Alien: Rogue Incursion review for SteamVR, PS VR2

Alien: Rogue Incursion comes from developer Survios: a developer that has, over the last few years, primarily focused on making VR games for big names. Westworld, Creed, The Walking Dead. This time, they’re once again stepping into the shoes of taking on one of the big names and bringing it to you as a VR experience: Alien. Alien is a much loved franchise and it’s proven in the past to be a franchise that either generates the best of horror games or the worst. Alien: Colonial Marine showed us just how bad things could get, and Alien: Isolation showed us that actually, this thing can work if done right. With all the benefits of VR, a good, immersive, and most importantly, terrifying Alien game is something that could be so, so good. So did it pay off to bring it into VR? Well, I’d say… yes and no.

With Alien: Rogue Incursion, Survios did a lot of good. I really do mean that- the game is extremely well designed, faithful to the franchise, and the environments are nice. I do have some problems with it, though, and a lot of them have less to do with the actual game than it does with the VR handling. I’m just going to get right into knocking out the negatives because there aren’t many, but they are notable to me. I have played A LOT of VR since I got my Vive back in 2016 and have come to be quite familiar with the many quirks and oddities the platform generates as different developers try to piece their way through immersion when someone has full control of their character’s hands.

First of all, and by far the most notable: the way your digital body handles. Everything is given a weird weight to it that makes things feel almost uncanny. The biggest example of this has to be the way the head movements handle. I noticed very quickly that something was just… not right when turning my head. It’s almost like there’s an inertia to the action. Swing your head quickly to look at a loud noise, and you’ll notice your view is slightly behind where it should be, and then when you stop, it catches up a moment later. It seems to be tied to the way the game handles the fact that you’ve got a full character model, and so it wants to animate that at a realistic speed by making it follow your head direction, but sometimes I’m not turning my body, I just want to look in a different direction. I got used to this, but if you are motion sickness prone or someone who isn’t seasoned with VR, I cannot say I’d recommend playing this game. It’s really disorienting not to have your vision moving 1:1 with your head turning.

I only had a few little quirks with the game to complain about, but, again, since this is a VR game, I do feel it’s important to focus on VR handling first and foremost. One is the way that you have to open the menu when you’re playing with an Index. The pause button is pressing in on the touchpad on both controllers simultaneously. I’ve never experienced another game using the touchpads for menus and I have to say, it took minutes of experimenting to even figure out how to open the pause menu. It’s not really a thing games ever use outside of a handful of interactions, so I didn’t even try to use it until all else failed me. The only other thing of any real note is the default handling of the Pulse Rifle. You can change this, I learned, after it messed with me enough. By default, Alien: Rogue Incursion locks the rifle butt to your shoulder and aligns the sights perfectly with your right eye when you hold it anywhere near your chest. It’s a nice accessibility feature for those less keen on aiming quickly, but I thought it felt a bit unnatural. Luckily, as I mentioned, this can be disabled entirely in the settings accessibility menu.

Aside from those quirks though, Alien Isolation really is genuinely well designed. The environments look great, the gunplay feels punchy, and the Alien lore with story writing is all top notch. I do want to note that it is not much on the scary side, and might even dare say that I think the xenomorphs come a bit too frequently to really be even mildly frightening. I think I had 50 xenomorph kills in my first two hours of game time. I personally don’t have a problem with this and enjoy the action, but it definitely feels more action, less horror. Fortunately, though, as I mentioned, the gunplay feels excellent.

The environment in Rogue Incursion is classic Alien. Metallic hallways full of vents that could explode out a xenomorph at any moment and dark corridors galore. The visuals look very sleek in the game, and I never had any issues with visibility. Everything looks, feels, and behaves as you’d want them to in a VR experience. Everything’s interactive, and you’ll find yourself opening every locker, crate, and flipping every box that comes into your sight just to see what you can discover. In my experience, it’s always another healing stim you can’t take because you’re full, but the experience was worth the dig.

You’re deployed at the beginning with two weapons. If you’ve watched even a minute of any Alien movie, you already know what one is- of course, you’re getting a pulse rifle. You are also armed with a six-shot revolver, which requires you to reload it one round at a time. You’ll feel that pain in the middle of a fight, but it’s fun if you get quick with it. Both guns feel very powerful in their own right, and I had a hard time choosing which I preferred, but I felt way cooler with the revolver. Ammo is plentiful on the normal difficulty, but just sparse enough that you can’t just waste time screwing around without putting yourself in a bind. Everything feels pretty balanced, and some of the later options feel just as good, but I won’t spoil any of those.

I found the story they’re telling to be interesting. I tend to keep my reviews spoiler free unless I think it important to say something specific, so I’ll just keep it simple by saying I enjoyed the storyline. It’s well crafted and woven into the universe well. You start out being called to a planet with a distress beacon before crashing, and… you guessed it: turns out the xenomorphs killed everyone! It’s just kind of the way the stories for this series have to go, but it still leaves enough room for a good overarching story. Plenty of text and audio logs also litter the levels to really flesh everything out.

All in all, I recommend Alien: Rogue Incursion, but… not if you’re a newbie to VR or are prone to motion sickness. Play a few other games first to get worked up to this one, and then you can enjoy it with the rest of us. You won’t regret picking the game up if you’re an Alien fan.

Note: Survios provided us with a Alien: Rogue Incursion code for review purposes.