Video games, like movies and music before them, have a very odd way of demanding originality and rewarding familiarity. The masses cry for new and interesting projects, condemn sell outs, praise anyone willing to break from the mold, and then make Call of Duty 9 (or Black-Ops 2) the most successful media event of all time, earning $500 million in the first 24 hours of its release (or about twice what the Avengers, the highest grossing movie of all time, earned in its first weekend). Making the situation worse, while movies had big names like Roger Ebert to remind us of the overall value of experiments and unsuccessful films, video games have MetaCritic and the internet. We universally slam anything that doesn’t meet our expectations while simultaneously criticizing games for not trying new things.
Alpha Protocol suffered this unfortunate fate. With Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 under their belt, Obsidian Entertainment set out to produce two games that they promised would surprise and break from the norm. It wasn’t long before the first project was leaked, a more personal and story driven take on the Fallout universe in the way of Fallout: New Vegas, while the second project known only as an “espionage RPG” didn’t gain much hype until release. It took the stealth game play we were used to from Metal Gear and Splinter Cell and instead focused on the espionage element; conversation, gaining intelligence, and forging relationships between maps was the refined focus, while the maps themselves were the filler. The game pulled off a fantastic (if not a bit convoluted) story that spanned the globe and made you feel critically important to the way things played out. The game featured a bi-polar relationship system with your handler (which you chose before each mission based on who you trust) where both positive and negative relationships have advantages and disadvantages. Have a handler who likes you? Perhaps they won’t tell you about the weapon hidden in the heavily guarded room out of fear you might die. Have a handler who hates you? Maybe you can make them angry and get more information out of them than they wanted to give. Beyond that, as the voice in your head the handler has a dramatic effect on the mood. On one mission, one handler provides you information on how to disable enemies and sneak around without killing them while another plays “Flight of the Valkyrie” over your head set while highlighting weapons. It doesn’t just change the map, it changes who you are.
The game had its flaws. It was a 3rd person shooter that didn’t play or feel like one. Combat was extremely clunky and unforgiving by design, with a little extra clunky added by poor implementation. The game had strong RPG elements while giving you the illusion you can play it the way you want; you can’t. If you build a stealth and conversation oriented character you might as well have a pea shooter even though you would expect the gun on your back to work like it would in other shooters. The game rests in its own genre and that is both its appeal and its greatest flaw. It was rejected by the masses looking for the same experience they got out of other stealth action games and by the masses looking for a 3rd person RPG like Skyrim or Fallout. It’s only people who could look at it for what it is; something fresh, new, and different, that seemed to come to its defence. Still, with a Metacritic rating of 72 and a price on Steam of $5, I can’t recommend this game enough to people who want to feel like a spy without feeling like a unstoppable agent of death.
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