An Alien VR game seems like a no brainer, especially as the Alien Isolation’s VR prototype has become a cornerstone myth of virtual reality gaming. This is one of the biggest sci-fi horror franchise of all time with iconic enemies, locations and weapons, and even the tracker ping is iconic. It’s a world just begging to be jammed in to a fancy headset. Alien: Rogue Incursion gets the the atmosphere right, but it’s more frustrating than scary to actually play.
The game starts strong with ex-Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks literally in the hot seat of a transporter as it hurtles towards the planet Purdan – a planet which unsurprisingly looks a lot like LV-426. It’s cold and snowy with an abandoned Gemini Exoplanet Solutions research facility doing a very good impression of the colony from Aliens. You get a few moments peace before something dislodges some snow from a roof and there it is, a glistening black xenomorph, visible in the night for a few brief seconds before it skitters off in to the darkness with that classic terrifying scream.
The first encounter with a xenomorph is truly exhilarating as it scampers from the shadows, crawling around the sides of buildings before dropping to the ground and towering over you just as it should. Some well placed shots from the classic Pulse Rifle and you also learn the first annoying thing about the game: the Pulse Rifle kicks like a mule. Hold the trigger down and after less than a second it is firing bullets in the ceiling. This is because you are meant to be using two hands to steady the rifle, which is fine, but you need to hold the tracker in your other hand to work out where the xenomorphs are coming from, or have the map out to know where to go.
You’ll soon have other tools and extra weapons to juggle as you settle into a rhythm of moving between locations while fighting a few enemies, solving a fairly simple wiring puzzle, surviving a wave of creatures and moving on. The game is billed as having “most cunning Xenomorphs ever encountered” but it doesn’t take too long to realise that’s not true.
They will stalk you, scampering around in the ceiling and popping out of vents but when they decided to get close they always take a few seconds to hiss at you before they attack. They just stand there, arms outstretched like they’re coming in for a hug and always giving you a window of opportunity to unload a shotgun in their direction. You will also learn that, apart from a few key sequences, the xenos come in pairs so you know exactly how many there will be and how easy they are to kill, robbing them of their fear factor and making them more of a nuisance than anything else. You can also just away – they aren’t fast enough to catch up and kill you, so you can just leg it round most of the corridors and listen to them snarl in the distance.
If an encounter with an Alien gets a bit too close it will result in death (as it should) and there’s some delightfully gory sequences including watching an Alien tail burst through your stomach. If you die then you had better have manually saved your game in a Panic Room because the checkpointing is atrocious, you can lose a good twenty minutes of progress. Just to add to the annoyance, if you do try to run back to the nearest Panic Room the game may spawn a few extra xenomorphs so you have to lose precious ammo just to get a save. The game is tense, but it’s not because of the Aliens, it’s because you are worried you haven’t manually saved for a half an hour and die.
The game does have moments of brilliance though. One sequence in particular was genuinely sickening, and it’s followed by an exceptionally creepy stroll that was absolutely gripping. It does feel very much like you are in an Alien movie at this point – it’s wet and squelchy with things skittering overhead and hissing at your from ventilation shafts. It looks and sounds great with lots of effects for smoke and steam and some excellent heart racing music when you are being stalked.
Zula is partnered with Davis, an android who accompanies her physically for a short time, adding much needed firepower, before becoming the classic quest advisor on the radio. Their dialogue is mostly functional but we do occasionally get a little more of their personality so that they feel like firm friends by the end of the game.
The play area is fairly large which plenty of options to explore and uncover more the story via emails on terminals. However, as every single room and corridor is of the same general design it is very easy to get lost, especially when the map is so bad. Which reminds me, all the icons the map that show if there’s a terminal or a lift or a closed door, if you zoom out a bit and they all become plain white dots. There’s no way to know if you are running towards a lift that will save you from marauding creatures, or a locked door. What would have really helped is simple but effective sign posting in the world to telling you Medical is down the corridor to the right, then you don’t need to keep bringing up the map.
As you enter the end of the game it does pad things out by bringing you back to your ship then sending you out to the furthest reaches of the facility to complete an objective and there’s a lot of cycling through air locks and trying to remember where lifts are.
I did encounter a few bugs of the video game kind. Crawling into a vent got me completely stuck one time, an important object clipped through the floor and vanished, both requiring me to go back to a previous save, and my head was always level with the floor on the pause screen.
What is rather more annoying is the inaccuracy of the quest descriptions and map. Davis usually gives you a quick briefing on the next step, but the quest summary on your pad is very brief and missing important details, and the map markers are frequently wrong. I spent half an hour trying to deposit some canisters inside the loading bay on my ship, only to discover that you’re meant to go outside to a nondescript panel and punch a button before the canister receptacle will appear. The following mission had me go to Operations… but not the part of the map that’s clearly marked “Operations” a completely different place.
There’s a good game here – it looks and sounds fantastic and really captures the feel of the films – but there are so many little annoyances that it’s hard to like it. Rogue Incursion has you constantly juggling two-handed weapons, the motion tracker, mission object, and the touch screen map that requires two hands to use, and it’s just clumsy going back and forth all the time. Heck, the map doesn’t even auto-track your location, so you need to drop whatever else you’re holding just to scroll it.
All of this is probably fine when it’s a quick button press away, but annoying in VR. Not to mention that Zula is an ex-Marine. Give her a helmet with the tracker, an auto-scrolling map and the mission briefing on a HUD and you fix the vast majority of problems with the game and free up your hands for the important things – like aiming straight.
