The story is very intriguing.
I have waited for a long time for a new interpretation of Sid Meier's Covert Action. A game where you can plant bugs to enemy bases, steal important documents, free hostages and interrogate prisoners according to evidence you have gathered. And this game tries to get close.
The good missions are brief, like I would imagine real life plant the bug missions to be. The combat missions take forever to complete. It's not that they're long, they're just horrible. Bosses where you have to go through certain steps before the battle is won - I've hated it in GTA -series and I hate it in Alpha Protocol. This kind of bosses belong to platformer games.
If anybody would have bothered to test this game for the PC with mouse and keyboard controls I bet the game would have become playable in combat. Due to that and endless swarms of enemies in some boss fights are really annoying and pretty much killed the fun for me. And reloading from last checkpoint sometimes make all the enemies disappear which is kind of nice except if the game won't proceed unless you have killed a certain enemy that is no longer there.
But it's really tough to completely hate this game because of the good part that just is that good. The conversations and the feel that you can make a difference just by making different choices. It also matters what kind of character you build. For example when I concentrated on stealth, marital (...err martial) arts and pistols the game was great but when I concentrated on submachine guns, toughness and technical aptitude the game was horrible.
After all this bashing there's still something appealing in Alpha Protocol that kept me playing. So if you're into agent action check your bargain bins.