Things don't look very good for Herk West. His brother has sold him into slavery to a bunch of religious fanatics, who worship the dangerous energy of the future, A2P. Luckily an ex-elite soldier, turned caravan master, frees him. And Herk goes on a killing spree through the wastelands of the future while looking for his brother. You get to play him as he blows up mutants, bandits and corporate soldiers. Though it might look like Fallout, Fallen A2P Alpha Protocol is a turn based tactics games like X-com. The story is simply an excuse to go on missions and fight battles, in between you level up your caravan and decide on what sort of upgrades you want. There is a story told by a mix of cut scenes, but you have no influence on how it plays out and it's thankfully secondary to the tactical battles.

Combat

Like all squad tactic games and SRPGs, combat is at the heart of Fallen A2P Alpha Protocol. Here is the good news; the combat works, with a few exceptions, very well. Combat works on an action point system, somewhat similar to the Fallout games. Every character starts out with ten and only gets more at a very high level. These are used for things like movement, attacking, and reloading weapons. Also like Fallout there is a large variety of weapons. Pistols, for example, are fast and only cost four action points to use. They have large clips, meaning they don't need to be reloaded often and have a decent range. In comparison to most other weapons, it's pretty easy to come across pistol ammunition, and lots of pistol ammo can be stacked in a single inventory slot. Their only big downside is they do pretty light damage for a firearm. A rocket launcher in comparison takes eight action points to fire. Its ammo is pretty tough to find early in the game. Rockets also stack only two to an inventory slot. Rockets, however, have a huge area of effect blast that does good damage and can set opponents on fire. There is also everything in between, from long range sniper rifles, to close ranged shotguns, which fire a nice cone shape blast that can hit multiple opponents. And let's not forget melee weapons, which in the right hands are the deadliest weapons in the game. Of course, getting next to an opponent is not always an easy prospect and if you fail to down an opponent, you'd better hope he's not carrying a deadly weapon himself. This is really one of the strengths of Fallen A2P Alpha Protocol. It's fun to see what all the weapons do, and deciding which of your party is equipped with what and when to use what weapon keeps combat interesting.

Like in X-Com, cover, run range, and walk and fire range or clearly shown on each unit's turn

While the weapon and action point system are very reminiscent of Fallout, the way battlefields work and the behavior of your opponents in much more like X-COM. Anyone who has played the new X-COM or Shadowrun games will instantly recognize the white lines which show how far a unit can run and how far it can move and still use the weapons its equipped with. Also what objects give what cover and what kind of cover is clearly shown when a unit is highlighted. Like X-COM, Fallen A2P also has battles over multilevel terrain, whether these are the buildings of a post-apocalyptic settlement, the ruins of a bridge, or the old shell of what was once a subway station. Opponents run for cover once you get within sight range, and those with long ranged weapons will use their alertness talent to wait to take a shot at you when you come in range.

The difficulty of combat wavers throughout. The first two battles are relatively simple, but after that you face some of the more challenging battles of the game. The reason for this is that most opponents from the third mission onward carry grenades or some sort of highly damaging weapon like a sniper rifle or machine gun. At the onset two grenade hits can, more or less, wipe out your entire group. Also one amusing quirk of the game, is that your enemies are willing to hit both themselves and their comrade with grenades if they can damage your group in the process.  Most weapons come in three or four varieties, the better of which you come across as the game progresses. However, the damage increases progress much slower than the progression of your hit points, which are increased by leveling up and getting armour. This means that after the seventh mission the battles slowly become progressively easier. About 15 hours in the game I had little fear of my opponents on normal difficulty. One positive feature of Fallen A2P Alpha Protocol is that the difficulty can be changed at the outset of every mission.

The aiming system in Fallen A2P Protocol is well thought out. You see range, hit chance, and who you can catch in a weapon's area of effect

Missions take anywhere between twenty minutes and an hour to complete. Many missions require that you reach a certain point or multiple points on a map. Some missions require you to destroy all opponents. Some of them involve protecting an NPC. The mission variety seems good for the first 10 hours of the game or so, and after that they become somewhat repetitive. Also, even though the maps feature a large variety of areas, the landscape begins to look the same after a while.                  

