The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I really wanted to like Alpha Protocol, but it just constantly pissed me off, every single time I played it, and I had to send it back to Gamefly. It just wasn’t agreeing with me at all. I had heard it was unpolished, but fun in the dialog, and that was what I was expecting, but it just didn’t seem to do what it was advertised. I don’t know.

Everyone has talked about how much the combat sucks, and it really does. It’s like Mass Effect, only 3 times as shitty. I got around a lot of that by using Shotguns, which don’t work exactly the same way as other weapons and are still very effective, but it really didn’t save the combat. It’s just flat-out bad, and isn’t why you should play this game.

The reason you should play it, supposedly, was the interactions with people. You pick various approaches as you talk to people, which affects the plot and how they like you and treat you. This is good stuff! Making meaningful decisions is totally cool. However, I just felt there was a real break between the conversations and the rest of the game. In the game, I’m making meaningful decisions, I’m helping out, but at the same time, when I’m in the missions, I am killing everyone, even on Stealth missions, and nobody seemed to care at all. They’d still tell me what a good job I did.

The moment that really ruined it for me was when it hinted at me getting penalized in conversations for decisions, and then backed out of it. Basically, I wore my combat suit to go and talk to this guy at his office. He makes a passing comment about how inappropriate my clothing is. I gasped. “Finally, some actual consequence for me dressing up as commando dude and shooting people!” But the main character just cracked and joke, and everything continued as if it didn’t matter. There were no penalties. He wasn’t uneasy because I was fully armed in his office. It was pointless. I threw up my hands and said, “Whatever.”

Brer claims that part of the fun of this game is the planning. “What’s most important for me to do first?” However, I was never penalized for not planning (See the above example. I could have planned and wore business clothes, if I wanted) so I don’t understand why I ever would. The same goes for sneaking. Brer claims that sneaking vs killing every one does affect things somehow in later missions, but since it doesn’t in any of the tutorial missions, how was I supposed to know that was the case? He claims that the NPCs told me that during the tutorial, but damn, who believes NPCs speaking flavor text in a tutorial? I know I just approach games different than him, and maybe my own whatevers are just keeping me from fun, but I really feel the game could have been designed better to make you do those things, if those things were actually important.

So, yeah, I didn’t really care too much for Alpha Protocol. It was really rough around the edges. It’s a shame that Obsidian can never seem to pull off what they try to do, because they try to do some very wonderful things. Maybe they’ll get it right some day.