10 Video Games That Were One Critical Flaw Away From Greatness

6. Alpha Protocol

Critical Flaw: The general lack of polish. If you were to ask anyone how a game that twinned the Bourne movies with Mass Effect would turn out, chances are they'd envision Alpha Protocol, which by all accounts should've been one hell of an experience. Here you had prolific RPG-developer Obsidian taking everything we loved about RPGs - customisation, perks, dialogue choices - and bringing it to life by funnelling it through the world of super-spies, letting you pick and choose missions, form alliances with informants and generally choose if you wanted to be a headshot-popping suave-talking Bond, or a close-quarters neck-snapping Jason Bourne. Where did it fall down though? In the execution. Dialogue was spotty at best, character models and environments looked remarkably last-generation, and the overall feeling of controlling your character on-mission was like some cumbersome PC-to-console port. Those who stuck with it discovered a fantastic system of interlocking narratives and a rewarding progression-system, but that was at the cost of having to put up with a lot of bugs along the way that play-testing would've easily solved.