Caravan Management.

In between fighting, it is necessary to manage your group. This includes leveling up your characters, buying and selling equipment, recruiting new party members and upgrading your mobile caravan. While caravan management is for the most part fun, one comes to realize that in terms of balance and execution, it isn't as well implemented as combat, and unlike in X-COM, I began to lose the feeling of having lots of good options for using my resources as the game progressed.

Your characters have three sets of different abilities. One is a set of four attributes: strength, agility, perception, and vitality. Unfortunately you can only influence these for your main character Herk West, and only when you start a new game. The attributes do go up as you level up, though I honestly can't tell you if this is at random or if it follows a set pattern. I didn't really pay much attention, since I had no control over the process. Also you have a set of weapon skills. These improve when you use weapons. They seem to improve most when you score hits, but since there is no manual or in game explanation, I'm not sure exactly how they improve. Still it does encourage you to specialize your characters with certain weapons and not switch out weapons among team members at a whim. There are also skill trees, which I'll call talents and talent trees, so they don't get confused with weapon skills. The talents are organized in multiple relatively small trees and also have level requirements. While the talents themselves have a noticeable influence on gameplay and are well implemented, there aren't so many of them and the trees are small enough that you can mostly avoid what you don't want. The result of this was, especially at higher levels, that most of my group had exactly the same talents, which I kind of felt was a shame. I would have almost preferred longer more rigid talent trees, so that my characters felt different from one another.

Your caravan transports you all over the world map. Here you find stores, quest locations, and random battles

Fallen A2P Alpha protocol features a world map. Not only do quest locations appear on it, but also a few towns. In these towns you can buy and sell equipment and recruit new troopers for your caravan. While the equipment sold is random, each town has a slightly different "theme". In Merchant Town, for example, one can always find weapon upgrades, which are some of the more useful ways to spend your well-earned scrap. The right upgrade can extend the range, accuracy, or damage of a weapon. Each weapon can hold three upgrades. Your caravan initially holds four members, but you can increase this by a rather large amount, but increasing the number beyond the maximum of six who can take part in a mission is relatively senseless. Caravan members are scaled to your level, and so is their cost. That means you need 2-3 missions worth of income to hire a new caravan member. So unlike in X-COM, you really can't afford to lose anyone during a mission.

One of the last elements of the strategic overlay is your caravan, which is also your transport to and from towns and quest locations. In addition to the number of beds (which allows you to recruit new mercenaries), you can improve its speed, its fuel capacity, and its inventory capacity. Also the caravan has what's called a nutcracker, which lets you dig for goods. You can improve its effectiveness and the amount it can dig out by purchasing upgrades. You can find out where it would be good to dig by paying rumourmongers in the various town. While in theory many of these upgrades sound interesting, in practice most of them simply aren't worth the high costs you have to pay for them, and some seem almost completely worthless. For example I never even came close to running out of fuel in my over 18 hour play through, even though I never upgraded my fuel capacity. I tried out the nutcracker right after I recruited my sixth team member, some 10 hours into the game. Even after upgrading it, the equipment I was digging up at that point was largely inferior to what my team had found at that point. Also the equipment would have hardly been worth delaying recruiting additional team members for. Once I had lots of money, I did improve the inventory space and speed of my caravan, which slightly increased the comfort of travelling, but was nowhere near as impressive as upgrading my equipment.

Story and Atmosphere

Fallen A2P Protocol takes place in a future after an environmental catastrophe. There is a war between the great corporation which seems to have caused the catastrophe, Genkorp and a mysterious society called Arkane. The world is also full of mutants, bandits, and rabid dogs. Herk and his cunning brother get caught up in this, and we get to hear the story in cut scenes and also by reading various digital recordings at some locations.

