Alien: Rogue Incursion – Part One: Evolved Edition (PS5)
Summary: The first official Alien game in VR Evolves into 2D for cowards like me.
3.8
I Admire its Purity
It’s not a great sign for the future of PSVR2 when one of its best games, Alien: Rogue Incursion Part One, decides to ‘Evolve’ from the first official Alien game in VR into a regular first-person horror shooter.
When Nay reviewed Rogue Incursion, he called it a “perfect” VR game. Now I don’t know how the game plays in VR. Weirdly, this new non-VR mode is being sold as an entirely separate game rather than being added as a patch (like Resident Evil Village), but it’s still a decent Alien game, regardless of whether you play the coward’s version or not.
Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, players strap on the M3 personal armour of AWOL Colonial Marine, Zula Hendricks, who, along with her Synth companion Davis 01, crash land on the Planet Purdan after their ship is shot down in orbit while responding form a distress call from their former brother in arms Benjamin Carver.
As Hendricks and Davis assess the damage to the ship, they find the seemingly uncharted planet is actually home to a secret research facility for Gemini Exoplanet Solutions. As Zula explores the abandoned facility, Castor’s Cradle, Zula discovers the facility is overrun by Xenomorphs, which the company was attempting to weaponise.
Thus, it’s up to Hendricks, over the course of this 5-6 hour episode 1, to unravel what was happening at the facility, while attempting to find a way to escape before she’s horribly murdered or becomes the unwilling host of a Chestburster.
The Xenomorphs are easily the best part of the entire experience. It’s clear a lot of time, effort, and care have been put into making sure that they look, sound, and most importantly, act, the way you would expect them to. Put it bluntly, the bastards love to ambush you. They hide in ducts and dark corners, they crawl along the walls and ceilings, they scarper if you manage to train your pulse rifle on them, and then pop up behind you. They work in packs to overwhelm you and tear you to pieces. If you don’t take them down efficiently, it’s game over, man.
They move in a strange, otherworldly yet threatening way that screams apex predator. The bastards will attack you whenever you’re trying to unseal a door or rewire a junction box. You never know when they’re going to strike, and Rogue Incursion is all the more thrilling for it.
There are also some unsettling set pieces involving Facehuggers, which, once they became a regular enemy, I found a bigger pain than their full-grown brethren since they were small, fast, and tricky to hit. (But then I guess that’s the point).
The main problem with the enemies, though, is that the Xenomorphs are bullet sponges. Your Pulse Rifle seems to hit them with all the impact of a Nerf gun, though the shotgun does generally take them out in two to three shots. Ammo is limited.
When you have several bearing down on you, it makes for a pretty tense experience, especially when you initially can’t see them and the only thing you have to go on is the change in the music and the bleep of your motion tracker.
However, when you’re shanked by the sneaky bastards for the umpteenth time it starts to wear a little thin, especially when you consider that Alien Rogue Incursion uses a save system similar to old school Resident Evil where you can only save by logging into consoles in a series of safe rooms in the facility, with checkpoints limited to major boss battles and set pieces.
Though you might not need a VR helmet to play Rogue Incursion anymore, the fingerprints of it originally being a VR game are all over it. Especially when it comes to the myriad of levers to pull, valves that need closing, and junction boxes that need rewiring,
Likewise, most of the main set pieces involve things that would be pant-wettingly terrifying in VR, but are merely tense in an average FPS, like being tied up and attacked by a nest’s worth of facehuggers with only a handgun to try and fend them off with.
The graphical fidelity is also decent for a VR game, but somewhat average for a 2D title. All the specifically Alien parts of the experience look fantastic, though. The Xenomorphs and facehuggers in particular look spot on. Though the facility itself can be a little bland at times, since it’s mostly a series of dark corridors and winding ducts with the occasional creepy lab or deserted admin buildings. Though the areas of the facility where the Aliens have taken over and begun to build their nest are a film-accurate highlight.
The sound design is also strong. The combination of ambient noises and an initially low-key score does a marvelous job of ratcheting up the tension. Hearing strange rumblings in the pipes, the unnerving bleep of the motion tracker, growls and grunts, something shuffling in the distance. Then the music kicks in, and you know the Xenomorphs are going to tear you apart. It’s great stuff. Though the use of music, mainly when the xenos arrive, does kill a little of the unpredictability of the damn things randomly spawning, because if you hear the ‘fight music’, you know you’re in trouble; otherwise, you’re probably in the clear.
There are also motion controls for the rewiring minigames, exploring computer terminals, and aiming. I wouldn’t recommend them at all. If you could still use the motion controllers from the PSVR2 with it, that would be ace. However, trying to awkwardly twist the DualSense to move a cursor or wrench when I could easier, and more accurately with the right analogue stick wasn’t my idea of fun. The aiming controls were absolutely abysmal as well. Trying to move with motion controls made me feel more nauseous than trying to spin around in circles in VR.
Final Thoughts
Alien: Rogue Incursion – Part One: Evolved Edition is fun while it lasts. Over the course of its 5-7 hour campaign, The Xenomorphs are clearly the stars of the show in this lovingly crafted horror shooter that makes Colonial Marines look like utter garbage.
Though I have a feeling it may be better experienced in VR, this new 2D version is still a great way to play one of the best Alien games since Isolation
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