izigame.me

Overall conclusion

A worthy spin-off successor of Alien: Isolation. Ties in indirectly with the pancake game, and brings it fully to VR, with tactile and physical gameplay, delightful combat, and a 10 to 20-hour campaign. I can highly recommend the game, I can even say it's my "VR Game of the Year" for 2024. But I have some criticisms, if you want to know them, read on.

Lore and narrative

For starters, the protagonist, Zula Hendricks, was not created for this game. She has debuted on the Dark Horse comics Aliens: Defiance in 2016 and took part of several other works: Aliens: Defiance - Extravehicular, Aliens: Resistance, Aliens: Rescue, the Alien: Isolation novel, Alien: Prototype and Alien: Inferno's Fall. She met and befriended Amanda Ripley from Alien: Isolation after the events of that game, so there's a tie-in, even if indirect.
Zula has a companion, Davis One, a former mass-produced combat android that somehow found a way to reprogram itself, got some kind of "humanity", and uses glasses to differentiate itself from the other androids.
I didn't find the story of the game to be bad. It's good, not excellent, and I'm a guy that will notice every detail, and I've also paid attention to every audio note I heard and I have read every terminal message on the game even with the alien danger looming around. These messages could be better, almost all of them are boring mentions that don't help world-building nor reveal anything interesting, and sometimes the messages are repeated in different places.
Alex White (in an interview about the game here) wrote the story, with the narrative lead being Zoe Quinn, of GamerGate fame when she traded some favors for favorable reviews of her game.

Gamergate? Is this game "woke"?

Yes and no. If you take into consideration the writers, it should be awfully replete with identity politics tropes. However, the game has kept these down to a minimum. Namely, maybe these parts:
* A female character, Eunice, with a female voice, has several repeated mentions of having a wife, as if nudging the player to understand it's a same-sex relationship. Curiously enough, today's sensitivity trainings usually say that "wife" is a loaded word that can trigger LGBT people.
* All female characters are virtuous. All the villains are male.
* Not sure if that counts but there's an android with a male body and a female voice, called "Helen".
* The choice of the character might be seen as a "diversity choice" but has a lot of plausible deniability going for it, since she's tied to Amanda Ripley and an established character in the alien universe.
As an anecdotal experiment, my wife is a black woman not too different from the protagonist, so to see if she liked being represented in an alien movie I insisted dozens of times to get her playing the game, almost to the point we had a fight because she didn't like the setting. So much for representation.
I also have read Aliens: Defiance to understand the character better but I found it so full of plot holes that it gave me trypophobia. Therefore, I couldn't bear reading the other books. The game is much better than the comics in that regard, but I still found a number of plot holes on it, not going to list them (6 or 7) because it would be spoilers and make this review too long.

VR controls, options and comfort

The game has all the needed VR options, locomotion vs teleport, snap or smooth turn, the dreadfull vignette effect and a few others. During the game your hands don't pass through objects, many objects can be grabbed and thrown with realistic physics, many interactions are done with the hands like levers. Your inventory can be accessed with a button showing holograms of the items which you grab, and there are assigned slots on your body to draw your weapons/items from (shotgun from the left shoulder, rifle from the right shoulder, revolver from the right belt, grenate from the left arm, health from the left wrist, etc.). Reloading each gun is different, with a spatial sphere from your belt where you can grab the ammunition (which is a trainable skill you acquire since the volume is small). It fits the bill but I would constantly miss the location when doing it.
A big downside of the game, currently, is performance. It can get stuttery and lagged sometimes and I could not find the pattern for that, and a reboot usually fixes it. I am using Linux via ALVR to run the game but it seems to be the same on Windows and the developers recommend OculusVR or Virtual Desktop instead of SteamVR to play it for performance reasons. I hope they can optimize the game with newer patches.

Graphics, effects and ambience

They completely nailed the alien ambiance. The effects are good, convincing, resemble the movies and Alien: Isolation. The aesthetics is perfect and the environments realistic. The snow is very well done. The weapons and devices are the same as in the alien movies.
One thing that's not well done though is the gore. It looks made for small children, because none of the bodies show signs of having any physical harm and even the blood color is unrealistic. There are no dismemberments, guts, body parts or exposed wounds. At one point in the game there is an alien fetus extraction but the body cavity of the person shows just a fleshy hollow space with no organs, guts or even blood, it feels like a joke out of place.

Gameplay

That's fortunately the best part of the game. In Alien: Isolation you had for most of the game one alien alone that was immortal, so you just had to distract and hide from it. In this game they evoke the same kind of fear, but you are a fully armed (former) colonial marine and can fight back and kill aliens, but it's just that even a little distraction or timing mishap could mean your end. The battles with the aliens (and facehuggers) are tense and meaningful and the more progress you have, the more numerous alien batches you face. Ammunition is scarce and you need to learn to reload your weapons quickly. You don't battle androids or humans at any part, so enemy variety is low, but there is an alien boss fight.
The saving works by docking your tablet on a "panic room" computer. This is a perfectly safe room (when it's closed) where you can ensure you are not caught. Some segments save your game even when you are not in this panic room.
The tablet holds your information for the game. The unfolded map -- which you have to check manually, and that's a nice addition, make the gameplay much more immersive -- the inventory, and some notes. It would be good if it had a section for all the mails you've checked, since the moments you read these you are not safe and must read in a hurry.

Part I/Part II blunder

A couple of the days before release, the developers changed the cover art of the game to instead of showing "Alien: Rogue Incursion", showed "Alien: Rogue Incursion - part I". This was a terrible PR blunder, but without going to the reasons of why they did that (which would be speculation anyways), I didn't find bad myself. The game ends with a cliffhanger -- as did Alien: Isolation in 2014 -- and I completed it in 20 hours, there are people saying they did it in 10 hours. It's a full game in VR, which has shorter gameplay sessions that a pancake game, so it seems the right size for me, specially for the relatively low price it has. I liked the cliffhanger ending and I am looking forward to play part II -- I was actually very happy that a second game was announced, and will buy it in pre-sales if they allow it. I don't want to wait 10+ years like in the case of Alien: Isolation.
I have some sample gameplay of the game in my youtube channel, for example this one. Browse the channel for more videos, including the ending with credits.