Meet The Most Dangerous Creature In The Universe!
HIGH Blasting facehuggers with my one free hand.
LOW Getting to the ‘to be continued‘.
WTF Those aliens LOVE to do jazz hands, apparently.
It sounds perfect — that’s the first thing I noticed.
I was ten minutes into the game after crash-landing at a mining facility in the middle of a frozen wasteland of a planet, and just after being told my first objective, I picked up my trusty pulse rifle.
Famously featured in the film Aliens, the gun is not only cool as hell to look at, it has an incredibly distinctive report when the trigger is pulled. There’s an electronic whine mixed in with standard blast of exploding gunpowder, and it’s instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever heard it.
It’s been featured in videogames before, of course — Alien titles tend to be made by fans of the movie Aliens, and authenticity tends to be a high priority, but there’s a difference between pressing a button while looking at a screen and actually firing the rifle. So, the first time I pulled the trigger, hearing that sound and watching the sparks fly from the control panel I’d detonated, I was all the way on board.
Set in the Alien: Isolation world where Amanda Ripley narrowly escaped the horror on Sevastopol station, Rogue Incursion is a sequel of sorts that puts players in the role of an ex-marine on a rescue mission. A former compatriot has found work as the head of security for a terraforming corporation, and needs to be exfiltrated from a nightmare situation. It’s up to the player to carefully explore the ruined facility, piece together exactly what happened, and rescue any survivors.
…Also, naturally, to kill a whole lot of aliens. Just an inappropriately large number.
Rogue Incursion‘s developers have gone above and beyond in creating an authentic world, attempting to put as little as possible between the player and the experience. For example, there’s no HUD or non-diegetic visual elements — there’s a health meter on the player’s wrist and a map they can grab from their PDA, and that’s about it.
The facility itself is designed with function as its first and only priority, so the corridors and rooms are understandably similar, making it extremely easy to get lost. With every moment looking at the map being a moment which the player isn’t scanning for signs of movement, there’s an oppressive tension to every second of play. Only once I’d slammed the door after entering a save room did my heart rate ever slow to a manageable pace — and even then I knew that the minute I’d finished logging my progress I’d be thrown back out into the monster-filled tunnels I’d just escaped.
While the title might give the impression that players should expect randomized dungeons full of xenos, Rogue Incursion is a fully linear narrative experience. The mining and research facility is a sprawling location, and even though the campaign is restricted to the top handful of levels, it’s absolutely loaded with intriguing nooks and crannies to explore. Like most adventure titles, RI is primarily about finding new and innovative ways to open locked doors, but it manages to keep from feeling repetitive and tedious by offering one of the great videogame monsters of all time.
Anyone who’s played Alien Isolation will remember the terror inherent in knowing that the xeno could pop up at any moment, and while an arsenal of weapons gives them a way to fight back, it does little to strip away the terror that the creatures instill. The aliens that fill the facility are fast, smart, and able to climb any surface, meaning an attack can come from any direction at any moment. I play a lot of VR shooters, and I’ve never spent this much time frantically blasting at shadows because I thought I saw something moving at the edge of my vision.
It’s not all guesswork, though. Players have access to a film-accurate motion detector to let them know if there are any aliens in the vicinity, but it only works on a two dimensional plane. Sure, there’s an alien ten meters in front of me, but is it about to pop out of the ceiling or the floor? No matter how prepared I thought I was, Rogue Incursion never failed to startle me, even on my third playthrough.
Perhaps Rogue Incursion’s greatest accomplishment is the fact that it manages to make the alien scary in an action-game context, something that many other titles have struggled with. Being able to gun down aliens removes some of their threat, and many devs have tried to counteract this by loading their work with weird new alien varieties — spitting aliens for ranged combat, exploding aliens that need to be kept at a distance, giant bulletproof tanks that have to be avoided, and so on. It’s a valiant effort, but every attempt serves to make the basic alien feel less special by comparison. In contrast, Rogue Incursion celebrates its monster.
Yes, the standard xenomorph we all know and love isn’t too difficult to kill, but there’s always more of them, and at any moment the player is just two hits away from being killed. In fact, there are a few sequences in which the player is besieged by aliens, and it quickly becomes clear that once there’s more than a couple of them, the creatures are a formidable threat that do not require any special abilities to take the player down over and over again.
I’m an Aliens super-fan. I think that’s clear at this point, so it’s worth saying that I’m going to be predisposed to love a game that goes to the lengths this one does to recreate the aesthetics of that film. The flipside of that fandom is that I’ll recoil from anything that gets the franchise wrong. So with that in mind, hear me when I say that this is the best Alien game ever made.
In fact, it only has one flaw — despite ending on a fantastic climax, Incursion is only part one of the whole story. I knew this going into it, but I was still shattered to see To Be Continued come up at a particularly shocking moment. That continuation can’t come quickly enough, but until it does I’ll keep playing Alien Rogue Incursion over and over again.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Survios. It is currently available on PSVR2/PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PSVR2. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed 3 times. There are no Multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game was rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence and Strong Language. It’s an easy test this time — are you comfortable with your children watching the movie Aliens? If so, they can play the game, if not, keep them away.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles but audio cues are not included, so you will be at a severe disadvantage, playable only on the easiest difficulty settings. This game is not fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.
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