Alien: Rogue Incursion is worth considering. I haven't finished it yet, but played enough to give it a 7.7/10 after around 4.5 hours of play. More details below -

From what I understand, this game limped out of the gate (like 95% of all games these days), but by the time I bought it earlier this week, the worst bugs have been dealt with. It runs well enough to enjoy with a 2024 era, medium-high spec VR rig, but probably not enough to use as a benchmark if you know what I mean. Trying it on my laptop with a 3060 (6gb) card was only playable at 72hz, with all settings all the way down. It did boot but only after adjusting SteamVR resolution at somewhere south of 2k, and yes I do think that's unfortunate.

With that said, it is a lot of fun on a newer prebuilt desktop from 2024 w/ an i7-14700F, 64gb RAM, 4070Ti Super - playing on a Q3 via Virtual Desktop (w/ VD settings on Godlike, 80hz, HEVC 10-Bit codec streaming 150mbps). I tested performance for half an hour with both Steam Link and VD and found image quality and performance very similar.

Because of these findings, i'm recommending it with the disclaimer that the required and recommended pc specs are unusually accurate, and might even still be a little less than what players want, if they wish to play at 4k+ 120hz. Sometimes the AI (both companion & enemy) are less than aware of the situation, but those moments are pretty rare.

As for the game itself, completely removed from its' technical performance - I'm really into it. Clearly made by fans, It is much more action-oriented than Alien: Isolation, but with the same amount of cinematic authenticity -- especially the smoke effects, sound design and lighting. The gameplay mechanics are pretty standard, and it doesn't break much new ground for VR or gaming in general... but as a huge fan of Alien (especially the first 2 films), and a musician I found it really captures the vibe perfectly.

I understand that the game is basically the first part of a bigger story. I haven't yet finished this one, but for what I have, what I paid for seems pretty spot on... as long as i'm not 20 minutes from the ending.

Plans for the game: will be finishing it at least twice before I put out my final word, so if you're some weirdo that is hanging on my every word, stay tuned (weirdo).

I felt compelled to drop a review now because the issues other recent reviews mentioned didn't match my experience very closely. If technical brilliance and capacity to run on a calculator are required for you to enjoy a game - move on, but if you tend to enjoy games more for their content and capacity to transport the player to somewhere else, give this a try. Remember Steam allows for up to 2 hours of play, set a timer if you must, but I'd bet that you'll forget you even set one, as long as your pc and the game play along nicely.

Mediocre gun play. No enemy variety. Impressive enemy locomotion, only for them to stand there and telegraph one of their two attacks. Good atmosphere. Janky hand/environment interaction. There could be a good game in here with another 6 months of dedicated development time.

Ultimately, its probably my biggest disappointment since TWD Saints and Sinners 2.

Alien Rogue Incursion is one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever endured. Here's a list of issues I have with the game that I've noticed in my short time playing it.

- Grabbing items off of one's person is lacking in sensitivity to the extent where I cannot grab the motion tracker or ammo without actively looking at where my hand is going, otherwise it comes up empty (not ideal in high intensity scenarios as you would imagine).

- Items don't always deposit back into your inventory when you release them and I cannot for the life of me understand why. I'll release the grab button in the exact same manner for the exact same item and sometimes it ends up back on my person and other times it lands on the floor with an embarrassing thud.

- The Aliens are bullet sponges

- Hand movement is sluggish and always feels slower than my actual hand movements leading to a strong sense of disconnect between myself and the player character.

- This is personal preference but I'd prefer disembodied hands to a full body render as whenever the body moves it usually doesn't move in a similar manner to my own, thus creating a disconnect. There's a reason Half Life Alyx used disembodied hands, not even Valve could figure out a way to make that look good.

- Little to no build up to the first Alien encounter so any tension that might have existed was completely deflated. Pacing in general feels very rushed frankly.

- The Aliens spawn on an infinite timer that's about as consistent and predictable as the sun rising in the morning. This kills any sense of fear or tension and results in the Alien threat serving as a nuisance that's preventing me from exploring. In a flatscreen game this would be bad, but in VR that issue is exacerbated. VR games inherently favour exploration as scrounging for items is a far more involved process than simply pressing the "E" key on an item to add it to your inventory. The aforementioned sluggish hand movement also makes combat with the Aliens feel like an absolute chore.

- The game attempts to hide its loading screens in gameplay which on paper sounds like a good idea. VR is all about immersion after all and hiding the loading of a game in order to allow the player to keep full control of their character should help retain immersion in the game. The problem is that loading causes obvious slowdown and freezes which break immersion far more severely than any loading screen ever would.

- Lines of dialogue would bug out to the extent that my character would respond to a question around 5 minutes after it had been asked. Multiple times. In a row.

- The main character simply won't shut up. When I was carrying around a quest relevant item, whenever I dropped it to have both my hands free for something, she refused to stop reminding me of the object's existence despite it being A LITERAL FOOT AWAY from where I was standing. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I can take jank, but I refuse to be talked down to.

There are things to like here. As someone who likes as much world interactability as possible, the amount of objects I can pick up and mess around with is impressive. The computer terminals and the PDA are intuitive and true to the world. The hacking minigames take advantage of the VR medium quite well. The issue is none of these positives outweigh the sheer slog that is playing the game. I'll give it another try when a major update hits but until then I cannot recommend this game.