A few days ago, after growing to hate Obsidian’s latest release, The Outer Worlds 2, I started wondering “Do I just not like Obsidian games in general?” So I decided to play Alpha Protocol, Obsidian’s forgotten 2010 title, and I can say quite clearly that this game is pretty good.
The moment I launched Alpha Protocol, the first thing I felt was how much it resembled Mass Effect. It was like playing a Mass Effect game set in the present day, far from science fiction, with a spy theme. Even the main character, Thorton, resembled Mass Effect’s protagonist Shepard. As a Mass Effect fan, this warmed me up to the game right from the start.
What Is Alpha Protocol?
Alpha Protocol is an action RPG, but a rare kind. Games usually try to offer worlds as different as possible from modern reality — some do this by going to the future, others to the past. Alpha Protocol stays in the present. When you think about it, you’d expect this kind of game to be more common. Because we’re so used to seeing the present day in films and TV, we assume games do the same, but no. A James Bond-style action game set in the modern day barely exists. Alpha Protocol fills this gap beautifully. Independent of its quality, for this reason alone, if an Alpha Protocol 2 were ever announced, I’d have it wishlisted immediately.
In the game, we take control of a character named Michael Thorton. At the start, you choose a character background — options like Soldier, Field Agent, and Tech Specialist are available. There are six different background options in total. I played as Veteran, which normally requires you to finish the game once first, but I used a mod to unlock it. Since the game is quite old, I installed a few mods and played with those.
Anyway, that’s not the point — let’s move on. Each character background affects both the story and your skill tree differently. You can start as a total rookie with no experience, or as a seasoned veteran spy. This alone adds a huge amount to the role-playing experience.
Perhaps the aspect I appreciated most was the dialogue system. The writing is excellent, and on top of that, your choices genuinely affect the game. Instead of the classic good, evil, and neutral options seen in Mass Effect-style games, here you have aggressive, calm, professional, or sarcastic dialogue choices. I loved this right away. It feels more realistic. It captures the sense that the character you’re guiding isn’t a caricature — he’s a real, living person. And your choices truly matter. Making these choices isn’t just about picking a line — for example, there’s a mission where I’m supposed to go in stealthily and avoid all confrontation. If I go in guns blazing and kill people, my relationship with one of the characters in that mission deteriorates. Or sometimes the game presents you with a fork: go through Door A and you can defuse the bomb, but go through Door B and you can save the hostage. The game forces these kinds of decisions during gameplay as well.
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the story. The less you know going in, the more you’ll enjoy it. Broadly speaking, you’re an agent who has joined the Alpha Protocol program. Due to certain events during a mission, all your records are erased and your own country starts hunting you as if you were a terrorist. Throughout the game, you’re trying to find and stop the people who orchestrated this conspiracy.
I can’t say the game has a particularly original story, but it’s an enjoyable one to play through. The dialogue writing and presentation are especially strong. The game has a Mafia 1-style narrative structure.
In an RPG, well-written dialogue is crucial, and Alpha Protocol genuinely delivers on that front. I mocked and taunted everyone I encountered throughout the game, and it was an absolute blast — I recommend you do the same.
Alongside the dialogue, the characters themselves are well written. No character with a significant role in the story ever feels like they lack a personality. Every character has a reason to be there, a motivation that drives them. Nobody is just another generic villain. Good or bad, every character has depth.
Throughout the game, you’re operating in the world of spies. You could be betrayed at any moment, so you have to choose carefully who to trust. You meet many characters along the way, and you have a relationship score with each of them that influences how they behave toward you. In this regard, I’d say it shares a similar vibe to the spy storyline in Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC.
The story takes you to several different countries. The order in which you travel to each location and tackle each mission is entirely up to you. The game opens in Saudi Arabia, and after finishing the missions there, you can freely explore Russia, Italy, and Taiwan in any order you like. This adds a nice sense of freedom. The missions aren’t directly linked to each other. For example, you arrive in a city, two missions appear, you complete one, and the intelligence you gather from it unlocks new missions.
