The game has it's flaws, but once you get past them you'll get a great time out of it.
First of all I finished it twice on Normal difficulty.
The first time I played as an rookie class the second time as a veteran. I must say it was nice to see all the options, I got a little bit lost, the training part reminded me a little bit of SYSTEM SHOCK 2
with the doors for training fields.
==Bad points==
1. The game needed some more polishing. The character has lighting reflexes and by that I mean it turns unrealistically fast, giving a terrible feeling to the game.
2. Another annoying part is mouse smoothing.
3. Game tutorial is almost a bust. If you never played a action/rpg before - this game would not be a good first choice for you.
4. Reload sometimes remains in a black screen.
5. In-mission load times are quick but sometimes if you move the mouse you may be facing the sky or the floor or the other way and it is so fast that you get disorientated. Bad timing for loading stuff...
6. Unrealistic over the corner shooting.
7. Some skills are useless. But I think it depends on the style of play.
-- some of the above can be ignored if you consider the game a arcade/action/rpg --
==Good Parts==
1. Original skill tree.
2. Original story.
3. Good story and nice characters.
4. Good voice acting, most of the time -- except that one time.
5. Good enough graphics ( I am not a big fan of state of the art graphics, for me it was enough to consider it a good part)
6. Enough violence, and if you are not a violent guy, you rarely see violent stuff... but if you are... well - enjoy.
7. You can finish the game no matter the choices you make during the game-play but, in the end, you might fight other agents depending on the intel you gather
8. Good side games for lock-picking, disabling electronic devices and nice hacking game.
9. Nice inventory management system and balanced items
10. And las but not least: nice jokes. They didn't make me fall of my chair but they surely made me smile a lot.
==Final Word==
I love original games, and I loved this one. It was a hard love because of the minor but annoying glitches. I gave it a 9.
I actually hope for Beta Protocol (Alpha Protocol 2)