The Good Computer RPGs of recent years have been dominated by the likes of Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age and Mass Effect, so it's refreshing to see a game that isn't fantasy or sci-fi for a change. That fact alone would have interested me in AP. For once, the game's tagline (“Your weapon is choice”) isn't much of an exaggeration. Rather than just measure the player's behavior with some sort of alignment meter, AP tries hard to make the decisions in the game meaningful. The plot doesn't branch until close to the very end, but major and minor decisions the player makes will have knock-on effects, changing how other characters react to you and personalizing the story.

The Bad AP is a glitchy game. I was lucky enough to avoid any of the horror stories floating about, but I was frequently annoyed by how guards popped in and out of existence depending on where the PC is and whether I'd reloaded recently. Speaking of reloading, the game sometimes crashed for me when I tried that. The game just doesn't feel completely finished. In one of the Taipei levels, for example, it's possible to see holes in the landscape. In other places you get the impression that content was cut in order to get the game out the door (a la KOTOR 2).

The Ugly In terms of both gameplay and story AP is quite short (I finished it just over two weeks after buying it, which is a record for me; actual playing time is probably 20–25 hours). With the exception of the boss battles, the game isn't particularly difficult unless you use one of the more underpowered character builds (eg. gadgets) rather than the overpowered stealth/pistol combination. The boss battles have the artificial hardness of giving the enemy ludicrous amounts of hit points. The PC version is a lazy port from the console version (is there another kind?). The UI and how difficult it makes it to use your abilities is the worst offender, followed by the checkpoint save system. It doesn't do AP any favors that the game it's most likely to be compared to is Mass Effect 2, which is graphically superior as well as being a better shooter.

The Bottom Line AP is a good game, but it's not as good as it could have been, and it's definitely not as good as it should have been. Buy it if you're a fan of RPGs, but wait until it's been patched and/or the price drops.

It seems that Obsidian has run into some issues with their DRM, namely that the DRM provider has taken their site down. This means that you cannot regoister the game to play it until you apply a patch to remove the DRM.

You need to install the game and then download the 1.1 UK patch from http://www.gamefront.com/…o110-eur.zip

It took me a while to find that patch and I'm pretty damn annoyed, so I doubt very much that I'll even play the game through. If it's this much of a pig to even install, then playing might drive me around the bend.

Good luck to any and all who purchased this game.

I won't lie, the game had some technical issues and has some clumsy game mechanics, but once I got used to the narrative structure and the character gets some decent skills it was sort of fun.

There are multiple endings and some of them are amusingly nihilistic. It didn't take me too long to finish the game.

To get the game going I had to copy Alpha Protocol/ Game Saves and Checkpoints files into MY Documents and copy dat files into the checkpoints. For more detailed instructions with this problem read http://www.rpgwatch.com/…owthread.php?….

The lyrics to the grunge song at the end the game with a morally ambiguous endings is “Heaven help the red zone, for over seven years. If this cause to do it right, I don't know what it is. Cause I get tired of running and living life indoors. It always comes down to the money …”