Alien: Rogue Incursion is one of the finest examples of how to cleverly adapt a famous movie IP into a VR game — that is if you can get past the poor performance and even worse visual quality. It’s the latest Meta Quest 3 game from veteran VR developer Survios, known best for the Creed series of VR and non-VR games, plus a handful of VR classics like Raw Data and Sprint Vector.
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While the game was released on PC VR and the PSVR 2 on December 19, 2024, the Meta Quest 3 version was delayed two months, almost certainly to remake most of the game’s visual assets to fit better on Quest. Aside from lower-quality assets when compared to the PlayStation or PC releases, Survios also tweaked the lighting in many areas to work better for the Quest 3’s screens and power.
It’s not these changes that are so offensive, though. Rather, it’s the resolution and downright sub-par performance. It’s the lowest-resolution game I can recall ever seeing on Quest 3, and the game still chugs when moving between areas. Developer Survios says a patch is coming as early as next week (at the time this is written) to address these issues, but until then, gamers will have to deal with them.
But if you can get past the poor visuals, you’ll be treated to one of the better action-horror games on the Meta Quest platform. That’s especially true if you enjoy the Alien movies and the sci-fi universe within them. Alien: Rogue Incursion is Part 1 of at least a 2-part game series, although Part 2 doesn’t have a definitive release date just yet.
Brilliant gameplay, hazy corridors
The on-body inventory system is among the very best I’ve used in any VR game.
From the moment the game began, I knew I was in for something special as far as gameplay goes. The intro is simple enough but also introduces a great way to get the player used to the game’s mechanics without feeling obtuse. Alien: Rogue Incursion uses a combination of shooting, puzzle-solving, and key card-hunting gameplay mechanics to excellent effect.
The on-body inventory system is among the very best I’ve used in any VR game. Two large guns can fit on your back — shotgun over your left shoulder, assault rifle over the right — a pistol on your right hip, ammo on your left hip. Grabbing the ammo always presents the right kind for the gun you’re carrying, assuming you have enough ammo in your inventory.
On the left arm, you’ll find healing syringes on the forearm and grenades attached to the shoulder. The right shoulder holds the motion tracker, which is always active, giving you forewarning of anything moving in the shadows. Picking it up will let you scan the surroundings and get a rough idea of the direction Xenomorphs are coming from, but not much else. It helps get rid of cheap jump scares and allows you to prepare for battle rather than being surprised all the time.
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Problems from the initial release in December have all been addressed, including better enemy difficulty and spawn rates and weapon handling bugs squashed.
The initial launch was met with plenty of criticism, from ridiculous spawn rates of Xenomorphs — which made it feel more like an arcade game than an action-horror one — to bugs with guns and a distinct lack of ammo to be found. All of these issues have been addressed in the Meta Quest 3 launch and the subsequent patch has also been issued to the PC and PS5 versions.
Now, the balance feels nearly perfect. Aliens take 2-3 direct hits from a shotgun to dispatch — a weapon you don’t even have for the first hour or two of the game — roughly 30 bullets from the assault rifle or a few rounds from your pistol. Meanwhile, two shots from a Xenomorph will be the end of you, so you’ll need to be strategic about every encounter you get in. Most Xenomorphs travel in packs, and you’ll do your best to remember that.
Gun handling is superb, although I don’t like the sound of the assault rifle. It sounds tinny and hollow compared to the punchier sounds from the pistol and shotgun. Placing a sticky grenade as a trap for oncoming Xenomorphs never seems to get old, although the physics of Xenomoph deaths tend to be more comical than realistic. Maybe comic relief is needed to keep the tension down.
Tools and weapons have a very satisfying tactile feel. Survios has been honing these kinds of interactive systems for a decade now, and it shows.
Throughout the game, you’ll make your way across a research base on a remote planet to unravel the events that occurred. Everyone at the station has either fled or is dead, and it’s not long until you figure out why. Since you’re the only living human there, getting around through locked-down, high-security areas requires a bit of work. Thankfully, your faithful Synthetic — maybe we should call him an Android in keeping with our site? — is there to assist.
