Alpha Protocol was a pretty interesting experience.
The story centers around a man named Michael Thornton who is the new recruit for a top-secret spy organization called Alpha Protocol, where they take care of the worlds problems without the U.S. governments direct involvement. Throughout the game you'll be completing several missions and making decisions that will affect the outcome of the game. The first thing that the game gets right is in the dialogue system. This is a very different type of system compared to other games like Mass Effect. The dialogue is all done in real time and you have to be able to choose what particular thing you want to say or do within a very short limit of time. The cool thing is whatever stance you choose will affect your relationship with the characters. You also get certain rewards like new missions and other useful favors from different characters depending on your choices. With a very engaging story to go along with these sequences this was defiantly the best part of the game and it was just so much to get to the next dialogue sequence.
However once I got started on my first mission that is when I begin to notice some of the faults in the game. Most of the missions in this game involve infiltration into a certain areas and if you're someone like me who wants to play the game stealthy you'll mostly likely fail at it 90 percent of the time. The stealth element was very poor due to a certain number of reasons with the first being the camera. For the most part the camera stays way too close to the player making it very hard to look around corners or to even see where the enemies are above. The second reason is that the A.I. seems to know where you're at all times even when you're trying to hide the best you can so for the most part it's almost pointless to stealth.
The combat in this is for the most part passable. In the game you get 4 different types of weapons the assault rifle, shotgun, SMG, and a pistol. The cool thing is that they're different types of ammo to use for each weapon and they are very useful for certain situations. Now aside from different types of ammo you can also customize your weapons with things like silencers, rifle scopes, or extended clips and for the most part they can enhance your weapons quite a bit. The problem is that the weapons are very unbalanced and most of the time you'll always have your assault rifle since that is the most accurate weapon and you'll use the other weapons for certain types of missions. They also have a cover system which works sometimes but at other times the enemies will still hit you even while you're in cover and there are moments where you're trying to get into cover but it doesn't happen immediately.
The game like other RPGs also has it share of special abilities. As you level up you unlock these abilities that will benefit any type of skill you have. Some of these abilities are pretty cool to use and they can help out a lot during mission when faced with a situation where you have to get past some guards and you can use the silent feet or the invisibility mode or if you're fighting off a number a bad guys and you can slow down time to line up your shots.
Overall Alpha Protocol could have been a much better game if they fixed some of the technicals issues as well as reworked some of the combat and stealth but with its excellent story and well done dialogue sections this game is pretty fun to play.