I do think it's some sort of reputation thing that causes people to blow it out of proportion, which then leads to the reputation for bugginess then getting worse etc. especially since the 'professional' reviewers seem to feed on it themselves. Hell the reviewers were some of the worst critics for AP yet they let more buggy messes get through with shining scores (The Sims games and expansions for instance).

While I understand that people have different experiences I cannot for the life of me understand how Destructoid gave it a 2, sure a 4 if you truly didn't like it or had serious bugs but 2 means that it was pretty much unplayable by anyone, which it clearly wasn't. Did Michael Thorton touch the reviewer in a bad place? From that score I would take it as a serious possibility...

Or maybe I'm just upset that I'll never get to find out what was going on with Sis...

In the case of Destructoid it's pretty much what I expected from them. You have to rememeber that Destructoid only care about page hits and they write reviews specifically to get them. It's why they have the reputation they have for hyperbole. It has to be bad or it has to be good, there is no middle-ground with Sterling. Indifferent or Meh = People not interested in reading so it has no place on Destructoid.

Yep, it really does the raise the question of journalistic integrity in the gaming industry, or rather the lack of it. Oh well, I'll just added them to the list of sites not to trust the reviews from. :D

I'm so happy so many people liked the game. It's one of my favorites I've ever played. It wasn't a true FPS, nor did it claim to be. That was most of the complaints I heard.

The 1.1 patch removed the DRM. That would have been handy on Steam. :)


The biggest thing I can recommend is to save before you enter each mission on a new save game slot .Because sometimes when you load your mission (even if it's the first load right at the start), it won't load correctly and baddies will have disappeared.

I think that was the biggest problem: people went in expecting at the very least a shooter/rpg hybrid, but really it wasn't. The aiming mechanics did not have much player skill involved and the box read "Alpha Protocol: The Expionage RPG", not "Shooter/RPG".

Nothing. I killed her. Sorry.

Sis was an interesting character, especially when Thorton a asked certain character about the certain item she gave :)

Everyone should play Alpha Protocol. It's totally priceless to hear SIE hum the "ride of the valkyries" while Thorton is heading towards battle :D

But, the cream of the crop, Steven Heck. Damn :)

After I heard loads of Heck praise, I decided to murder him at the earliest opportunity.

However, he really grows on you. Like flesh-eating bacteria.

By the end of the game, we were best buddies. He was the Felix Leiter to my James Bond, if only they both had some sort of murderous personality disorder.

I had quite a few issues though that didn't stop me from enjoying the game. One i got quite often is when the menus instead of having a clicky noise when you hovered over them had the sound of someone dieing.

I was under the impression it was an espionage game. That usually involves less "run and gun" and more "run and hide".

The grunting sounds replacing normal menu sounds was a DRM issue, hence the removal of DRM in the v1.1 patch. At least that was the way I heard it. It was never clarified to me if "DRM issue" meant "you get those sounds if the game detects a pirated main executable" or if it meant "it's a glitch caused by a conflict with the sound system and the DRM's constant checking for pirated code".

So is he like Deadpool in a "Wolverine/Deadpool" crossover? Deadpool's awesome.

Having loads of fun with this game so far. And I mean I'm doing missions as stealthy as possible with casual attires too. And I'm rarely the one to tolerate doing things the long hard way, so the game IS well planned after all.

I'm just past the Saudi Arabia levels and have not met any bugs besides a single crash to desktop (though I alt + tab a lot) and a reload where part of the enemies from a level didn't appear.

Lucky man. I remember almost finishing the prison camp mission there with Darcy on my first playthrough, and after hopping over a fence to get to da choppa, I began falling down an endless black hole.

However a quickload stopped that, and I must say that AP was one of the best games I played last year. I even remember the names of all the characters and it's been about 6 months since I last played.

Just finished the whole game. Something about the visual effect of the bullet in the head of Leland in the ending was... satisfying.

Overall a great, if unpolished game.

Some concepts could have used a better thinking, the graphics are a bit under the level of goodness of the UE3 and the AI surely leaves a lot to desire on various moments.

But I do like it. :)

I bought Alpha Protocol last week, from a shop in the UK, because I am a big Obsidian fan and somehow this game got under my radar when it was released. I had to get it.

So, I bought it on DVD - the only downloaded games I buy are from GOG - installed it but had to spend an entire afternoon to get it to work.

I've got Windows 8 (64-bit) so I was somewhat concerned that the game would have problems with Windows 8, fortunately, Alpha Protocol works 100% fine on Windows 8. :)

But it has some issues and for me they were twofold.

1. I could not activate the game, with the 1.0 version, because Sega shut down the activation server.
2. when I applied the EU 1.1 patch, the game always crashed when starting up, it would not even get to the intro credits.

So I could not play the 1.0 version because the game cannot be activated now and I could not play the 1.1 version because it always crashes. I was somewhat puzzled for a while.

I had bought the game in the UK so it had to be the EU version, there were all the major European languages included with the installer and everything. Even people posting from the US on various websites had claimed that they had successfully patched their US copy with the EU patch so I thought it had to work.

But it didn't.

In frustration I patched the game with the US 1.1 patch and it worked. So it's worth a shot if Alpha Protocol is crashing to desktop when one starts it up after patching it to 1.1 it may just be the "wrong" patch, and one should apply the US patch - even though one bought the game in the EU.

Just FYI, you can disable the intro videos so you will end up in the menu directly after you have started unless you meant the intro movie of the game but it might be possible to disable that too.

There's a bunch of tweaking possible for this game, take a look at Obsidians own forums.