Alien: Rogue Incursion Delivers VR Thrills Before Petering Out

More than 45 years ago, Alien slunk into our collective consciousness with its unforgettable central monster and convincing portrayal of how much it sucks to be a space trucker. It’s one of those seminal sci-fi flicks with a nearly incalculable degree of influence and that, like any good horror movie, received a boatload of not-so-great sequels. Okay, maybe that’s not exactly fair: Aliens is not only an excellent follow-up but arguably one of the best action movies ever made. And while most of the rest of the series is a mixed bag, many of these films are at least flawed in interesting ways, from Prometheus’ grandiose existential questions to Alien Resurrection’s freaky little French sicko shenanigans.

Of this extended canon, there are essentially two modes: stories handled by auteurs who are at least nominally trying something different or more fan-service-oriented affairs like Alien Vs. Predator, Alien Romulus, and the truly staggering number of comics and videogames in the “Alien extended universe.” Beyond commercial reasons, I don’t exactly understand why Alien has an extended universe, as there’s nothing less scary than lore dumps, but at least it’s given us some compelling experiences like Alien Isolation.

And now there’s another installment in this sprawling mythos, Alien: Rogue Incursion. It has a pretty straightforward sales pitch of being the first Alien game in VR, allowing you all the fun of getting impaled by a Xenomorph or grappled by a Facehugger in immersive first-person. Neat! At least initially, this premise pays off by firmly placing you in an abandoned company town filled with skittering Geiger creatures that very much want to kill you. It may not be quite as creative or out-there as some of the Alien film spin-offs, but it turns out that being on the receiving end of these spindly nightmare creatures in immersive first person is enough of a novelty to get the job done. However, while it begins strong, the game is eventually let down by repetition, technical issues, and motion sickness-inducing movement that left me much more nauseous than its body horror did. It’s certainly not a “Game Over, Man” level disaster, but its high-flying introduction makes this eventual crash landing all the more disappointing.

As for the premise, you play as Zula Hendricks, an ex-Space Marine who touches down on an isolated arctic planet with her android companion Davies after getting a tip from a war buddy that there may be aliens on this corporate facility (it isn’t Weyland-Yutani being blowhards this time around, but a different nightmare company). Apparently, Hendricks is a character from an extended run of comics, but even if you’re unfamiliar, we get the run down pretty quick: after a mission gone wrong, she travels the cosmos battling corporations who want to weaponize the Xenomorphs.

While its narrative often feels more like a thin layer of set dressing to put you in the thick of it, there’s just enough pathos between Hendricks and her synthetic buddy Davies to add some extra wrinkles to the equation, and voice actress Andia Winslow does a great job making our hero more than another gruff, faceless FPS protagonist.

As for what Hendricks is up to moment to moment, the game is very much operating in an old-school Resident Evil-style mode: this arctic base is somewhat free for you to explore, but your progress is gated by locked doors, keys, and tools. While it’s easy to imagine a world where Rogue Incursion was another on-rails shooter in VR, this alternative is far more interesting, forcing you to face your fears and plumb the depths of this doomed facility. And, of course, every moment you spend scavenging for ammo, fixing circuitry, or finding voice logs puts you in harm’s way.

It’s in these particulars that the game makes good on being a virtual reality experience set in this iconic universe; at any given moment, you’ll probably hear the clanks of a Xenomorph making its way through air ducts to deliver a nasty surprise. Especially early on, there’s a sense of constant tension because these creatures can show up at any time, your motion detector bleeping as a green dot gets unbearably closer before one suddenly pops out of a ventilation shaft. You may have an assault rifle, but that doesn’t minimize how fast, relentless, and big these creepy crawlies are.

