THE LOWDOWN

I won't recommend any game that uses deceiving market practices.

Originally in interviews and all material leading up to the release of the game; they stated it was a full and feature complete VR title with a full story. However, with the game's release they changed the info/cover image and only after early review copies went out; admitting that it is merely "Part 1 of 2" and you are expected to buy part 2 if you want to see the conclusion of the story.

People should not have to rely on steam's generous refund policies to avoid deceptive marketing like this. If this had been what was advertised from the start; it may not have been an issue.

One could say releasing it in this manner was an act of the shareholders pushing it out the door for Christmas; which I could defend the devs for-- except they have refused to comment on this even after it was a clear issue for folks who felt mislead.

Edit: They also raised the price of the game by a fair bit at the last moment on people, more so in some regions. There is a lot of dishonest behaviour coming from this developer...

Edit2: The deluxe edition is forced. It just costs more for almost nothing. Devs even admitted on discord that you can't even see them in game really, and it's just a camo for your body and gun that's it. Just one and you can only really see the gun one. It's just a clear grab at your wallet.

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THE GAME

Now with that out of the way, the game itself is....okay. It's nothing amazing, it's pretty barebones and loaded with bugs (not the fun Xeno kind). The first xeno I encountered kept popping in and out of existence
The gun handling is really weird it like locks itself into places you don't have full control over your gun like with every other VR shooter. This may turn people off immediately who are experienced in VR.

Mechanically it works like a mix of Isolation and Fireteam elite; but with none of the depth, level of content, graphical detail, or overall polish in any way. That is not to say it's outright bad, there is a decent 7 out of 10 VR game somewhere; it's just buried under a lot of issues and unapologetic behaviour.

Performance is good on my 3070 GPU, but visually it is not much to look at either. Edit: as I got further in, performance went into the pits. The game becomes a blurry mess and frame rates drop into the single digits. Inexcusable. (low-medium settings, link cable connection, don't even think about trying virtual desktop atm)

It's exceedingly dark even with the flashlight you get later on; but it's dark not for atmosphere but to hide the xenos that will literally spawn into existence 5ft in front of your face. They tote this as a feature but it's to hide lazy AI work.

Overall it's not very good; but it isn't terrible either. I wouldn't recommend this except to other die hard alien fans that have VR; to the average user I would pass until a big sale or a bundle of part 1 and 2 even if you are interested in the story.

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IN SUMMARY

Zula Hendricks is ony of my favourite characters in the Alien franchise, so it hurts me to leave a negative review of this.

TLDR; dishonest publishing at play, game is buggy and runs poorly on even upper mid range PCs, game is also mediocre at best neither trash nor great. Developer has been mostly quiet, no steam presence, some minor updates are likely but I would not expect any serious support. Edit: Devs are now starting to respond to issues, albeit with a degree of dismissal. I will update the review if any future changes solve the game's main problems.

Buy only with all that in mind.

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Final Edit until next game update:
Dev responded here as you can see, requested information is being e-mailed.

Alien Rogue Incursion, Scam Of The Year ?

Yes it is for the moment !
The game has been marketed to us since its announcement as Alien Rogue Incursion, and yesterday we learned through various content creators' reviews that this is only Part 1. I therefore went to their official Discord to get answers, which clearly were inconclusive. Since yesterday, several others and I have asked Survios why we’re only now learning that the game we pre-ordered is "Part One." In the meantime, we noticed that overnight, the game's cover art changed and they added "Part One" on it, as well as in the game description. Once again, with no announcement or warning to anyone.

We only received a response this morning, 10 hours before the official release of the game. What response did we get? (I obviously translated everything from English) "We know that you are concerned about the addition of Part 1 to the game. Our focus right now is on the Quest 3 version of Part 1, which we aim to release as planned in February 2025. This Part 1 is of course built as a standalone game, with Part 2 continuing the story and experience. Part 2 is actively in development, and we promise we have more to announce at a later date." Obviously, we are not convinced. So we asked more questions:

1. Has the game’s content been split into two parts to make Part 1 and Part 2?
Answer: No, Alien Rogue Incursion is a complete game and nothing has been cut.

2. Was the game originally planned to be in two parts?
3.Was this decision made later to split the game into two parts?
Answer: The answers are related, in the sense that for now, we can’t say much more. We are working on how to announce this properly, but all I can say is that, as I said earlier, our goal was not to deceive anyone.

4.Was the decision to make a second part perhaps related to the success of preorders? Could that have encouraged you to develop a second part?
Answer: we would say it was more of a neutral one - we had no greed in mind while developing the game (To summarize: no, it’s not related.)

Part 2 has indeed been in development for a few months, so they deliberately avoided stating that the current game was only Part 1. Do you think Part 2 will be free? Well, no, because as Survios’ admin stated, Alien Rogue Incursion Part 1 is a COMPLETE game.

However, the game has been marked as "Gold" since December 6 (meaning it’s finished), so why didn’t they announce at that point that this game was only Part 1? No answer to that.

To continue, it is 8:56 PM, and no official announcement has been made regarding this Part 1 issue. By the way, the game was supposed to release at 7:00 PM, its price was €28.99 (no preorder discount indicated, so base price), but it was eventually released at 4:00 PM with a last-minute price increase of €10, which was not justified or announced. It is now priced at €38.99.

It’s up to you to form your own opinion on the situation. Do you accept endorsing such dishonest practices? A lie during preorders, no transparency from the developers about this, last-minute changes right before release, and of course, a last-minute price increase.

It’s crazy to note that even though content creators have pointed out that this is only Part 1, none of them have denounced the practice.

For the game itself ?
On rtx4080 it run fine at max but graphicaly.. it's not really good right now, loot of noises, artefact. I can't enable TAA supersample because it's to demanding.
We are in 2024, and we get here game mechanics of 2016 games like the inventory and automatic shoulder aim (the weirdest thing i've seen on a VR game).
Ambiance is great, sound design too. I can see the love about Alien franchise.
But is it still enough to compensate the predatory marketing ?

I will update this review when Survios addresses the situation with an official statement of apology and explanation. As it stands, they are deceiving us, the players, and in the current state of the video game industry, as well as the current state of VR, this is unacceptable!

In the current state, it's... weird. The game is good, but the technical side is hard to stomach.

this is the only game VR game i've ever played where i can feel how unresponsive and clunky things are, even if the actual latency (through virtual desktop on a quest 3) is the same as other titles. Things feel weighty, but not in a good way like in the walking dead, but in a way that feels like my body isn't moving at the same speed as my real body, such that my hand doesn't move in time with my real hand. This makes everything feel really laggy and off.

Performance is also mediocre, at best. The game itself looks pretty good, but even with a 4070 ti super, i'm getting sub 60 FPS, and even that is inconsistent. I'm running at medium settings, even, with dynamic resolution.

The base game itself is probably great, and I'll definitely return to it once some of the quirks are hammered out, but its just really hard to actually get into it while having some of the worst performance of any VR title I've played.