Alpha Prime

There have certainly been far worse games in the extremely well-traveled FPS genre. For what it is, Alpha Prime delivers the goods and ends up being an engaging experience.

Pretty but tedious, Alpha Prime is a solid but supremely derivative shooter that's more often a chore than a pleasure. [June 2007, p.60]

At 20 bucks, Alpha Prime may be a decent stocking-stuffer for FPS junkies. [Dec 2007, p.97]

For the most part, I’d say that the weak points overpower the few positives in Alpha Prime and because there isn’t anything that’s really new or unique and the sound ruins the intensity, I find it fairly boring. You shoot enemies, watch a cut scene, shoot some more, interact with something, repeat.

Alpha Prime is a very average game. It might have nice visuals that make it look comparable to other games of its ilk, but in the end it suffers from being a truly derivative and under-developed game.

All in all this game is solidly average. It’s a decent if predictable story saddled with a pedestrian game.

The cinematic cut-scenes are poorly voiced, the characters unconvincing, and the plot is so-so at best.

This isn't 60 dollar title.. if you can grab it for 5 bucks and like shooters then I would recommend it. Standard fare.. HL2 Doom etc. run and gun with decent graphics. not a long game but again.. its a lot for the price.. I wasn't expecting Mass Effect 3

I usually find most good games can be lumped into two categories: either they are innovative but a tad buggy or they are polished but a tried and true formula. Alpha Prime is certainly the latter. You won’t find anything you haven’t done before but it is handled well and is enjoyable. It has parts of Doom; Red Faction; and a few others. The gun mechanics are solid though and there is a good variety of weapons. The lean function was great. I wish you could toggle aim and toggle crouch but you couldn’t. The graphics were not top notch even at release but it was solid for it’s time. Nothing was an eye sore for it’s era but it was no Far Cry in term of wowing me on release that’s for sure. The story wasn’t extremely deep but it was serviceable and knew to tell just enough to have reason to keep going. That being said a lot is made of Glomar and their heart but not a lot ox explanation is given as to just what it is or how it works. The music was a kinda typical soundtrack for an FPS game but once again got the job done. The voice acting was a bit stiff but not terrible. The one mechanic that was bad was the driving section. The handling on the buggy was just terrible. Luckily this was just one level and only lasted maybe a half hour. The AI wasn’t super great either as the enemies would block each other and had repetitive dialogue but they managed to provide a decent challenge due to lack of ammo on some sections and them doing a fair bit of damage against you even on the normal difficulty. The final boss however was extremely easy in comparison. Their one attack was easy to dodge and I had saved up enough rockets by the end that they didn’t stand a chance. I played Alpha Prime on Linux using Valve’s Proton. The game never crashed but I did notice two bugs. First even though I turned subtitles off the game still had them. Secondly there was one time where the game made it so that I couldn’t advance. Basically I pressed the button to bring an elevator down but it never started moving. I had to reload my last save and try again which it then worked. The stairs were borderline a bug though as if you stopped moving on stairs you started slowly sliding down them but that seems like janky physics rather than a bug. You can manually save whenever you want and there didn’t seem to be a limit on how many saves you could have. There were three AA settings; three AF settings; and fourteen other settings. There was not a v-sync option though which meant my GPU was running hotter than it normally would have given the visual detail as it was churning out over 600 FPS at times. Luckily I didn’t notice any tearing. You can’t change the difficulty setting once you start the game. Performance was great as you can imagine from me saying that. There was one small supply room where the frame rate tanked strangely while inside of it but while strange the frame rate “tanking” was still above 60 FPS. Game Engine: Enforce Game Version Played: 1.3 Disk Space Used: 1GB Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse Game Settings Used: 8x FSAA; AF; highest settings; 2560x1440 GPU Usage: 78-100 % VRAM Usage: 1744-2463 MB CPU Usage: 5-18 % RAM Usage: 4.1-5.8 GB Frame Rate: 65-610 FPS Overall I would recommend Alpha Prime. It has some issues and isn’t overly creative but it is a fun shooter that is competent in most areas. I finished the story on normal difficulty in five hours and thirty six minutes. It is well worth it’s current price of $5.49 CAD, I’d go as far as $20 myself. My Score: 7.5/10 My System: Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.0.0 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.2.8-zen1-1-zen | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz | Proton 7.0-6

Based on the reviews, I was expecting a really badly made game. However, I was somewhat surprised. Sure, Alpha Prime is nothing extraordinary, but it's not crap by any means either. It's a standard corridor FPS with a story. If you like FPS games, there is nothing to complain about here, aside from perhaps the difficulty being a bit too high. I've played on Easy and even then some sections were unusually hard and caused me to die many times. The story isn't bad either. Again, it's nothing groundbreaking, but for an FPS game it's pretty decent. Most FPS games don't make anywhere near the effort in the story department as Alpha Prime does. The cutscenes and the radio dialogue sections between the characters were a nice addition to keep the game interesting. Most characters were developed reasonably well in terms of personality. The graphics are very nice. Considering the game came out in 2007, those are pretty decent visuals, even by today's standards. The music is also not bad. There are only about 1 or 2 jarring heavy rock tracks, but the rest of the soundtrack is pretty good and gives a nice epic feel to the battles. The enemy variety could've certainly used some work. You spend a good 80% of the game just fighting spec ops, which gets repetitive eventually. There are some other gameplay sections added too, like hacking, and using a loader to move boxes out of the way, which is a nice change of pace, even if some sections were quite annoying. The loader in particular was difficult to control, and having to move a dozen of boxes out of the way just felt like a waste of time. In general the game is not as bad as the reviews claim it to be. It's just a standard, above average FPS that will keep you entertained for a few hours. If you are into the genre, give it a try, otherwise pass it up.

To start off this game is fairly awful. No not like it's old school NO this is NOT how old school games should be remembered the bad voice acting and overly long cut scenes as well as the poorly executed game play with the wonky controls and weapons that seems to have little to no effect on enemy's. However i can comfortably say that the game poses difficulty.... in an unfair manor as the enemies shoot right through walls. the story isn't terrible but it was fairly standard. The graphics for its time are fairly decent so i cant give this an overly bad rating a below average of 4 is exactly how this game preformed. it is below average and i honestly wouldn't recommend playing this game it is okay BUT its a very rough ride all the way through. All the AI are just pathetic But what i think saves this game from a worse rating is its excellent use of bullet-time which is well done to say the least. now the level design its well done for it's time but nothing to be amazed about there are places where you will get stuck or be clueless in the exact direction you should go. But it isn't worth buying all in all perhaps if it was cheaper but even then it isn't worthy as a game that deserves the praise it received.

Pretty pointless really considering how many better written and executed games are out there. It looks decent, but the AI, voice acting and story are all pretty uninspiring.