Alpha Protocol

Alpha Protocol is a strange strange gam. 

It's ugly in purely an art style/choice way. It doesn't help that the animations are also horrible! But I did beat the gam! And then I started another one and got halfway through.

Lets get this going. 

First look at this character.

"MAN! THAT GAM LOOKS AWESOME!"

All the characters look like Pre-rendered cutscenes from a Playstation 1 gam! Hell, the gamplay would have also been from a playstation 1 gam. On my first playthrough, I played as a super stealth kung-fu killer. It was slow and methodical. The AI was extremely dumb. nothing ever requested the AI to do something new. "Walk from this point to this point. only stop if I think I hear something, or if I think I see something. When I reach this point, rotate in place head back to the first point." Their hearing was exact enough to pick out my footsteps from all the other guards in the area. If you ever played Tenchu for the PSOne it's more like that then anything recent I've ever played. It sped up as I leveled up more. Making me invisible for 5 seconds if anyone ever saw me, and giving my a total 100% stealth ability that lasted 20 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown.. This just gave me a chance to run  into places and around corners without looking.

The real gam

I got addicted though. As the marketing for this title says "Your Weapon is Choice". The choices kept me going! The only thing new they added was a "timer" to the dialog choices. It sounds extremely minor, but it was a big part in the pacing. A fairly big choice of "WHO IS GOING TO DIE?" or "WHO DO YOU ALLY WITH?" pops up and you may only have 3 seconds to choose. This lets you go with your gut and see how it plays out. And if I had time to pause and think about "what does this choice mean for this connection?" then I may not have been caught off guard by my choices. Also, credit to the writing and the VO work! It was actually well done (apart from the boring main character), and the story came together with a nice little wrapper. 

I only wish I can go back and play the gam for my first time as the guns-n-glory character I had on my second playthrough. The shooting gamplay was still pretty bad, but the quicker pace got me to the fun VO/choice sections much faster. In the end though, I ended up metagaming my choices more since I knew the outcome of the story/characters.  And that made it less interesting to me. Going with your gut with quick reflexes was fairly exciting and kept the VO/script have a good pace with none of those awkward Mass Effect pauses.

Thanks for the picture IGN

End

So my advice to anyone who is thinking about picking this gam up. Or anyone who likes any choice driven RPG's. Don't pay more than 20bux. I suprisingly enjoyed my playthrough with it, but I couldn't make it through the second due to me spoiling myself (unavoidable).  Stick with guns, don't bother with stealth. Neither tree has anything that a different gam hasn't done better. But I have zero regrets about my first playthrough.