Alpha Protocol

Ok, Started playing yesterday. Wow. One of the most slow paced games I think I've ever played. It begins ok with an action starter that lasts all of 10 mins and then suddenly plummets to a tortoise pace. Lots (lots!) of stuff to read through and information to take in. I think they've basically tried to bring 'information' to the 3rd person action adventure genre with the characters constantly suggesting that you do your homework and read up on everything and anything.

The whole game is a bland mixture of RPG and 3rd person action adventure with neither side coming out very good.

The main new thing they have added is a conversation mechanic that allows you to select the mood of how you speak to people and then they will react accordingly with a knock on effect of how your conversations affect your relationships with other characters. At this early stage, it's not clear exactly what effect this has as no-one does anything different according to whether your professional, suggestive or angry etc.

Overall, the game just seems to be a little mis-concieved to me. The idea of having a major USP based on simple choices as to the mood of conversations and the effect that has on relationships comes very secondary to the mechanics of stealth and combat - neither of which are as polished as many other similar games.

TBF, the game has a lot of depth and you can approach missions in various ways, but it suffers here too as a single mistake using stealth simply defers to shoot-em up action - you can't recover from a simple mistake.

The mechanics aren't great and the player feedback for them isn't very clear either. Just feels like design has made some high level choices without thinking too much about the low level game play. Not sure I'll keep playing for very long tbh. Shame as it looks like it could have been a good game with a bit if fun and better action.