Alien: Rogue Incursion – Part One Review (PSVR2) – A good game stemming from the Alien franchise is, unfortunately, far more rare than it should be.
Of course there’s Alien: Isolation, which borrowed more from the original film than its sequels, emphasizing slower pacing while matching you against just one Xenomorph. It remains an excellent horror game to play and a must-play for fans of the film franchise.
Every other game I’ve seen based on the franchise (like Aliens: Fireteam Elite) tries to capture what’s probably the more obvious route for a video game – the bombastic action sequences of Aliens and the intense direct fights with Xenomorphs to really make you feel like you’re fighting for your life.
Alien: Rogue Incursion – Part One tries to draw a line down the middle of those two options, without pulling you away from the action in terms of your POV, like Aliens: Dark Descent.
At times it succeeds in being both things – an action-packed shooter where you’re letting bullets fly and dropping X-Rays (Xenomorphs) even faster, and moments later you’re walking slowly down a dilapidated hallway, flashlight on, motion detector in one hand, revolver in the other. Hissing sounds that you can’t quite figure out if they’re an X-Ray, or a burst pipe letting out steam.
Unfortunately that experience is often cut by a game that is buggy in the wrong ways for an Alien game, and a narrative that’s at its most interesting when focused anywhere beyond the main characters, and takes a long time to get going.
Alien: Rogue Incursion – Part One Review (PSVR2) – Horror Jank
Stay Alert, Stay Alive
The main reason I say there’s a lot to love here for horror fans and for Alien fans is: the vibes are crisp. They are magnificent. It feels so much like you’re in an Alien story, and that you’re being hunted by something so dangerous and terrifying when you first step foot on Purdan.
Even if you’re jumping into this as the best shot in VR and you’re running and gunning with ease – you never really feel powerful when X-Rays are closing in on you one-by-one.
Though the combat has its problems (more on that later), the Xenomorphs are still an overwhelming visage that feel completely terrifying in a new way, thanks to it being in VR.
It’s clear that a lot of time was spent making sure they all look and sound the part, even if their frantic movements and scripted patterns break the immersion of it all.
But to be fair, the jank doesn’t become clear until they’re right in front of you – when you see/hear a Xenomorph coming, watching them crawl through the vents or on the ceiling, or leap across great distances to jump towards you, that all looks/sounds smooth and it’s all the more terrifying for it. Especially if you haven’t been able to spot them, but you can hear them. A big kudos for the sound design team really nailing the hiss and screeches Xenomorphs let out.
It all really adds to the feeling that you are the prey in every scenario, and it’s up to you to find a way to survive.
Of course having a shotgun/pulse rifle/revolver helps, so you’re not defenseless – but reloading any of your weapons is not a quick ordeal. If you have to reload and can’t quickly swap to another weapon, you’re probably dead.
The high-stakes combat heightens the atmosphere, since you’re constantly on alert for any footsteps or noises, looking up through the broken ceiling or shining your flashlight in the crawl spaces to try and see one of them coming.
All together it brings the feeling of being in the universe of the Alien franchise home in a very strong way. Though none stronger than a section where you land in the Xenomorph Nest, which you unfortunately only visit twice. It was easily the most terrifying section, and each time it’s over too quickly.
But even more unfortunate is the other parts of Rogue Incursion that don’t hit as hard, and are often pulling you out of your own immersion.
The Wrong Kind Of Bugs
Perhaps not as nicely as Alien: Isolation, but Rogue Incursion does a good job of capturing the ‘Alien’ universe. It’s easy to let yourself be immersed in that. It’s also easy, and a constant, that something will pull you out of that.
Not a progression-blocking bug, (though I know some people have experienced that, I’ve just been lucky) but countless immersion breaking bugs that do negatively impact my experience.
Audio bugs like things where combat music would play for far, far longer after an encounter was complete, blaring as I moved through objectives. It would stop after I had found a save point and been able to quit back to the main menu, but this also happened enough times that I began to expect it, and was always relieved if the music died out as it was meant to.
The worst variant of this impacted my PS VR2 headset, where the haptics on the headset kept rumbling long after my encounter with a face-hugger had ended. Thankfully this only happened once, but that’s probably more due to the fact that I only had a face-hugger jump on my face one time in combat, and stopped opening the containers that I recognized probably had face-huggers in them. Their resources be damned, the less face-huggers I run into, the better.
