Espionage RPGs are certainly rare beasts and, given the scope allowed by the spy genre for matching the potential of a compelling RPG, it’s perhaps surprising that there aren’t more of them. Developer Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol is certainly ambit­ious in its scope, not just in its attempt to meet the demands of the treacherous plot of a spy thriller, but in attempting to match the sheer breadth that some of the very best RPGs can offer the gamer.

Alpha Protocol opens with a missile strike taking out a comm­ercial airliner in flight. Cut to Michael Thorton waking up in a Black Ops US government agency, the Alpha Protocol of the title. Once Thorton has been inducted, he is soon off on his first mission, travelling across the world to investigate a terrorist group said to be responsible for the destruction of the plane. As in any spy thriller worth its salt, things soon go awry. As Thorton, you find yourself in a good old existential maze of uncertainties and false trails and using firearms and unarmed combat, Jack Bauer-like, to figure out the meaning of life during your globe-trotting across the Middle East, Russia and Europe, pursued by lots of nasty spies simply trying to figure how to rub you out. The RPG element in the labyr­inth of options available as you make your way through this international avenue of bull­ets is one of Alpha Protocol’s strengths. Not only will your attitude in dealing with others – be you professional in your approach, or suave towards female contacts, or just downright, head-buttingly aggress­ive – affect your choices, Deus Ex style, but your choices will significantly determine your path and the ultimate outcome. Alpha Protocol is perhaps much closer in feel to the recent Mass Effect 2: people die because of what you decide to do and because of how you act. Add to this an extensive system of levelling, tweaking, choice of arms and approach – whether going in all-guns-blazing or taking the stealth route – and the game has tremendous scope in its RPG ambitions.

Your  early choice of specialis­ation for Thorton is effectively akin to a profession in a fantasy RPG. The extent of the dialogue is impressive, the voice-acting well done; like ME:2, it has wit as well as intelligence. Win someone over with your indubitable charms and it could earn you bonus perks. But while you might sweet-talk one amenable female contact, try it on with another and she may well tell you where to shove it. As in ME:2, there were times when I really just wanted to get on with more interactive tasks, like runn­ing around shooting things, walking the walk rather than talking the talk, before exiting yet again out of one of the city safehouses serving as an operations hub. While, overall, the game might not win many plaudits in the visuals stakes, the way in which each safehouse in a specific part of the world reflects its local environment is a nice touch.

The essentials of the plot are like lynchpins, but how you come upon them in-game will differ markedly depending on your choices and approach. Be careful in pandering to your curiosity when you see the option “execute” after grilling someone you’ve just bested, holding a gun to their head as ‘incentive’ during a little espionage chit-chat. Thankfully it isn’t all talk-talk – cut-scenes can be action-based interactive. Combat is uneven and, this being a console game (there is a PC version), the third-person, over-the-shoulder per­spective comes as no surprise. A perfect headshot hit might not kill one opponent, while you can wade into a firefight and down another with your bare hands – even when he’s blasting away straight at you. Levelling up improves your accur­acy and weapon effectiveness, although the AI never seems to play catch-up.

And if there is no God, then there is always the assault rifle. Again, I return to ME: 2, in which the gunplay, while not outstanding, was relatively smooth. Here, it’s more than a tad prickly, but it does have much more variety; and you don’t get the recurring sense that you are – hang on a minute – revisiting yet another rescue mission. Woven around Alpha Protocol’s main mission there are a number of minor ones you can undertake, but the cent­ral arc clocks in at over a dozen hours depending on how much time you want to spend tweaking your array of skills. Replay value is also one of Alpha Protocol’s strengths. If you possess time and patience, a more stealth-based approach to missions will certainly ratchet up the tension a second time around. And cruc­ially, the different decisions you make and the approach you take will create different repercuss­ions and outcomes with the impressive ‘ripple effect’ working through the game’s plot.

Alpha Protocol is an ambitious attempt at an espionage RPG. Although it’s never quite the Jack-Of-All-Trades it aspires to be, it’s sufficiently well executed to allow you to be master of some.