When I played Alpha Protocol for review at FileFront back in the day, I played it through three times. This is why it’s good that the game is so short-the longer a game is, the more prohibitive it is to play more than once, which is clearly a bad thing for games which have “branching story = replay value” as a marketing hook (cough masseffectcough). There are major characters you might never even meet if you play the missions in a certain order. The ways the game changes based on how to treat people and the tactics you use during missions are super interesting, and make the game feel worth playing multiple times. Like all the great Bioware RPGs, the “gameplay” is what you suffer through to get to the good stuff. The key there is to always always always play on easy, because that minimizes the irritation of the brokenness of the “game stuff.” What makes Alpha Protocol great isn’t stealth karate chopping or shooting bad guys anyway. My normal playthroughs of Alpha Protocol, though, are under eight hours. Those estimates are largely incorrect, though I suppose if you go full stealth it will lengthen the game. And people on the forums and in Steam reviews often claim it’s upwards of 20. If you look at HowLongToBeat, you’ll see the average completion time is like 13 hours.
Let’s talk about why I like the janky, buggy mess so much. Like, it was so widely disliked that whenever I tweet about it being the best game ever people think I’m making a joke. When it was released five years ago, everybody hated it. But on the Phil Owen “Was This A Big Waste Of Time?” Scale, however, Alpha Protocol comes out on the good end every time I go back to it. It’s super irritating to play, and every time I speak with somebody from Obsidian, the studio that made it, they just shake their head.
In the “objective video game review” sense, Alpha Protocol is pretty much the worst. Phil Owen (Kotaku) likes Alpha Protocol and tells us why:
0 kommentar(er)
