be a cool concept (a place where you can retire to research the next objective, deck out your load-outs and chase down leads), each subsequent global hot spot that the story leads to (from the Middle East to Taipei) provides the exact same setting. So, players find themselves running and gunning through generic warehouse environments taking down the poor AI opponents, returning to their safe house for a new debriefing, using the on-site computer to choose their next assignment, and then heading out into the field to do the same thing all over again. It hurts that the missions never really vary from the standard fetch quest approach. The intel you’re chasing may change its name but it’s always the same thing – fight your way to the next waypoint, press A to grab the item, and then work your way to the exit.
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Moving on, the level design has a tendency to hit you over the head when you’re in the thick of things, bringing the “corridor shooter” or “rat in the maze” feeling to the table. Since you can’t jump, your movement area depends directly on the way the designers chose to approach each area. From an artistic point of view, the world built by Obdisian is credible and pretty detailed, even though the general feel of the graphics is “antiquated”; but “architecturally” wise the shortcuts taken will get on the nerves of a lot of players.
I discovered this for myself, because there’s nothing more annoying than wanting to run towards a door or some stairs to bypass a patrol and discover that, actually, you can’t, because there’s a meter high fence between you and the objective. Oh, sorry, the fence can be jumped over, but only in the places you’re allowed to do so, which means a bit more to the left of where you are.
It’s true that you’ll have multiple routes at your disposal on plenty of occasions, but when you (literally) hit a wall, you can’t help but grumble at the fact that you can’t go that way simply because the designers didn’t place a “jump over” area. In Mass Effect this might have been tolerable, since the focus is a lot more on the action side, but here it’s another matter, because approaching the missions as a stealth character is a viable and a lot more entertaining option.
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You gain XP from completing missions, sub-missions, missions for different characters, picking locks, hacking computers, pretty much anything that you can do pays off by giving XP to level up. The level up screen is a gamer’s dream–plenty of skills with tangible rewards for every level gained. Also, you can acquire ‘perks’ from a multitude of sources. These perks can do things like give you discounts in black market gun dealer marketplaces, give you increased endurance, weapon perks, ability cooldowns, and more. These perks can be obtained by silently killing certain amounts of people, from impressing other people, or even by being hated. There is a huge amount of perks out there and every time I gained one, I was very happy about it and it added a lot to the gameplay and my character build.
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Alpha Protocol also has a checkpoint system that saves automatically, though it lets you save the checkpoint manually as well, just in case you make a mistake or you’d like to take a different approach at a mission-critical point. Generally though, if you make a wrong turn or say the wrong thing, you’re stuck with that decision and that is a frustratingly awesome feature that puts real weight behind your in-game actions and decisions.

The bottom line for the gameplay is that it’s structurally sound with some annoying issues; you’ll often find that you can’t stick to some objects as cover or you’ll stay glued to the wall for too long. The camera also has some issues, often appearing to be a little too close to Mike at times. It has some nice ideas though, such as the critical hit system for pistols, aim at someone for long enough especially at the head, and the crosshairs will come together until you get a one-shot kill chance. Pull the trigger on the target and they should die.
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All-in-all, you guys did a good job with Alpha Protocol. Though I do have a lot of complaints about combat, the story is engrossing enough to keep me going; I just simply do not try very hard any more. I arm myself to the teeth and run in with guns blazing. However, because I am forced to resort to this method, I am missing parts of the game that interest me, because the way in which I play opens up different paths. I would love to see a combat patch. If you guys patched the combat, say to feel similar to Splinter Cell: Conviction, this game would be amazing. Possibly even in the running for game of the year. However, what I suspect you’ll do (and recommend if you’re not going to patch combat) is make an Alpha Protocol 2 with these issues fixed. Either way, I’ll be happy to play.
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<span class="post">Even after all was said and done, my time wasted and Alpha Protocol never to be finished or played again, I still didn't hate the game. If just for the concept, Alpha Protocol is an ok game. It will continuously attempt to pull you in to both the story and customization features of the game. Unfortunately that is only a small piece of the pie. There is alot of third person action that just doesn't work. With a ton glitches and bugs, it comes down to how much tolerance you have for these nuisance. Some, like myself , would rather not waste the time with so many other great games out there. I could see there being many people that could overlook the faults of the game if they are a fan of either the Stealth or RPG genres. Though my general hatred for games that feel like they are unfinished waged war with my curiosity to see what would happen next in Alpha Protocol, and my general hatred won.</span>
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