Review by: Todd Brakke

In Alpha Protocol you play the role of “rogue” superspy Michael Thorton in a wide-ranging quest to untangle and set right a mission gone wrong. It’s billed as a modern-day espionage RPG in which “your weapon is choice,” and that’s on the mark. This game has as strong and variable a sense of choice and consequence as any game I’ve played. It’s just too bad that horrid PC controls, poor adversary AI, questionable level design and an adherence to Mass Effect 1 play concepts that, at times, borders on the absurd, hold this back from reaching the game of the year potential it has hiding not all that far beneath the surface.

If you look up at the score I gave this game you might think I hated Alpha Protocol, which is entirely untrue. It’s a weird day when you have to critically pan a game that you actually enjoyed playing, but the sad fact is that despite some wonderful design concepts, characters, and moments, this is a deeply flawed game that I cannot recommend you play on the PC. If you get a chance to play it on the 360 or can connect a 360 controller to your PC, by all means take a second look. But if mouse and keyboard are your only options, save yourself the time, money, and frustration.

This is, quite simply, the weakest PC port I’ve seen since the first Assassin’s Creed. And it’s worse than that, really, because when using the mouse to manipulate the in-game camera the game is, in places, very nearly unplayable. Obviously, PC hardware can vary so your mileage may too, but the first thing I found absolutely essential was to turn off a video feature called Motion Blur that all but destroyed the game’s performance. (This is on a PC that can run Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, and Bioshock 2 - all better looking games - without a hitch.) With that done you still have to contend with a camera that regularly and spontaneously flips a full 180 degrees with no warning whatsoever. When you’re skulking about, trying to avoid detection, or being chased down by adversaries this is a lethal problem. In fact, if I hadn’t had a wired 360 controller at my disposal (the problem all but disappears using a controller), there’s one boss battle in particular I might never have survived. Once I changed to a controller I defeated said boss in two attempts, after having failed about a dozen and a half times to achieve victory with mouse and keyboard. Shameful is the only way to describe the PC controls in this game and that is a deal-breaker.

If, however, you can get around or overlook this crushing issue, what remains may still be a flawed game, but it is one that’s well worth experiencing, so long as you are enamored with idea of doing your very best Jason Bourne impersonation.

In many respects this game’s design is an outright theft of the Mass Effect 1 formula. There’s nothing wrong with stealing good ideas and making them work for you. At times this game does exactly that. In this case, the mission structure, which sees you finish a set of introductory missions before branching out to three other selectable core mission points (in Moscow, Rome, and Taipei) and then narrowing the focus back down for a big finale, is very much a Bioware formula that works to great effect in this game. The ability to tackle the core locations in the order of your choosing allows the game to play out very, very differently depending on the order you tackle missions, not to mention the myriad choices you have to make. If you play through the game more than once, you might find yourself making enemies of what were allies (and vice-versa), having completely different characters involved in crucial scenes than what you saw the first time around, and, in general, having a remarkably different experience. It’s amazing and wonderful how many impacting permutations there are to how this game can turn out.