Alien: Rogue Incursion is coming to VR on PC and PSVR2, with a Meta Quest launch a few months from now. I got to play the title early on PC and found a nearly brilliant homage to the franchise. You are Zula, who alongside your companion David-One, is answering a distress signal. Things go bad, Xenomorphs are everywhere, and you’re in a fight to survive. Rogue Incursion is gorgeous, full of great ideas, and hamstrung by a few baffling design choices. Also, this release is a surprise “part one” which was nowhere in the marketing beats that I could find. Let us get into the heart of this review.
The Premise
You’ll begin the game on a ship heading for a distress signal. You are Zula, an ex-space marine who absconded from her duties to fight the Xenomorph menace. She is joined by David-One, a synth, thankfully a helpful one. Your arrival at a secret facility is met with much gnashing of teeth, you crash, and the ‘fun’ begins.
Alien: Rogue Incursion is a mix of the dread of the first movie with the action of the second. The latter part is where the game falters. Fighting Xenomorphs is never fun. In fact, on any difficulty outside of Story, it’s downright unpleasant. Not in the ‘this is terrifying’ way, but in an ‘oh god… not again’ variety. Zula and David-One are handy, able to use guns and tools with aplomb, to break into various rooms and dispatch the Alien threat with relative ease.
This game being a part one was a surprise. It popped up as I started the game, and I immediately paused things and hit up Google. I couldn’t find this “part one” being a known quantity anywhere. As the title is $40 and just called “Alien: Rogue Incursion” I guess this is a soft launch? I did not see a “buy part one” or “buy part two” on either the PlayStation or Steam store, it’s just one title.
Nearly Excellent VR
Alien: Rogue Incursion is a fully immersive virtual reality experience. Built from the ground up to only work on the platform it controls and looks fantastic. As Zula, you will reach to various parts of your body to grab your weapons, motion detector, grenades, and more. The control scheme is great, with a press of a button bringing up hovering items like your datapad and plasma torch whenever you need them.
It’s a whole-body type of game, you’re not just floating hands here. Where it fell apart for me was the amount of combat you are forced into. Xenomorphs are always present, spawning no matter what every 1 to 2 minutes. To save the game, there are no checkpoints, you must find a panic room and use the station there. It’s fun to put your tablet into things and then use a joystick to access them. What isn’t fun is how often I’d be standing in a panic room, making no noise, and have an Alien rush me.
Fight, Fight, Fight
A single attack, even in story mode, takes most of your health. Ammo and healing stims are limited and often I found myself stuck in situations where I simply couldn’t kill everything that kept spawning. Adding on to this drudgery was how boring the Aliens are to fight. They mostly crawl around and then leap on you from a mile away. There is a dash if you click on the left stick but I’d still get hit every time I tried to use it. You have three main weapons, a powerful handgun, a classic pulse rifle, and a pump action shotgun. Each is, purposefully, a pain to reload. If the title was more horror-focused this would be a fun way to ramp up the tension. Instead, it’s just annoying as hell when you’re stuck fighting so often.
Overall the immersive VR side of things is amazing but the combat is severely lacking in comparison to how often it is forced upon you. There is a mix of great and misguided ideas that kept me from ever having fun once I was more than a few minutes into the game. I wasn’t scared of Xenomorphs, I would simply groan that I couldn’t explore this vast and beautiful facility without them constantly trying to jump-scare me. The game is punishing in the worst ways. Without having checkpoints it means you have to constantly run back to panic rooms every time you get something done. It killed the thought of trying any exploration when you add in how often new Aliens will spawn.
Frigid Splendor
The facility where the game takes place looks fantastic. This is one of the best-looking VR titles I’ve ever played. It might not have the object density of something like Half-Life: Alyx, but few things ever could. This game feels like you are living in the Alien universe, which is a terrifyingly delightful thought. The graphical prowess is matched by the sound effects, all pulled straight from the source material when possible.
The voice acting is OK. It’s rarely bad and generally good enough. The story, without going into any spoilers, does a solid job of investing you in the location and your fight through it. As this is part one I am curious to see where part two goes, though without some Xenomorph spawn-rate changes I don’t know that I will bother.
The music is good when it kicks in, which is far too often. Like I said, every minute or two you have a fresh Xenomorph or two loading in and they will find you, setting off the musical score. I didn’t have any major bugs once I got everything sorted technically. Playing on a Meta Quest 3 I had tried using Virtual Desktop at first but it didn’t work well. Once I got the runtime to use Meta’s solution and used the Quest Link it was technically excellent.
Wrapping Things Up
I like every part of Alien: Rogue Incursion except for the most important one, the combat. It looks amazing, sounds great, and has a solid story. I am sad to say that I found said combat, and how often it was forced upon me, to make the game tough to recommend at launch. Not only that, but this is a ‘surprise’ Part One. At $40 I hope that the full package, many patches later, can find the brilliance that’s hidden underneath this game’s faults.
Update: It seems like this purchase only nets you “Part One”. $40 for 5-7 hours of half a story isn’t that unheard of. What is is not telling anyone it’s “part one” until the game has already launched. Be warned before purchasing this anywhere, you’re not getting the full story and you’ll need to buy it again to see things through.
Alien: Rogue Incursion - Part One (VR)
Played on
PC (Steam)
PROS
- Looks amazing
- Controls well
- Solid Audio
CONS
- Constant, boring, infuriating combat
- No checkpoints, only save stations
- Simply is not fun until these issues are fixed