As for the gunplay, it offers much of what you’d expect from this style of game in VR; the controllers physically track to your weapons, and everything is handled diegetically instead of through menus. For example, you need to physically pull your revolver from your hip or reach over your shoulder to get your Pulse Rifle. Honestly, it’s all pretty damn cool. There’s a tactile feel to the reload animations and weapon handling, like the click as you pump the shotgun or how you physically insert each bullet into your revolver before snapping the chamber shut with a flick of the wrist. While none of this is anything new for this kind of game, there are some clever specifics here, like how the Pulse Rifle has a mean kick that requires both hands to handle, but at the same time, you’ll frequently be using your offhand to do other things, like to hold your tablet that has a map or utilize the motion detector. As a result, I had many situations where a Xeno jumped me, and I panicked like those sorry saps who bit it early in Aliens, pulling the trigger one-handed as I missed badly and a coiled tail shot straight through my chest.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for heroics too, and at one point, I unloaded my rifle on a Xenomorph, heard the click of an empty cartridge, and then quickly drew my pistol like a Western gunslinger to put one right between its eyes (or where its eyes would be if it had them). Yes, the premise of being a badass marine who chews through aliens for breakfast sort of flies in the face of what most of the movies are doing, but this is balanced out by the game being hard—you are about as fragile as you would expect a meager human would be against the perfect organism—and I became very familiar with death screens where you get impaled in various creative ways. There were long siege sequences where I was forced to sprint for my life, dropping shotgun shells as I crammed what little ammo I had left into my empty firearms. You’re often surrounded and always outnumbered, but there are little tricks to survival, like setting down the motion detector to cover your blind spots, which adds some mild strategy to the equation.

However, although exploring this creepy base and gunning down aliens offers the type of immersive experience that will impress superfans, unfortunately, there’s a big problem: there’s only so much acidic blood you can spill before the magic trick starts to wear off because you’ve seen too much of these foes. While the Xenomorph in Alien was shown sparingly because it was pretty apparent back then it was just a 7-foot-tall guy in a rubber suit, at the same time, this decision was made because Ridley Scott knew that if you show too much of the monster, it eventually stops being scary. By contrast, you’ll probably be seeing more of these guys here, up close, than you have your entire life. It also doesn’t help that there’s an increasing amount of backtracking as things go on, as these creatures spawn in at a consistent clip, eventually making shootouts more of an irritating distraction than anything else.

And then there are the bugs. No, I’m not referring to the Xenomorphs, but the kind where the game crashes or you get stuck in geometry. These issues were doubly annoying because there aren’t autosaves for the most part, meaning if you haven’t been to a saferoom in 20 minutes and you randomly get killed or, even worse, run into an unavoidable technical problem, all of this progress is lost. Moreover, I’m not sure if this is an error or a design oversight, but many of the objective markers remained on my map even after being cleared, which eventually made it difficult to figure out where I was supposed to go, in one case leading to an almost hour of stumbling through this base while being accosted by both varieties of bugs. It also didn’t help that this experience does not feel on the cutting edge graphically, with some relatively flat textures, while still causing my PC to chug in spots.

And beyond the technical issues, there were a few other big problems, like how I was tired of battling the same enemy over and over with a relatively small arsenal of weapons by the end of this 10ish hour adventure. Specifically, I wish there were some bigger swings when it came to creature designs—they should have added in some freaky alien animal hybrids, or at least those dumb Xeno dogs from Alien 3. It also didn’t help that the Xenomorphs we did get behaved sporadically, as there was one particular pounce attack that I never found a consistent way to deal with.

On top of this, sometimes the controls didn’t do what I wanted, leading to fatal flubs. I’d go to stabilize my rifle only for my character to grab nothing, causing my shots to spray into the ceiling as I got toasted. When combined with the high difficulty and lack of autosaves, this all led to quite a bit of frustration.

And beyond making me sick of the same fights, the game also literally made me sick. While this will vary dramatically from person to person, I experienced the most severe motion sickness I’ve ever dealt with in a VR game because, for some inexplicable reason, it completely lacks a “teleport” option for movement, requiring you to continuously move through the world in a way that’s quite good at tricking the brain into thinking you’ve been poisoned and should throw up. Sure, this style of movement was more immersive than if I could blink around, but I’d prefer this slight drop in tension over feeling like I just came out of a particularly long cryosleep.

Upfront, Alien: Rogue Incursion delivers exactly what you’d want from an Aliens-inspired VR game: the horror of being chased by these iconic movie monsters and the thrill of blasting them into green goo with your Pulse Rifle. But while this mission starts strong, it eventually spins its wheels, stretching out the experience for too long before ending on a disappointing cliffhanger—while it isn’t specified in the title, this is actually only Alien: Rogue Incursion Part One, with Part Two still on the way. Add in lots of technical issues and a huge accessibility shortcoming in not having teleportation movement options for people prone to motion sickness, and you have a much rockier ride than it initially appeared. With its high highs and low lows, Rogue Incursion is a little too accurate a microcosm of the Alien experience.

Alien: Rogue Incursion was developed and published by Survios. Our review is based on the Steam version running on an Oculus Quest 3 via Quest Link [using Virtual Desktop is not recommended by the developers due to technical issues]. It is also available on PSVR2.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.