This game has a LOT of great ideas.
Alpha Protocol does the rpg element really REALLY well. Likeable characters and characters you hate, ones that get you emotional, and the fact almost EVERY character who talks can change their view of you as a person, help or hinder you, based on what actions you do to each of them or to something else they care about at any given time.This seems to be what the game focused on most.
With quick timed choices from what to do, to what to day, you can turn your enemy into a friend, a headache, a neutral, or a tool for your own ambitions. This works with who are your "allies" as well. The game encourages multiple playthroughs with this. There are many and I mean MANY ways to play this game, get different results, get different pieces of the same story, to open new paths and even levels!
From here it gets a bit shaky. The main way of progressing this game is combat involving gadgets, weapons, armor, and other gear. Including reading E-mails to answer (which depending on what you choose to respond with brings up the rpgs elements I mentioned before.) and getting messages with new weapons, new missions, and money.
There are a wide variety of gadgets,weapons, and items to choose from! Some will be very helpful to you, some will help your allies, and some will be great distractions for enemies.
The issues with this is that all of that effort in items, gadgets, and an assortment of weapons is literally wasted to the point of it being useless. The game encourages pretty early on the use of Automatic weapons like an Ak paired with a type of SMG. Although it does sometimes try to get you to pair an Automatic with pistols but to be honest, either way it changes nothing.
Buying more powerful weapons and such is a waste of time that does not really change the game at all. In fact, it would make it even easier. All the difficulty modes are not the least bit challenging with how poor the combat is once you get started. Yes, your weapons can be upgrades with special parts so you can customize. But this just adds further insult to injury.
Items is another thing, there are only a handful of items you will use because the stages seem to be designed without have the items and weapons in mind. All the missions are structured to make all this extra effort wasted.
This is the biggest fault of this game. This also hurt the Stealth aspect, which is great in some areas by border line insanely hard to pull off in most others do to awkward stage design, incredibly weird vision sights for the enemies keeping watch, and the range from which they will hear noise.
This main issues is preventing this game from being potentially the best RPG and one of the best games ever made. There is so much in this game that is entirely pointless, I would bet money that it was probably rushed or something happened during development.
Your actions and what you do effect so much of this game as it is, and it does it so well, but the progression is so mixed and faulty it's just unfair. I know something must have happened during development.
Another neat feature is your own Role-Playing and action elements. Per mission you ca upgrade your self in any areas like being better at hacking gadgets, better at Pistols or Automatic weapons in terms of aiming, or being quieter in stealth and much more.
In fact, you get special abilities the further you clear out your skills. Like for Stealth you will have the ability to become invisible for short period, upgrading damage you can take bullets like a champ. Dual wielding automatic weapons, and these special abilities get better the further you go like being invisible for a short time while RUNNING AND SHOOTING.
Issues is that there are quite a few of these Self Rpg-Action elements, and a lot of them actually are quite useful but there is still a big PORTION that is completely WASTED and it's just so maddening. This game has SO much stuff.
You got your cosmetics like TV with changing news, radio, areas changing based on what you did before, electronic lock picking(which kind of goes with hacking.) Armor that can give you camouflage in certain areas and so much more and when you beat this game the first few times trying different ways to play the game you will be just as mad as I am.
The main portion of this game is the RPG like emotion/Ability/Story progression/Cause and effect system. It beats many games at these Rpg Elements in an amazing way that will make you wow. But as you do multiple playthroughs and start wondering about the items, weapons, abilities, etc. you did not use or do, you realize that all this effort in this game is mostly wasted. you start to see what I am seeing which is the fact that the game was not designed for all this to be implemented well. All the issues in the game just boil down to the stages are designed not to take in all the extra amount of effort and instead are made to encourage sub-par gameplay progression.
Yet it's so well done otherwise you can tell that if they did, it would be perfect and it continues to remain a mystery of why? Why did this happen?!
But trust me, you will play this game many times and do many different things. It's a great games that has its efforts hidden in the shadows, but once you start exploring you will be playing this game for a long time. Especially to get that "real" ending sequence and the tons of secret.