I edited the title on this blog a little to make it easier for readers and such. I was being long-winded before.
I consider myself to be someone who doesn’t always play the latest hottest game and goes back to old games a lot, but then I went ahead and bought Alpha Protocol at launch and finished it really fast. It was short enough. It’s the sort of game that lends itself to a replay or two, but lately even when I think I’m going to replay a game (I’ll do Fallout 3 again! And be a really bad guy this time! Except I haven’t gotten around to that…), I really don’t. So maybe I will and maybe I won’t. A “GamePlus” option would be a nice incentive, but I don’t think Alpha Protocol has this.
By the end of the game…
I probably should put a spoiler warning here.
By the end of the game I felt like I had pretty much done as poorly as I could’ve possibly done. I don’t know if everyone walks away feeling this way. It reminded me a lot of the movie “The International.” I didn’t really care for the end of that film, because it felt like everything that happened had basically been pointless and nothing was really resolved. By the end of Alpha Protocol it… felt like everything had been pointless and nothing was really resolved. So that’s definitely within-genre for this sort of conspiracy story. I kind of don’t feel like I should fault the game for getting that feel “correct.” With a video game you can easily say “well, more fodder for a sequel!” except, the game wasn’t real well-received and I don’t know if there will be one or not.
Any time the game offered me a choice to save one person who was named versus a bunch of people who were not, I tried to make the “needs of the many” decision based on pure Vulcan logic. The only time this didn’t happen was the assassination attempt situation (I was left feeling as if I screwed that one up, since both choices seemed equally bad, really). Otherwise any time the game put a woman in the refrigerator, I left her there. Although, to be equal-opportunity, I left Albatross in the fridge too. Sorry, bro.
I tried not to straight-up execute anyone until the final act. Rarely did this leave me disappointed, though letting Brayko live didn’t seem to make any difference in the long run. I couldn’t really kill him after his “power up” animation gave me one of the best laughs I’ve had in a video game in a long time.
I don’t think that siding with Heck in the final mission will be a popular choice, but I did it because that dude is crazy, and, I had more rep with him by that point than anyone else.
I will say that one of the consequences of having a game story where there is no “best choice” means that in a lot of situations, there is straight-up no “good choice.” A step forward for storytelling! But bleak, so very bleak. I do get what the game is doing here. In making you pick what’s important to you, without straight up telling you which choice was “right” in the end, it is treating you like an adult.
If only they’d fix the camera, bugs, and stuff.
…Edit! Youtube is showing me there’s many different twists on the ending I missed just from doing the final mission one way versus another, so maybe an entire replay isn’t needed just to see some different stuff. Cool…
Leave a Reply