Lots and lots of choice in this cult hit espionage RPG

Bought this game quite a few years ago on the recomendation of a friend who had played it. But it kind of got pushed to the back burner due to an almost complete lack of knowledge of it. But now that the backlog is finally starting to shrink and choices are getting a bit more limited, I decided to give this one a go.

You play Michael Thorton who has just been initiated into the titular secret Alpha Protocol outfit. Who are there to carry out clandestine government operations which can then be denied and the outfit itself can be dissolved and remade if needs be. You start out being sent on a fairly routine operation, but then naturally everything starts to go wrong and conspiracies start to happen and you end up having to save the world as usual.

The pro-dominant feeling I got when I was playing that it was that it was some kind of present day love-child of Deus Ex and Mass Effect. It's all about the character you build up and what you put your stat points into to make him a killing machine or tech expert or silent killer. And making dialogue choices which were touted as being the 3 "J.Bs". That being James Bond, (suave, charming and flirty), Jason Bourne (straight to the point and professional) and Jack Bauer (in your face and very aggressive). Different characters respond positively or negatively to these dialogue choices. So business like people will respect the professional approach whereas mercenaries and soldiers will prefer the direct and aggressive approach so you have to figure out what works best with each type of person. While this is interesting initially, it quickly becomes very easy to read and predict what people will like what so this fairly quickly becomes redundant.

The 3 sets of footsteps that you can choose to follow in

But you are also given a lot of choice in the routes you can take in missions. You can talk your way into places or sneak your way in or hack your way in or shoot your way in (my preferred approach). This most reminded me of Deus Ex in that there were a lot of different approaches to every situation. But like in both Deus Ex and Mass Effect, there were many many choices of outcomes so there were so many different ways that things could work out and it felt like they were all actually significantly different unlike some other different ways things work out....

There were some minor complaints here and there like general low texture quality, quite lifeless voice-acting and some events do not quite occur like they should. In one case I had an end of mission report stating how the mission events affected a character that I had shot in the head a few hours earlier. So that was odd. But these are pretty small niggles in an otherwise very well put together game that you could play dozens of times easily and have a different outcome each time.

In conclusion, I'd say this is decent enough but I could never shake the feeling that I was playing the lesser cousin of Mass Effect or Deus Ex and just kind of wanted to be playing one of them instead. So give this a go if you've exhausted all those kind of games already and would like to try something a little different, slightly more campy and down to earth (as in not sci-fi). But I always preferred sci-fi settings myself.