I decided I might as well grab it today when I wandered into EB and the game was on sale for the exact amount of money I had in the bank. Thought I might as well do another live first impressions thing which explains why it's taken me 3 hours to finish the tutorial...
Who’s jo? Why is he/she riding a snake. Oh no, its an alpha! Makes sense, looked like a J & O run together
Ugh, title music sucks, modern dancey suspense music, I like them copying the bond film style but they should have gone for a more classic era bond theme.
Hmm, backgrounds are cool, soldier, field agent, tech specialist, freelancer and n00b rookie. You can play a vet agent when you finish
I’m playing against type and being a n00b
Can’t say I understand the skill screen, seems to show me being average in everything and I can’t change stuff. Ahh looks like the recruit gets nothing to start with, the freelancer gets to assign stuff immediately, maybe after training it'll make more sense
Ooh people in the intro are speaking foreignese, must be terrorists!
Ooh lots of jaggies in this cutscene, hope thats not common
Shots of missiles! that confirms that they’re terrorists, well that and shooting down a plane.
That businessman with a cigar is obviously going to be evil!
Great, you start out on drugs, what sort of message is this for the kids?
Mmm Minalicious, I’ll be shagging her.
The dialogue stance system seems nice, good to choose an emotion rather than the words, wonder how variable the dialogue will be
Hmm, the first use of a stance gives you a game-wide bonus, being suave with my first choice gives me a reduced cooldown time on all my abilities
Melee combat seems simple, mash the B button, hopefully it’ll get more complex.
Heh played too much red dead redemption, I knocked out the guard and was walking over his body for 10 seconds trying to trigger the ‘press Y to loot body’ option
The movement is a bit weird, feels a bit... oldschool and not in the good way, everything is a bit too fast and a bit too wrong. Hard to describe it really but I’m sure I’ll adapt
Bypassing alarms is cool, its a circuit panel and you have to trigger nodes at the end of long paths in a time limit. A timed maze is way nicer than a quicktime event or a ‘hold a until the progress bar fills up’, feels like you need to do stuff yourself. Shits all over Bioshock’s pipe minigame
Oops, got spotted after getting a tranquilizer gun, the reticule is pretty huge what with having no skills (leet or otherwise) but I managed to take the enemy down in one shot. Wonder if it was the short range, a fluke or good aim on my part. After another fight, it looks like either option 1 or 3 but I'm guessing 1
Ooh you can’t be spotted by cameras or destroy them without setting off an alarm, nice. Hate games where you can shoot cameras and no one gets suspicious
Hmm, the cover mechanic is a wee bit clumsy, seems to take a bit to attach to cover and you can’t seem to detach by pulling away like you can in most games
Lockpicking time. Nice, looks like oblivion’s lockpicking but doesn’t suck donkey bollocks. You have to use the analogue features of the controller to gently move the pins up with the pick and then set them in place. Damned if I know how the PC version will handle that
Special skills are kinda cool, I used awareness which lets me see the suspicion, rough location and facing of enemies
Well that was awful, tried to stealthily tranq a guard only to miss him several times and set off an alarm which lead to a fairly large firefight. Thankfully the hostile guards are as crappy a shot as I am
Time to be a 1337 haxx0r! Looks like you have to do 2 passwords, overlaying the password with the stream of data. Hard as hell this, I seem to suck at seeing stationary things when everything is moving, REALLY plays into my area of weakness, I foresee many a firefight or at least heaps of skill points invested in hacking. Holy shit I did it! I think I have a headache now
Woah the boss gets WAY too close to the camera, someone needs to teach him about framing a shot
Cool, I’ve just managed to level up and buy the skill needed to make hacking easier. The character screen is indeed making sense now
Ooh the character customisation has the option to give thornton a giant lumberjack beard, looks funny with his nicely groomed stylish prettyboy hair. Good selection of hats and glasses too but no monocle and top hat option. It’s light customisation, you can’t make him anything other than a white guy and oddly you can’t change the colour of his hair
Fuck, the hacking thing is still hard as hell, must be my brain not being able to spot patterns. Weird, my bizarre ability to unfocus my eyes seems to make it easier to see where things aren’t moving. Okay its now useful for both magic eye drawings and hacking
Going through gadget orientation now. Heh love the sign on the door “Danger firing range in use. Only authorised personnel permitted beyond this point. Unauthorised persons are considered targets”
Grenade usage is much the same as any 3rd person shooter, having the arc displayed in yellow is a bit of a mistake, you can lose it pretty easily amongst the clutter. Cool that you can use grenades as proximity mines, handy for taking the arrogant twat of a gadget trainer down a peg and pocketing the money from our bet.
Weapons training time. Ooooh nice! The longer you aim at a target, the redder the reticule gets and you end up with a critical hit. I seem to miss a lot more than I thought. 2 times through the course and the best I managed was 32 misses? I could swear blind I didn’t miss that often, unless maybe the shotgun pellets are individually tracked
Espionage training. Pretty easy, camera evasion and hacking but with a side job afterwards to steal data from the medical bay. Got spotted a few times and pissed off the trainer, he also doesn’t like jokes it seems.
Well thats the training done, the boss seems to think I’m okay and now I’m off to Saudi Arabia to shoot some bloke wearing sunglasses and a head wrap.
Overall I’m enjoying it so far, bit clunky but I think I can adapt to it.

