Modern day espionage
Michael Thorton is an agent working for an undercover U.S. agency in present time. Players can customize Thorton’s background right from the start, choosing whether he was a freelancer, a soldier, a veteran and even more, before his recruitment. This choice has an effect on certain dialogues and responses from other characters and is entirely up to you to make.
After a commercial airplane is shot down by an American missile Michael is send by his agency to investigate the situation and find those responsible. He has the option to choose both his allies and his enemies; he can ally with the government, terrorists or other agencies revealed along the way, or just be disliked by everyone. He can choose to execute key characters, let them go, or make a deal with them. He can destroy weapons, sell them in the black market or send them to his safe house. The vast majority of these choices make characters you have talked to either like you or dislike you. The availability of certain missions depends on such choices, which massively raises Alpha Protocol’s replayability value.
You can complete the game even without having met all the available NPC’s and then complete the game a second, or even third time, with a different course of events and ending. You can form friendships and hate/love relationships with main and secondary characters (if you make the appropriate choices you can even see one of the most daring ‘sex scenes’ ever shown in a non-adult-themed video game, without actually seeing anything ‘improper’).
The developers claim that Michael Thorton is James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer combined in one. They definitely got that right.
Metal Gear Solid, Hitman and Mass Effect combined
The first two hours are highly misleading, be it due to the main character’s awkward basic shooting skills, or the strong colours used within Alpha Protocol’s base. In addition to the hacking and lock picking mini-games that keep coming up, in the form of tutorials, the game initially comes across as complicated, clumsy and old fashioned.
However, the game starts after the tutorial stage, as soon as you find yourself at the first safe house abroad. That is when the controls start to make sense, when the colours seem right and when the dialogues begin to have true impact on the game. The graphics may not be up to the latest’s GTA’s standards, but they definitely deliver.
Alpha Protocol integrates Metal Gear Solid’s basic gameplay, Hitman’s atmosphere and Mass Effect’s cause and effect dialogues. You can think of it as a game where you are in control of a highly customizable modern James Bond, with Metal Gear Solid’s guards and security cameras, choosing either to go stealth or kill on sight, planning your mission by looking at the map, like in Hitman, but without having to hide any bodies, and being either aggressive, casual or professional with the people you talk to.
The saving process of Alpha Protocol is outstanding. In addition to the frequent auto-saves, you can save your latest checkpoint at any point you want and reload it. For example, you can choose to assassinate your target and then save the game. Then you can continue playing with the target assassinated, or reload a previous checkpoint where the target is still alive. This way you can see parts of the game you missed without having to replay the game from scratch, or having to look up the different results on YouTube. This aspect was developed better in Alpha Protocol than in Mass Effect 2. It is actually the way Mass Effect 2 should have been made.
The reason why Alpha Protocol is an RPG
Everything you do, from hacking terminals to shooting enemies, rewards you with experience (XP) and perks. Completing objectives reward you with XP whereas doing all the rest gives you perks. For example, being aggressive in conversations can reward you with better melee attacks, even if you have not spent any XP on martial arts themselves.
XP is used to level up Michael, choose the weapon(s) he is going to be good at, if you want him to be good at stealth, martial arts (i.e. melee attacks), SMG’s, shotguns, pistols, rifles, hacking and lock picking and so on. About halfway through the game you are given the choice to specialize in three such domains and therefore maximize those three skills. The more you upgrade the better Michael becomes. I have read in a tremendous number of reviews that the shooting mechanics in Alpha Protocol are below par; this is a false statement. Michael’s shooting skills are meant to be below par if he has not upgraded them. You cannot spend ten levels of upgrading on pistols and expect him to be an ace shooter with a rifle. That would be absurd.
Michael is also equipped with gadgets and special skills. Gadgets can be bought via the computer at the safe house and the number of each that Michael can carry is upgradable. You can have medi-kits to instantly heal yourself, EMP’s to automatically disable terminals (without having to go through the, not-so-bad, mini-games), grenades, items that trick the guards, and much more. Each gadget can be chosen after reading the mission objectives, so you can buy grenades when you know you have a small army to deal with, or shock traps when you are asked to take out, but not kill, your enemies (even though such a requirement is optional and you can kill them anyway).
Special skills can be used during missions, but they are actually skills you have selected and upgraded during leveling up. Their effect has a time limit and you have to wait a few seconds for them to recharge before you can use them again. For example, Awareness is a stealth skill which reveals to you the nearby enemies in the form of coloured arrows, whether they are looking for you or not and the direction they head to. This skill is given to you early in the game but its duration is between three and five seconds. If you choose to upgrade your stealth skills the awareness skill is going to last longer.
Select page: 1 2
Alpha Protocol 