Visual bugs were also a constant, with assets popping into a scenes around a lot of corners and even some constant texture issues when I was getting a closer look at environmental objects. Speaking of the objects, one thing I will say that did add to the immersion is the fact that you find a huge chunk of resources like ammo and health stims not just in easily-identifiable places like lockers, but in boxes that, in plenty of other games, look like non-interactive parts of the environment.
This extended from the boxes to hats, hammers, helmets, glasses – pretty much anything you see that you think you ought to be able to pick up, you can. There’s less nailed down to the floor in Rogue Incursion, and the fact in that digging through these parts of it you’ll find resources makes the journey on Purdan feel that much more real.
It’s too bad that picking any of these things up is a crap-shoot between interacting with it as you’d expect, or you get to watch your hand spin around like a top.
This is what I mean by immersion-breaking. One minute, I’m looking around a room for any box or anything I can dig through for ammo I desperately need, tense as I try to be quick and quiet so I’m ready incase a Xenomorph attacks. And then I find the ammo, but I have to turn a cardboard box over and when I do that, the box begins to freak out and the mag goes flying across the room.
Now I have to hope the mag didn’t fall through the floor, otherwise my pulse rifle is down to 12 bullets. Sure, there’s more ammo to find, but that whole sequence is just one example of the minor bugs you face all the time in Rogue Incursion.
It got to the point where I began to wonder, ‘If this wasn’t an Alien game, and I wasn’t an Alien fan, would I just not like this game at all?’ but I concluded the answer was no, thanks to how it has solid horror and gameplay elements that would be good even if you swapped the Xenomorphs for something else in a brand new IP.
The combat and exploration however, is a bit of a different story.
The Perfect Organism, But Not The Perfect Hunter
I already mentioned that the combat is ‘high-stakes,’ because when you do see a Xenomorph right in front of you, poised to attack, it’ll take you down if you’re not fast enough, and you’ll be sent back to your last checkpoint, which is usually just the last time you saved the game. And that can sometimes mean a lot of re-treading the same paths.
But the combat is absolutely not challenging, and I don’t believe this is a situation where you could get a better combat experience by bumping the difficulty to the max. All I can see that doing is throwing more Xenomorphs at you that do more damage, and maybe take an extra bullet to kill.
Essentially the big issue with the combat is that the Xenomorphs just close in on you, mostly by walking right to you. Two shotgun shells to their long dome’s puts them down at close range, while a number of well-placed pulse rifle shots take them down without burning through half of your magazine.
If you’re a really good shot, then two headshots with the revolver does the trick, and if there’s anything explosive nearby, shooting that gets you a kill automatically.
Sometimes – Xenomorphs will try to get behind you, but that’s a moot point when you see them crawling along the ceiling, clipping in and out of the vents and then crawling back into the hallway through the wall, and in all that time you just have your weapon aimed and ready.
At its best, the combat is you trying to stay alert of your surroundings and react fast enough when a Xenomorph has sneaked up on you and attacked you by surprise. Those are the moments when I’m really locked in, and along with the game’s crisp vibes and atmosphere, it works as something that gets your blood pumping as fast as your shotgun.
However the vast majority of a time you’ll know a Xenomorph is coming, as there’s always a bright high-toned audio cue that strikes with each new Xenomorph entering the area. You’ll hear it, and then seconds later or even simultaneously you’ll hear footsteps, and can begin to discern where they’re coming from.
And then you take them down relatively simply. There’s no push-and-pull with the combat, no back-and-forth. You can’t stop or interrupt a Xenomorph attacking you no more than they can stop you from filling their heads with shells by standing right in front of you. You either shoot fast enough, or you die.
The ‘kill or be killed’ and no-room-for-error of that all perhaps sounds more enticing than it is, but trust me when I tell you, in large part because the Xenomorphs are 90% of the time just running at you, and you fight so many, it becomes boring by the end of the game. Maybe if there was a way to fight back even with a Xenomorph trying to pin you down, just to shake up the combat, that could help make encounters feel a tad different from one another.
I did appreciate the motion-activated bombs you can toss and place in a room, especially when you know you’re about to be swarmed when activating a part of the station that causes a loud noise. At least that encouraged me to think differently about those situations.
Unfortunately I can’t help but feel disappointed by how there was really no evolution of the gameplay. Not in the combat, and not even in getting around the station.
Too Much Noise
While I was happy to not have to deal with progression-blocking bugs like I know some players have encountered, I had a different progression-stunting issue. I got lost.
This happened towards the end of the game – which made it even more frustrating – but while some of this issue is definitely just user error, I don’t think I can be blamed wholly when the map you use to navigate the station is awful, and actively unhelpful, when you’re trying to discern where to go.