Thank you very much for your post.
I am very close on ordering it for the PC. It was between this and RDR (I have all the major consoles but I always prefer PC when available), but RDR is not available for the PC and I can get Alpha Protocol for like 1/4 of the price of RDR so...yeah.
I guess you have the 360 version of the game. How are the graphics? The screenshots and even videos make the game look dated. Not that I mind too much.

The graphics are a bit rough but they're not excessively bad and certainly don't get in the way of enjoying the game.
It does indeed have the expected case of Obsidionitis, you can tell right away that it needed a little more work but so far I'm enjoying it

Cheers, thats really helpful. Only found out about Alpha Protocol over the last couple days, but from what I saw it looked good and so have ordered it, but still wasn't 100% certain due to the lack of information on how exactly it works. This has reassured me quite a bit, though I am still interested in seeing how much of an impact the choices really do make on the story.

Must... resist... reading....
Preloading now on Steam, tomorrow (or rather, the day after) cannot come soon enough.

There's no spoilers really, just a description of the game in general.
Stealth is still causing me problems, I'm not sure if its because I'm not used to the game or if my character is extra crap because he's a n00b. They did mention it's more of a challenge to play this way

Any insight on how hubs work? Can you visit any of them in any order (ie. open ended gameplay), or what?

Well I've only got the one in saudi arabia so far, its pretty much a place with a computer, character & weapon customisation and a front door. When you use the door you get to pick from a list of secondary missions, when you do 2/3 you unlock the primary mission. Going to do the third secondary mission before tackling the primary

I've been playin AP since yesterday as well.
The game feels a bit raw or crude but it is surprisingly enjoyable. Actually I find it better than I expected it to be. The gameplay is decent, the dialogue excellent (as expected from Bugsidian) and so far I haven't noticed any game breaking bugs. The graphics are average, the faces ugly (God, Mina looks like she has some vicious case of a chronic diarrhea) but there are some nice environments: for example the second mission in Saudi Arabia in the sandstorm.
The guns are customizable (and they change visually), Mike is customizable (tho I can't get over his FUGLY feminine face and the fact that you can't change his hair colour), there's a ton of Intel text to unlock and read.
Voice-acting is decent so far.
Ooh and I really like the takedown animations! The walking, running and especially stealthing animations are weird though :/
So far so good. I give it a solid 8/10.
edit: I kinda wish that the Intel text was voice-acted. I imagine that the lady from the old Rainbow Six series (she also played Athena in God of War 1&2) would be perfect for the job. Oh well.

I think I've figured out the problem there, they don't move far enough. They take 1 metre steps but only move 75cm so they just look off

I couldn't stop myself, I ordered it, £17 is not bad.

okay, everything negative I've said about the game: forget it. I'm just doing a level that features russian strippers who you can throat chop! Best game evar!

Love these, but gonna wait til I play first. :)
Gotta wait a few days...glad Europeans/Australians arent getting shafted for once though.

Good thing you posted this, I had pre-ordered from GamersGate, but completely forgot about it. (You would have thought they'd email me?)
Downloading now...

Was looking forward to this, although I am probably going to wait for either a better deal than "Pay 50 bucks and get Space Siege for free!" and (preferably) a few people to comment on if the game is worth playing to the end.
Remember, KOTOR 2 was pure shiny. Then you realized that a third of the game was missing :p