Viqor played Alpha Protocol

Finally finished the game. Even though I beat the whole thing in three sessions, it felt as though it took me forever to finish. The experience became even more frustrating as the title reached its climax, the bad objective marking even forcing me to restart the final mission because a choice was not made clear and someone ended up dying because I didn't know which way to go in order to save them. There were also some frustrating fights, particularly one against a helicopter, where one or two solid hits could kill you, even on easy. This was exacerbated by the presence of the deadliest enemy in Alpha Protocol: the exploding truck, an enemy that will kill you instantly if you are anywhere near it when it explodes, and they were all over the place during that fight. It was a pain in the ass, barely giving me time to heal before blowing me up. I would have hated to see this fight on hard. By contrast the last battle was stupidly easy, allowing me to finish him off with a couple of weapon abilities, although I attribute that more to the difficulty I was playing on than any true failing on the developer's part.

The worst part about this game may just be seeing the wasted potential: this game could have, maybe even should have, been great, or at least a cult classic. One or two more passes on the script and more focus on character development could have made a good story and Mass Effect has proven that RPGs and Third Person Shooters can make great bedfellows. It's just such a shame that the game turned out the way it did, and I truly hope that this game's failure doesn't prevent Obsidian from at least using this dialog system again, since it was the by far the part of the game that worked the best.