Alien: Rogue Incursion VR

I wanted to love this game. The atmosphere is fantastic. The environments look great, the audio is excellent, and it absolutely captures the feeling of exploring a secret Weyland-Yutani research facility on an alien planet. Everything about the presentation screams Alien. Then you have to interact with it. Alien: Rogue Incursion is one of the most frustrating VR games I have played, not because of difficulty, but because it consistently fights the player. It gets so many of the fundamentals of VR wrong that it is hard to believe this was made after more than a decade of VR design lessons. The biggest failure is that it completely misunderstands what makes VR immersive. Immersion is not created by making interactions rigid, awkward, or unnecessarily complicated. Immersion comes from making the player forget they are holding controllers. Games like Half-Life: Alyx, Contractors, and Into the Radius proved this years ago. Alien: Rogue Incursion ignores those lessons. The pulse rifle is a constant battle. Instead of naturally shouldering and aiming it, the game forces you into a narrow, rigid aiming position that never feels intuitive. You are not aiming a weapon. You are trying to satisfy an invisible checklist before the game decides you are allowed to aim properly. The body system actively works against the player. Looking down often causes your own body to block your equipment belt, forcing you to crane your neck into awkward positions just to see items that should always be visible. It is baffling that this made it into the final game. Then there is the healing system, which may be one of the worst VR interaction decisions I have seen in years. The health injector is permanently mounted on the opposite arm from your dominant hand. That means if you are holding your weapon and take damage, you cannot simply heal yourself. You are forced to put your weapon away, reach across your body, grab the injector, use it, and then immediately re-equip your weapon again. During combat. Why? What problem was this solving? How did nobody stop and ask whether forcing players to disarm themselves every single time they need to heal was actually fun? The flashlight system is another example of poorly thought-out VR ergonomics. Turning on your head-mounted light results in it being angled downward, meaning you have to tilt your head up just to see properly. Instead of improving visibility, it actively makes you fight your own head position. The interactions only get worse from there. Objects frequently feel unresponsive, grabbing is inconsistent, and the physics are a complete mess. Early in the game I simply set my rifle down so I could switch my handedness. When I picked it back up, it clipped into a shelf, blasted the magazines across the room, and one disappeared entirely. That was not an immersive gameplay moment. It was a physics bug that wasted my time. Every interaction feels like it has just enough friction to constantly remind you that you are playing a game. Nothing feels natural. Nothing feels polished. Nothing feels like it respects the player's instincts. That is the real tragedy, because almost everything outside of the VR interaction design is excellent. The environments are beautiful. The sound design is incredible. The atmosphere is exactly what an Alien game should be. The VR is what lets it down. Instead of making me feel like I was surviving inside a Weyland-Yutani facility, the game constantly reminded me I was wrestling with awkward mechanics. Every forced aiming position, every clumsy interaction, every obstructed inventory check, every poorly aligned flashlight, and every bizarre gameplay decision chipped away at the immersion until I stopped thinking about xenomorphs and started thinking about the controls. If you want to experience this game, play the flat-screen version instead. The world and atmosphere are strong enough to stand on their own, but the VR implementation actively gets in the way of them. Alien: Rogue Incursion looks like a great VR game. It just does not play like one.

I've wanted a good Aliens game for a long, long time. Alien Isolation scratches the original movie itch extremely well, but the closest we've gotten to a good Aliens game is AvP 2, which is over 20 years old at this point. I grabbed this game on sale for around $12 and it has been so worth it. Rogue Incursion nails the aesthetic and atmosphere of the universe. The industrial, CRT futurism is so great to look at in true first person, and it's a treat to explore the game's dark, snow covered base. The weapons are modeled well and CAN have some good impact (bit of an asterisk, I highly recommend downloading a mod from Nexus that ups Pulse Rifle and shotgun damage if you plan on playing on hard or insane). The Aliens are modeled very well and their AI is more I than A. They climb on walls, leap across surfaces, ambush you from multiple directions, sometimes lie in ambush in vents, and torment you with their thumping footsteps and hisses. It's extremely unsettling in the best way possible, and then you get to purge them! I also really appreciate how their acid blood deforms terrain and surfaces, very cool. The story is decent so far, I am 4 hours in. The game has a semi openness/Metroidvania setup where you open up more and more areas as the game unfolds. Enemies respawn and hunt dynamically, and I've had enough ammo to keep up so far. Whether that's due to the mod I mentioned or good balancing, I don't know for certain. I really do recommend that mod as enemies felt spongey on hard mode without it. My gripes with the game are fair, and concern interactivity. It's very easy to grab the wrong parts of objects or have things you don't want to grab suddenly magnetize to your hand, while an Alien is munching your head. I've also done a speed reload in the middle of combat and had to charge the weapon twice because the game didn't register me pulling the bolt the first time. I've had that same problem happen during practice reloads in safe rooms, so I know it isn't entirely operator error. These annoyances add up and I can see why the game has mixed reviews, though I think the positives far outweigh those irritations. I want to end this ramble on an experience I had tonight while playing. I was climbing through some vents in the station's chow hall when I heard a thudding sound from somewhere beyond my line of sight. I came to a T intersection in the section of vent I was in, and saw that one direction led to a sealed storage compartment. There was a fuse box nearby which I could use a special tool to repair, and so I set my motion tracker down next to me and began my repair. My tracker read movement 9 meters away from the direction of the thudding. As I worked, additional movement signatures appeared and I heard hissing from below me. I had been in the vent reloading and resting for a few minutes so I assumed Aliens couldn't get up to where I was. I solved the fuse box, unlocked the storage room, and collected a proximity mine and some ammo. I started going down the other side of that T intersection and heard something racing down the vent from behind me. I whipped around and an alien rounded the T junction and was clawing its way right at me, I unloaded 4 or 5 shotgun blasts in a panic, as another signature approached me from the direction I had been going in, so I rolled to my side and unloaded my last 3 shots into it, completely emptying my shotgun as I dropped that weapon and drew my revolved. Then the only sound left was the faint thudding ahead of me. What a moment, I'll never forget how that felt!