By the end of the game it is scattered with white dots, when zoomed all the way out, and they’ll stay dots until you zoom all the way in. None of those dots are objective markers though, they’re telling you that there’s a terminal, or a door, or a junction box.
Objectives or key items appear in different shades of very similarly looking orange, and finding your way to them often means having to hold the map in one hand while you walk around. That’s not the part that’s bad – the part that’s bad is the fact that it’s still difficult to find your way around.
Having to zoom all the way in to try and discern what each dot is, and then zoom all the way out to get a lay of the land, and then carry your map around but drop it every two minutes because even if you crouch, and slowly walk forward, X-Rays will descend upon you every few minutes without fail.
Add on all the issues with combat and the Xenomorph’s AI I’ve already mentioned, and the combat you face on top of combating an unhelpful map, and even just getting from one point to the next can feel tedious. Especially if I had the misfortune of dying halfway to the next objective and save point room, since there’s virtually no checkpointing for most of the game beyond manual saves at specific locations.
It encouraged me to avoid looking for junction boxes or head down paths I previously couldn’t use but were now accessible to me, thanks to newly acquired tools. The tragedy is that those actually felt great to use, and I didn’t mind the electrical puzzles I did. Traversal was that annoying by the end that I didn’t want to risk getting lost further.
I do have to credit the fact that if you pay attention to the different door signs, you can begin to figure out your own way around without needing the map, which is easier in the earlier hours, when you’re still unlocking the whole station, and the path is more direct with little-to-no backtracking.
It’s another great immersive element that I appreciated, which made my late-game issues all the more frustrating, with the smoothness I felt from one objective to the next, gone.
All I’m saying is that a legend might’ve been helpful.
Part One? Or Part Half?
The final key point of Rogue Incursion I’ve yet to talk about is the story. I’ll begin by saying I’m not familiar with Zula, who I recently learned is an existing character from an Alien comic book series, Aliens: Defiance, Aliens: Rescue and Aliens: Resistance.
So this was my first real introduction to her character, an ex-Colonial Marine who’s seen her fair share of X-Rays already, and is no stranger to them when you first put one down.
Then there’s also Davis, her synthetic companion, who is fiercely loyal to Zula, aiding her on this journey to save someone she owes a life debt to, Ben Carver.
It’s a fair enough premise for why anyone would fly to a backwater planet in a sci-fi series, but I struggled to connect with their plight. I won’t spoil things, but after an early point in the story, I questioned why I should be invested in either of them. Their characters just lacked an immediate connection point for me, and it was difficult for me to care about them most of the journey.
What was more interesting was all the emails written to and from the employees at the station on Purdan. I loved reading those, and wanted to learn more about what the station was doing. The audio logs scattered throughout were a big highlight in the narrative as well.
My consolation is the fact that there will be a Part Two, enough if developer Survios did fumble the announcement of it. That fumbling is really the only thing that is making players curious as to whether or not Rogue Incursion was actually cut in half.
The way Survios puts it, Part Two came about as naturally as any other sequel, and I don’t doubt that, I just hope it elevates the foundation that has been laid in Part One. By the end of it I did find myself liking Zula and Davis, even if they still weren’t as interesting as what I was reading, and I did like the cliffhanger it leaves you on.
I feel like Part Two has the potential to be the much-better-sequel to Part One’s sometimes-entertaining, mostly flawed start.
Not Exactly The Perfect Alien Game
Right when I started playing Rogue Incursion, I saw there was a lot that an Alien fan like myself could love. The data pad you carry with you that acts as your map, inventory, intel and objective tracker, and how you interact with it, and how you use every terminal felt like it walked the right line of retro-futurism that’s a staple in the series.
Same goes for how you select your tools, grabbing holograms of them out of the air, and all the things you use them for, like cutting through welded doors or re-routing power at multiple junctions.
The look of the station, even with it not being a Weyland-Yutani operation, felt exactly in-universe. And especially in the early hours of the game, when you’re just getting used to fighting off Xenomorphs, they’re terrifying every time you face them.
I also feel like I need to stress how cool the Xenomorph Nest sections are, compared to how much more tense they feel than the rest of the game, and the station’s mostly same-y look.
All together, Alien: Rogue Incursion is a game that can really sing at times, but those moments are fewer and farther between than I would’ve liked. I hope Part Two’s chorus is even stronger.
Alien: Rogue Incursion is now available on PS5 and PS VR2.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.