Alien: Rogue Incursion Review

It has been a great year to be an Alien fan. Not only did Alien: Romulus do an excellent job bringing the series to the big screens, but now we have Alien: Rogue Incursion just a few months later. As the first VR entry in the series, Alien: Rogue Incursion successfully transported me into the Alien universe as I crept through an abandoned station while fighting for my life against Xenomorphs that were either hungry for brains or wanted to use my body as an incubator.

Alien: Rogue Incursion kicks off as Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks and her droid buddy, Dave, crash-land on the planet of Purdan. They were on a mission to the planet already in order to track down a former squadmate. However, they are shot down when flying in and can’t escape. It takes about ten minutes before Zula realizes the space station is infested with Xenomorphs – referred to her as X-Rays.

Zula is a Colonial Marine and, as a result, she is a fighter. What makes Alien: Rogue Incursion different from, say, Alien: Isolation, is the action. The game swings from intense horror chapters where I was fearing for my life to action-packed moments where I was pumping X-Rays full of lead and blowing them up with grenades.

While Zula can fight back, and the game doesn’t have much focus on stealth, she is just an average human lifeform. This means she is weak and fragile. A few swipes from a Xenomorph, and she easily dies. On the Normal difficulty, Zula can take two big hits before succumbing to her wounds. So there’s a constant need to heal up and avoid damage wherever possible.

Zula can dash back, which helps a lot. A quickly timed click of the analogue stick sees her dash backwards to dodge out of an attack. The same goes for side dashes. Zula is also limited in the inventory she can hold; I could only store so much ammo and healing stims before I was forced to leave some behind.

This is where Alien: Rogue Incursion shines the best. The game’s decision-making was a surprise to me. This includes careful resource management, exploration, and saving. I constantly had to take mental notes as to where I left a magazine of ammo behind for when I ran out or felt like returning to top up my stock.

Exploration also meant going into various optional parts of the facility. Some rooms are completely off the track, but they often play host to ammo, grenades, and audio logs. Getting to these areas meant taking a deep breath and exploring the dark corridors and finding ways into the rooms. Often, these rooms would be helpful for items, but sometimes, I ended up coming face-to-face with a Xenomorph.

I made an effort to explore every location top to bottom. You do return to previous places quite often with new key card capabilities to unlock new locked doors. There are also a few sealed doors that require the welding tool to break into. These too are incredibly stressful because you need to aim its flame over the seal to melt it away. However, the noise is so loud that often it would overshadow the rustling of the vents that normally alerted me to the presence of an entity.

I would often sit with one hand against the sealed door melting away the metal while aiming my revolver the other way in case I got jumped. My head would flick back and forth watching my back while I hastily opened the door.

The Motion Tracker helps here. This iconic motion detection tool can be carried around, and it reveals incoming movement. I could also pull out the tool and place it down next to me on a table or the floor while I browsed a terminal for emails and unlock codes or rewired a control box to open the door.

The Motion Tracker is helpful, but it is also incredibly buggy. I found that the device would make a noise more often than not. Even after I would fight off Xenomorphs, the tool would keep beeping and beeping non-stop. Only after I would pick it up would the beeping stop. It took a while to realize this issue. However, I spent many moments standing around waiting for the next X-Ray because the tool would beep only for nothing to ever arrive. Kind of annoying.

Alien: Rogue Incursion also relies on manually saving the game in Panic Rooms. These rooms are found across the game, and only after entering them and placing the PDA into the terminal would the game save. While I hated this mechanic at first, I found myself enjoying it. The rooms not only act as a reprieve from the horrors but they are nicely spaced out to take a break from the game whenever you find one.

This mechanic also forced me to remember where each room was so that I knew where to return to when I had to manually save. This was quite often given how brutal the game could be. I would often return to the room whenever possible just to save my latest state and prevent any lost progression from an unfortunate encounter with a Xenomorph.

Zula also has her fair share of weapons. A powerful revolver, shotgun, and assault rifle help take down the Xenomorphs. Of course, this being a VR game, it means that using these guns is rather fantastic. They come with all the expected cumbersome reloading you would expect. The shotgun needs to be reloaded by pulling single shots from your belt and loading them into the chamber. The revolver saw me flick open the dial, tilt the gun back to drop the bullets, grab the ammo, and quickly load the shots in one-by-one.

Sure, this isn’t anything revolutionary when it comes to weapons in a VR game, but these reloading mechanics often arrived in the middle of a feeding frenzy. I often found myself dashing around a box while trying to drop magazines, reload shots, and pump the shotgun. The rush was incredibly fun.

Everything else in Alien: Rogue Incursion felt great in VR. Stabbing my arm with a stim, navigating the PDA map with my finger, tossing the Motion Tracker into the corridor in front of me, even picking up a hard hat and putting it on my head. It was mostly smooth sailing. I did have an odd moment here and there where my belt would move away from me, but I quickly reset the view, and it fixed it.

Alien: Rogue Incursion also looks and sounds the part. The eerie station is well detailed with smoke blowing out of vents, broken floor grates, blood trails, and many a dark corridor to travel down. There were so many wonderfully scary areas in this game. So many times when I opened a door and was met with a pitch-black hallway. Just my little shoulder torch trying its best to light up the path ahead.

The sound design is also fantastic. Musical notes elevate the intensity while the thumping of the Xenomorph’s feet on the floor gave me a mini heart attack.

Speaking of which, the Xenomorphs are faithful to the series. They tower in front of you and crawl across every surface in an attempt to get closer to you. So many times I would turn around and have this black, shiny entity staring into my soul. Sure, they are a bit clumsy every now and then. You can easily spot the animation path for their crawling, and when they die, their bodies ragdoll all over the place. But it doesn’t take away from the fun.

The presence of the Xenomorphs comes to life even more when the game starts to add nests, Facehuggers, and other larger breeds into the action. It was awesome seeing a Facehugger for the first time. Even more awesome watching it crawl over my face as it prepared to impregnate me. Again, this takes the most traumatic moments from the Alien series and puts you right in the front of it all. Alien: Rogue Incursion is Alien like you’ve never experienced it before.

I had a great time in Alien: Rogue Incursion. Granted, there are some bugs and the common ragdoll issue here and there, but this is a great Alien game and, best of all, a good VR game. There’s clearly been a lot of love put into everything. From the story to the voice work to the authenticity of the world and its creatures.

This Alien: Rogue Incursion review is based on a Steam VR code sent to us by Survios. The game is available on 19 December for PS VR2 and PC VR. The Meta Quest 3 version is scheduled to launch in February 2025.