Alpha Protocol is out! I think this game's going to fly under the radar, get really cheap, and then be impossible to find. Partly because it is a
heavily flawed game.I just posted this on another forum:
[...] I could have swore Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape Torment were some of the best games ever made, but all bioware or obsidian seem to be capable of anymore is a bunch of cliche riddled male fantasy bullshit. And even if you got any kind of enjoyment out of Dragon Age or Mass Effect, I don't think the same will happen here, the writing here is way worse than anything Bioware's done lately, maybe anything anyone's done lately, and it behaves like it was assembled by the crack programming team behind Ultima IX, and the voice acting makes Deus Ex look like Uncharted 2.
There are unskippable minigames that range from simple and pointless to unsolvable and the save system is some check point type thing, like it came from a 2002 console game. All the security guards wear sunglasses indoors. On the character background selection screen, you pick what you wanna be, soldier, recruit, etc. They all sound like comic book superhero descriptions and the freelance one has a picture of a fat kevin smith guy with a backwards baseball cap and two uzi's. I'm saying I just feel like I'm not getting any younger and don't have time for this kind of shit anymore, there's good games out there.
I had a chance to watch one of my former roommates play this, and yeah, the game has all these flaws and more. Just in the time that I watched, I witnessed
–awkward environments: no jumping or climbing over obstacles, except where the holographic icon says you can
–a counter-productive camera: it's positioned really close to the protagonist, meaning attempts to run from an encounter often led to the character running in place against a wall we couldn't see
–juvenile thematic choices: it's like they based their world and scenario design on concepts rejected from "Burn Notice" for being too cliché-ridden
–character models that plumb the depths of the Uncanny Valley: major nightmare fuel. (Those teeth!)
All that, and it's still an improvement over Deus Ex 2. I totally have to buy this.
I should elaborate. I have always preferred the flawed-but-interesting games to high-gloss, triple-A titles. Stuff like Zelda Four-Swords Adventure, Graffiti Kingdom, Psychonauts, and Chulip: these games are mistake-ridden, some of them unplayably so. I still love them and am glad I own them. I'm looking forward to including Alpha Protocol among their number.