Aside from combat assistance early in the game, he’ll also help guide you across the station to get from one objective to the next and hack terminals through your PDA, which handily docks into computers — so long as they have power. If you boil it down, you’re essentially playing a more complicated Doom as you look for colored key cards to access different parts of the station.
But it’s not all badge scanning or computer hacking. Many puzzles require you to rewire electrical panels with special tools, un-weld sealed doors, or just blast through with your assault rifle’s special rounds. They’re extremely satisfying, and traversal through the large station and ship is made even better by the excellent map on your interactive PDA.
Puzzles, environment interaction, and weapon handling are among some of the game’s strong suits.
Environment and tool interaction is another strong point of the game. The PDA is a touchscreen device that you’ll need to physically grab and interact with as if it were a modern-day tablet. Hold it with one hand and touch the display with your fingers on the other. It feels authentic, and interacting with the many computer terminals throughout the game might be even more fun since you’ll grab the joystick and use it to move a mouse cursor around the screen.
Tools all have a very satisfying tactile feel. From the pop of the torch on the welding tool to the clamp of the wrench during rewiring puzzles, every interaction feels like a veteran VR studio made it — because it did, of course. Survios has been honing these kinds of interactive systems for a decade now, and it shows.
Even the story is compelling and kept me wondering what was going to happen next. I’m not the biggest Alien fan in the world, but I’ve seen a few of the movies and love the lore and character designs — especially the Xenomorphs. A twist about 2 hours in really shakes things up for the rest of the game, leaving me to wonder what’s going to happen in Part 2 when it eventually releases.
A visual downgrade
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Quest Games Optimizer helps fix the game’s visual problems, but that’s a third party tool most users won’t bother to try.
Of course, all of these positive feelings only go so far when the performance and visual quality of the game are as poor as they are. The game runs at 36FPS most of the time but has significant hitching when loading new areas or trying to do anything else on the Quest, like capturing a screenshot or video. If you’re sensitive to low frame rate, this is not a game you should play.
Meta’s Application Space Warp technology enables the game to run at a “reprojected” 72FPS, so it doesn’t feel like a slow-motion action scene the whole time, but this leaves some odd visual artifacts at times. This could all be forgiven if the game’s resolution were substantially higher than it was, but at least by default, it’s the lowest-resolution game I’ve ever seen on Quest, and it dynamically scales the resolution down when performance tanks.
That means you’re often left with a blurry, shimmery mess that just plain looks bad. None of these issues are surprising given PC and PSVR 2 reviews of the game that often referred to bugs, crashes, and other visual and performance problems even after the patch that was supposed to fix them.
If Survios can get the visuals fixed in an upcoming patch, it’ll have delivered on the promise of a truly stunning Alien game in VR.
Visually, the game simply doesn’t look like it should be taxing the Meta Quest 3’s hardware the way it does, and games like Genotype prove that this game should look and run a lot better than it does. Survios also changed some visual aspects of the game’s art, like adding a blue haze to the Quest version to help hide the terrible pop-in problems when the geometry is loaded.
It’s clear that whatever engine Survios is using needs to be swapped out for something else. Sure, this is a game that was developed for much higher-end hardware than a Quest, but, again, there’s nothing visually in the Quest version that looks like it should perform this poorly when compared to plenty of other games.
In the end, Alien: Rogue Incursion is a brilliant game wrapped in a distractingly bad visual package. If you’re willing to sideload Quest Games Optimizer, set the game to 120% resolution, CPU/GPU to high or ultra, and FFR to high. These settings completely fix both the resolution and performance problems at the expense of battery life, but that’s why I have a great Meta Quest 3 battery head strap, after all.
Hopefully, Survios will address these visual issues in a promised upcoming patch, because the rest of the game deserves to be surfaced in a better way than this.
The Meta Quest 3 is the best standalone VR headset you’ll find anywhere. Crystal-clear lenses and a powerful processor let you dive into games like you’ve never experienced before.