Recent reviews by Erdenshire

Really good, frantic time with friends (until you *push* them away)

Interesting, albeit very short little game on the first playthrough. The intro and general narrative premise are pretty cool, sort of an afterlife variation of the idea of VA-11 HALL-A, with very simplified mechanics:
- The conversation choices mostly small talk, instead of than trying to gauge people by introvert versus extrovert for small versus direct conversation.
- The interactive choices mostly boil down to picking a drink out of a book.

The game stumbled pretty hard partway through:
- One of the patrons enables a hidden menu in the drink book, but you're dissuaded from looking in that direction before the patron arrives or or after the patron leaves, and therefore have to rely on your boss telling you to look there.
- Immediately after, I ran into some really funky UI behavior with a woman who demanded a "drink" when prompted, but then insisted she asked for a daquiri when I gave her the wrong drink. After making the daquiri, the conversation options stopped working and I could only throw drinks at her until she left, then needed to jump into and out of the Options menu to display the UI to move on to the next patron.

The combination of those two put a pretty sour taste in my mouth, and crossed with the short, simple nature of the game, I'm not a big fan of the game in its current state and price. However, it is an early access game, and may evolve significantly into a real fun, creative idea. The promise is definitely there, it's just going to take some work.

I would love to see more development into the patron interaction and the drink system. For patron interaction, I found that the current game boils down to a loop of "Small Talk" > One option > Repeat until drink is asked for > Pick a drink > Jump to "Small Talk"; I'd like to see some more conversation options, and probably remove the "Direct Question"/"Small Talk" options by hoisting the single nested option in each into their place. For the drink system, more information about the drinks would be a good start, but I believe there's room for UX design in the Drink Grimoire to improve the interaction with that system.

Alpha Protocol is a fairly decent game. It has a lot of promise as an action-espionage game that combines stealth gameplay with social intrigue and roleplaying. While it falls short, the target it was aiming for was a fairly high one, which puts the game at above average in my book. It stumbled in its efforts, but it picked a rich, difficult goal, and it made a pretty good try.

Positives: Your decisions impact your gameplay and the story, the setting and factions are varied and interesting, and the interaction with the various characters is fairly well thought out.

Negatives: The game is pretty buggy, the save system is a course checkpoint system, and the action element is really lackluster.

I would give this game a rough B grade. It could definitely have been better, but I felt my time was well spent, and I will probably come back to this game in the future. I spent roughly 25 hours on the game, and other than some frustrating mission conditionss and setup issues, I had a lot of fun. I would recommend this game to people looking to invest their time in the setting and story, but not to those looking for to blow up some bad guys.

BUG NOTE: If you do try this game, make sure to keep action bound to spacebar for hacking in addition to your general preference. You'll pretty much have to use the spacebar to lock in the keyboard side of a hack.