I really liked this mission structure. Gather intel, unlock new missions, gather more intel, unlock even more. This loop genuinely makes you feel like you’re an intelligence agent whose actions are driving the story forward. In games where you can tackle missions in any order, there’s usually a narrative problem — Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the most recent example I can give. There too, the open mission order meant there was no real sense of story momentum, which made the narrative feel flat. Alpha Protocol handles this well. Even if they had presented these missions in a fixed linear order, it wouldn’t have felt out of place.
We’ve praised the game plenty. But as everyone knows, the Alpha Protocol series never continued, because the game unfortunately has major problems. The gameplay is clunky, as with every Obsidian game. In all honesty, I’d still rather play this than The Outer Worlds 2, which came out last year. But that doesn’t save it.
The game gives you genuine freedom in how you approach it. You can sneak through levels quietly like a stealth game, or blast your way through everything in your path. I think the differences between playstyles are implemented adequately, at least by 2010 standards. Now let’s get into why the game couldn’t find success:
The Gameplay… Oh, The Gameplay…
The game has one of the strangest shooting mechanics you’ll ever see. What do you normally expect from a shooter? There’s a dot, crosshair, or plus sign in the center of the screen, and when you fire, the bullet lands somewhere near that point. Well, in Alpha Protocol, that’s not how it works — and this is probably the biggest reason the game couldn’t survive into a sequel.
There’s a massive ring in the center of your screen. Depending on the weapon you’re using, it can be so large it nearly fills the entire display. When you fire, the bullet goes somewhere inside that ring, exercising its own free will. Apparently, during development they thought “RPGs have to have dice rolls and randomness” and decided on this crosshair system. If you’re going to play the game, I’d suggest playing on easy for this reason alone. Aiming is already hard enough — don’t add high enemy health pools on top of it.
The gameplay isn’t just a kill enemy, move on loop. There are plenty of hacking and lockpicking sequences. For example, if you’re caught while sneaking, alarms start blaring. You have to clear the area and then go shut off the alarm before more enemies arrive. This triggers a small mini-game. There are several of these mini-games woven into the gameplay. I can say with confidence that whoever designed these mini-games never actually played the game — at least not on PC.
A menu appears on screen with random letters and numbers scrolling past. Hidden among all these moving characters are two fixed character strings. You have to find them and move your cursor over them — controlling one with the mouse and the other simultaneously with the keyboard. Playing with a controller, this probably wasn’t so difficult, but with a keyboard and mouse it becomes unbearably frustrating. And then there’s something even worse.
Lockpicking… We’ve seen lockpicking mechanics in almost every game at this point. And I can say with full confidence that this is the worst lockpicking mechanic I’ve ever encountered. We’re supposed to slide a key up and down according to the lock’s feedback. How hard can that be? How did they manage to do it this badly? My hands were trembling, I was losing my mind, I cursed every single line of code. We’re talking about sliding a line up and down — how did they fail to implement that? The sensitivity is so absurd, the input lag so ridiculous, that I lost it completely. Even as I write these words, my heart rate is spiking. Words fail me.
You can make a single mechanic badly. You can make parts of a game badly. You can even make an entire game badly. But this is a line that moves up and down. What exactly did you fail to get right? I’m sure it’s not this bad with a controller, but with keyboard and mouse it’s an absolute disaster.
The game already runs into issues on modern platforms. I played the GOG version, which includes some bug fixes for modern computers. If you own it on Steam, you can also apply this patch to the Steam version. You can find detailed instructions here. Beyond the clunky controls, I didn’t encounter too many technical issues during my playthrough. I did run into two game-breaking bugs, both of which happened during the final mission, and I had to load my most recent save file to get past them.
Conclusion
In the end, Alpha Protocol became one of those games I was genuinely sad to see end. It’s been added to my list of games where I say “I wish there’d been a sequel” while knowing there never will be. If you enjoy Mass Effect-style RPGs, I’d definitely recommend giving it a look. And if you’re already familiar with old-school RPGs, the game’s rough edges probably won’t bother you all that much.