Alien: Rogue Incursion – The First Preview

I spent about 30 minutes completing the second of eight missions in Rogue Incursion, the point of which was to validate an ID card without getting whomped by Xenomorphs. As someone who’s not putting on a VR headset all that often, it definitely took a second to get my bearings and get used to both the weapons and utilities at my disposal and the directional controls of the game, done through joysticks and not head turning. But it didn’t take me all that long to get the hang of it. According to Jefferson and White, Rogue Incursion specifically introduces all of those features at a pace that’s palatable to VR newcomers, whom they hope to lure with the sweet, sweet Alien property. On my mission, I acquired a high-grade plasma soldering iron to unseal welded doors, which I found to be particularly satisfying. And the old reliables, like my handy motion sensor, med kit, and especially crucial pulse rifle, were all in their most logical places so that I wasn’t accidentally pulling out my map tablet when I needed to shoot at a Xenomorph that suddenly started running at me. In fact, when something like that happened, I was encouraged to drop everything else to pull out my gun, and pick it up back once I was safe – a very real, very human response to danger.

I shouldn’t go on any longer without talking about the stars of the show, the Xenomorphs. White said their primary behavioral inspiration actually came from the “clever girl” velociraptors in Jurassic Park. So instead of the kind of solo cat-and-mouse game with the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, the acid-blooded bastards here are smart enough to stealthily hunt in packs and flank their prey. While it’s definitely distressing to find yourself in the center of a Xenomorph circle, it’s not untenably difficult to survive it either. While the manner in which they came at me was scary, it wasn’t dizzying; I didn’t need to try to swivel in a frenzy in every direction to figure out what was going on. And luckily, Davis had my back when a Xenomorph came at me from behind so that I could focus on the enemy in front of me.

Truthfully, when I wasn’t wandering the perfectly dismal halls of the spaceship to get from one place to another, most of my game time was spent trying to avoid getting myself in a tussle. (Make enough noise, though, and you’re basically begging a swarm of them to come eat you alive.) Rogue Incursion seems to welcome all kinds of play styles, from the more cautious like me, where I’d peek around corners to check on any lurking dangers or quietly crouch in a cubicle to wait out a Xenomorph to pass, to more aggressive guns-blazing hunting tactics.

My main nit is that Rogue Incursion is hamstrung by how well one can tolerate existing in a tense VR setting for extended periods of time. (For me, I felt insane after taking my headset off, like I hadn’t blinked once in 30 minutes.) Jefferson said that the main story takes about eight hours to complete, but they were careful to add plenty of space to rest (and save the game). Those breaks add a dimension of exploration into the environment beyond using huge smeared blood stains as context clues for where I’m supposed to go next. Rifling through boxes to find useful items or even putting on a stray company baseball hat makes this Alien world all the more personal and real – and isn’t that what VR is all about?