I absolutely love the Alien franchise, especially the Alien and Aliens movies. A few months ago I played Aliens: Dark Descent, and I have to say, it was an absolute blast! It kept me on my toes the whole time and was a great homage to the Aliens movie and its theme. But this...? After 3.5 hours of playing, I can say that the game is pretty boring. I am baffled by the assertion by other Steam Reviews that this game is thrilling or engaging at all? The movement is clunky, graphics are only just acceptable, the gunplay is absolutely terrible, the atmosphere is basic, awful AI, and the sound design (guns, atmosphere) is also pretty lacking. And boy, are the fights against the Xenos boring... (because of the combination of all things I mentioned before - btw dead bodies just magically disappear, have no damage model or gore). Oh and of course there is no stealth or sneaking by Aliens. Not that you could get some (scary) atmosphere or something... ;) The Steam Achievements stats show this: 17% of players dropped out during the tutorial, only 28% got the second story achievement (~3h later) and only 1 in 10 actually finished the game - and I'm not surprised. Let's not even talk about stuff like changing the title of the game "last minute" before release to "Part 1". Survios Studios pulled a truly cheap one with that. And I'm pretty sure that only having static save points didn't help the game at all - I LOVE BEING FORCED TO PLAY UNTIL A SAVE POINT, REMINDS ME OF CONSOLE GAMING IN THE 90s/early 2000s! YAY! So yeah, the game isn't scary, the action and shooting is really bad (not good for a supposed scary action shooter) and Part 2 will never come. Let's see if my love for the Alien franchise can get me to finish this... only buy discounted and if you're truly DESPERATE for a VR game and then only if you really have exhausted all other options (like the VR Mod for Aliens Isolation). Edit: Ah, such an atrocity that my brain tried to delete the thought of it. An in-game body that you can't turn off (it literally blocks your view when you look down), terrible item/gun placement on the body (especially the revolver, which you will accidentally grab while trying to teleport pick something up off the ground), and generally pretty terrible interactive items (boxes, etc.) with mediocre physics.

Crawling through a vent...... radar is quiet, no movement...... palms are getting sweaty and hairs are standing up..... i turn around, nothing behind me..... I keep going...... i hear hissing from behind me ear...... i turn around....... alien staring and hissing at me....... lunges forward at high speed....... I pull the trigger out of panic and start shooting everything and anything "AAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!"..... dead alien, and about to have a heart attack...... takes off VR headset...... "F*** that s**t!!"........ looks at cat pics and videos.......puts on the VR headset...... "Let's hunt some bugs!!!"

pretty nice it wasnt for me tho

Excellent vr game, the controls are intuitive, the usage of tools work the way you expect them to, and all the items have weight to them. You can slam a lever with your motion detector to open or close a door, you can grab your gun with your offhand and it'll automatically hold the handle instead of the grip, ready for you to quickly switch to the next weapon. The grenades have a physical component to arming them. You can either use a button, your other hand or flick the cylinder of the revolver back after you've reloaded it. (And it's real physics, you can't just move your hand sideways, you have to give it proper momentum to move the cylinder around and into it's position) You can put down your active motion tracker and it'll still keep working, letting you set up a sound trap while you search a room. (Also a xeno standing still won't set off the alarm) The Xenomorphs are both durable and weak, badly placed shots will fail to kill them, but a well placed burst will take them down no problem. They move beautifully through the map, going from vents to the walls or even running directly at you. They come out if you're loud, but you can also evade them. They're also stealthy enough that the motion tracker is very necessary to know they're close (even during combat they can be frightfully silent, coming up beind you while you're busy with something else) Try playing with idle motion tracker sounds set to off. This game is what all other vr games should strive to be, it's as intuitive and deep as you would hope. It uses all the best parts of virtual reality to create an amazing experience. It also has quite a lot of accessibility settings, vignettes, aim stabilization, eye aim selection, screen recording settings. The only complaint i agree with is that it can run poorly, but I've not personally had that issue. So please buy it, it's a vr must-have!

waiting for part 2

Game looks really good. on quest 3, I have it set at the nvidia control panel 72fps everything ultra, like 2nd or 3rd highest thing on Virtual desktop, pc capped at 72, running on a 5090, fixed fps, vertical sync off, its at about 65 to 70% gpu usage.

Too low quality

If you want a good scare and you want to be on your toes, this game will definitely do it. My heart was beating at 100 miles an hour. Excellent game, I love it. Every time those aliens would come out, I would freak out and jump to the roof. This game to me is definitely a scare game, Ten out of ten. Thank you so much for a great experience. Still playing it, but I gotta take a break because I get too scared.