The premise for the story isn't bad, even if its typical post-apocalyptic fare, but unfortunately its implementation leaves something to be desired. The developer, Red Katana decided to go with voice actors, and like in a lot of indie games, the voice acting runs the gambit from decent to poor. Unfortunately even the decent voice actors aren't given anything to work with. The writing in Fallen A2P Protocol is pretty cringe worthy. While the writing in X-COM isn't anything to write home about, it is at least functional and the actors are able to bring it across well. In Fallen A2P Protocol on the other hand, the writers try to be edgy while at the same time humorous, and aren't able to pull it off. I think writing humour is an extremely difficult task, and only a talented writer can bring it across so it doesn't seems forced, like it does here. In a way the scenes remind me of the kind of second rate budget sci-fi and action films that one can only see around three in the morning on TV.  Luckily the cut scenes are pretty short, but I really think it's a pity that the rather limited funds of this game were invested in voice acting, rather than say in a quality author.

The cutscenes often try to be amusing, but just don't pull it off

The graphics and animations of Fallen A2P Protocol won't be winning any awards either. That is less of a problem for me personally, as they don't get in the way of gameplay. The music is quite decent. The locations and characters are what one would expect out of this kind of game. Like in Fallout of Mad Max we are greeted with desert like wastelands and the ruins of old civilizations as well as new settlements pieced together from old scrap.

The Save System

I'm going to come right out and say that I'm a huge proponent of being able to save a game anywhere in computer games. I'm also okay with a checkpoint system, if it saves regularly, but I hate having to replay large chunks of the same material. I know from the various Kickstarter and early access games that I've purchased that there are people with very different opinions, who are against "save scumming" and all for "consequences for failure." There have been games built around not being able to save during missions. For example, I had a friend who loved the classic game Syndicate. I personally could never get into playing through a whole mission again and again because of messing up near the end.

In Fallout A2P Protocol you can only save between the twenty minute and one hour long missions. I actually played through the game eighteen hours, and probably would have finished it if it weren't for the save system. I replayed a few missions twice, and even one three times, because I had to, but still don't like the system. Not liking the system doesn't have to do with combat difficulty alone. In fact, I'll give the two examples of not being able to successfully finish a mission that frustrated me the most and in both of the missions I eliminated every opponent without losing any of my heroes in combat. One mission ended because it took me a while to figure out the non-intuitive UI Unlike in most games, you can't pick up loot or manipulate objects just by clicking on them. Rather once you are next to them and extra icon appears in the UI (which is small and I didn't notice it for multiple missions). You can also press a key to get stuff. But of course the game doesn't tell you this. When I started, there was no tutorial, and even the current tutorial, which consists of some decent videos, isn't something you can call up in the middle of a mission. Anyways, at the end of one mission I had to disarm a bomb. After a long day at work I was tired and didn't managed to think about looking under the key bindings and ended up blowing myself up. In my last mission, I had to accompany the NPC Scarlet out of a subway and encountered my only bug of the game, which had Scarlet getting stuck in a stairway at the end of the mission. These were both 45+ minute missions and I really resented having to play them over.

Because ammunition is limited, and weapons vary quite a bit in their stats, its good to carry a large number of them

I will say though that I played missions somewhat differently than I would have if I knew I could save whenever I wanted to. For example, I made heavy use of my sniper rifles if I detected an opponent with shorter ranged weapons and I was very liberal with my grenades and rockets, since I knew that I'd get more ammo and explosives if I could prevent my opponents from being able to use theirs.

Conclusion

For me Fallen A2P Protocol is a turn based tactics game. It is as much an RPG as something like X-COM or Jagged Alliance. The most important aspect of these kinds of games is the combat, and that is actually quite enjoyable. The rest of the game is decent to lacking. The game has some fine strategic elements, though these are nowhere near as well developed as the tactical combat. There are good ideas in the strategic game, but many options seemed useless to me, because of the way they were implemented. They were either not economically viable or the game mechanics didn't make them useful enough. The low points of Fallen A2P Protocol are its outdated graphics and its poorly written story. Anyone hoping for another Fallout with all of its wonderful gameplay options and ways to solve quests should not expect anything like this from Fallen A2P Protocol. At most the combat and setting have some parallels to the classic RPG. Sadly I personally couldn't recommend this game to myself, because of the save system, but if you don't find that problematic, and don't mind indie graphics or need a good story, then you can find a pretty good tactical combat game in Fallen A2P Alpha Protocol.