The graphics on the game are decent. While there are few facial expressions on your character and his idle animations are few and often re-used the rest of the character models are good enough to not be out of place. Along with that are some well made environments that give you plenty of cover when you need it. While some of the environments are far from stunning visually, I usually didn’t mind the graphics in the game. They’re certainly not eye-poppingly realistic or anything, but neither are they so dull and drab as to pull your attention away from the game, usually. There are some minor areas where I just thought that they perhaps forgot to load up some textures.

There’s also a very noticeable lack of facial expressions on the characters at times. When you die you have this nice serene look on your face, not like you were just beaten, blown up and shot. It’s almost surreal, like you’re in a Zen state. Some serious lack of attention to detail there.

Speaking of loading, the game loads heavily at times from the disc and quite noisily as well. I would certainly install the game to the hard drive before going into it because it gets rather annoying and does cause some small lag from time to time.

The gameplay is decent for a third-person shooter. The camera is mostly in a decent place and rarely did I get killed because it was in a position that was detrimental. However, there’s no jump which is sort of stupid. You can only interact with the environment in pre-determined areas that allow you to leap over things or over a hole in the floor. No jumping makes the game even more unrealistic and forces you into the "on rails" path set out for you. Really, aside from your character progression and the sequence in which you take on missions, the game is all on rails. You can decide to take a more subtle approach or a run and gun approach but you can only go where the level designers wanted you to go and only do what the game wants you to do.

Yes, there are some extra objectives in each mission but they’re minor and generally revolve around hacking into a computer for some money or information or finding a specific object. Very little else exists.

Overall, Alpha Protocol is a decent game. It’s not as much about choices as they would have us believe and the game does have a very guided tour feel to it at times in that you can only go where you are expected to. It’s not about exploration or finding another path around an obstacle. The graphics are good as is the sound and they don’t detract from the game in any way. Some of the loading times are rather long but overall not so much so that I was tired of waiting for the game to be ready.