Alien: Rogue Incursion Review (Arnold Braunschweiger)
The performance is completely inadequate for such an average looking game. I thought that the days of staring at muddy visuals and straining my eyes trying to read blurry in-game text were behind me but here we are again.
I could still give it a pass if the game was good but that's not entirely the case either. The opening minutes were promising and I started getting immersed in the atmosphere. But then the first alien showed up and that pretty much killed the mood instantly. All it took was a mere couple of rounds from my pop gun and the creature turned into a rag doll, comically flying into the air before dissolving into a puddle of acid like in some arcade game.
So yeah, after the incredible Alien Isolation, which made the Xenomorphs scary again, we're back to completely tensionless corridor shooting where once formidable movie monsters are reduced to nothing more than cannon fodder to be mowed down with your big guns. They're not scary, they die too easily, the rag doll physics makes them look comical, and they're not aggressive or intelligent enough to make the combat tense or fun. It makes it even more aggravating that they keep respawning in groups of two pretty much every couple of minutes or so, which must be up there among one of the worst design ideas in the history of first person shooters.
To be fair, once they manage to hit you, they hit hard. Which at least makes them somewhat dangerous in combat if your mag suddenly runs dry and there are two more of them about to jump at you. Visually they're pretty decently modeled and animated too, and it's one of the few Alien games where the creatures actually look huge, towering over your player character. I also enjoyed fiddling around with various chachkies and gizmos, like the plasma torch, motion tracker, various computer screens, etc. It's reminiscent of the movies, of course, but it also reminded me of how Alien Isolation also had you mess around with various interfaces and tools to create tension when you started hearing noises while operating something. This stuff was great. Regardless, even if this game shows promise by allowing me to immerse myself in the expanded lore of the Alien universe (which I love), and despite the fun gadgetry and toys that you can cosplay with, it's simply unforgivable for a game like this to have combat that's just not scary or engaging at all.
I'm gonna wait for a sale, and I recommend that you do too. Especially since the developer slipped the "part one" into the title at the very last minute rather than just being open about it much earlier in the marketing leading up to the game's release. Pretty underhanded tactic.