Useful tweaks: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Alpha_Protocol
Bugs: https://alphaprotocol.fandom.com/wiki/A ... tocol_Bugs
For the record, I use ARPG simply to mean 'action RPG' and I classify just about any realtime RPGish game under this label, whether it be a realtime DRPG, a diablolike, or a third person shooter RPG. No store link because the license for the music expired so it's no longer sold. I'm sure you can find it somewhere if you're interested.
This game is very consoley. Navigating menus is confusing because you must select the item you want, then click the select button in the bottom right, and exiting the menu is done with right click or some other button rather than escape. The mouse controls for the hacking minigame are terrible. There's mouse acceleration that cannot be disabled. The default FOV is 60 and changing it with ini edits breaks cutscenes. There's no jump button, so jumping is accomplished by pressing the interact button at prescribed locations. There's also no climbing aside from ladders or leaping over waist-height barriers without prompting locations. It's a cover shooter, so you can also press the interact button to glue yourself to a wall.
Levels are pretty linear. You may have several different routes to get through one room or small area, but you still must go through areas A, B, and C in order to reach area D. Sometimes once you've advanced an area, the door behind you locks, preventing you from even backtracking.
There are no attributes. Leveling up gets you points to spend on upgrading your skills. Skills go from rank 0 to 15, though only three skills are allowed to exceed rank 10. Each rank gets you a passive bonus, an active ability, or improves an active ability. All the skills are essentially combat-focused except Stealth and Sabotage; there are no speech skills.
Shooting without aiming is extremely inaccurate. Guns gain accuracy the longer you hold the aim button without moving. Even moving the reticle around when aiming with assault rifles causes them to lose accuracy, so you have to hold it steady on one target. Accuracy can be improved with gun upgrades and possibly skill upgrades. There only seem to be four guns in the game: pistol, SMG, shotgun, and rifle. You can buy better versions of these with higher stats, but fundamentally they are the same. There are also grenades, medkits, and other gadgets, as well as armor and armor upgrades. All of these, including ammunition, are found or bought with money you earn on missions.
Stealth is there but there's not much to it. Enemy bodies cannot be manipulated (or looted, except when they randomly drop some cash), and while they alert allies who find them, they disappear quickly. There's nothing to throw to draw enemy attention away from your position; even a stun grenade blowing up in front of an enemy didn't alert him. Pistol with a silencer equipped is the only gun you can use that won't alert everyone. If you sprint, every enemy within a mile will go on alert, totally at odds with the rather quiet sprinting audio.
The dialogue system is the selling point. In each conversation you get to choose from a handful of responses as usual -- but the catch is that there's a timer, so you must choose or your character will automatically default to the same type of response as you last picked and the conversation will continue. Conversations can raise or lower NPCs' individual approval rating of you, reveal new information, or offer an opportunity for a surprise attack. You'll need to figure out each NPC's preferences and cares to manipulate their approval rating as you see fit. I'm told that there is also a great deal of reactivity to dialogue and other choices, but I'm too early on to have seen more than a glimpse of that.
There are bugs. If you choose to 'reload from last checkpoint' rather than load manually, enemies disappear. Sometimes I get a black screen after loading with no solution but to restart the game. Sometimes when I hit the interact button to take cover, my character slides along the wall until he reaches what I assume is the prescribed position.
There are two mods for this game. All they do is change numbers in ini files to rebalance existing content as the authors please. I have no idea if either is at all worthwhile.
