Alien: Rogue Incursion Is Still Fun Despite The Bad Quest Port | Alien: Rogue Incursion Review

So Alien: Rogue Incursion has hit a bit of flak for the quality of its port to the Quest 3. I’ve played this fantastic Alien VR game exclusively on the Quest 3 and I’d say that well… yea there is some justification to the criticism.

The game occasionally struggles on the Quest 3 even when not recording, and my recordings of it often came out choppy at points, which is a pretty good indicator for an unoptimized game. Not to mention the most obvious indicator of the visual fidelity being below what you would be accustomed to expect on a Quest 3.

There were some bugs as well. The occasional missed trigger for a mission (defend this area… and then nothing happens for five minutes).

Though I do have to say that despite all of this I had an absurdly good time with Alien: Rogue Incursion, as you can see on Youtube.

I’m not saying that the criticism of the low quality port isn’t valid. I am saying that I really loved this game despite the issues that others, and myself, have with it. I guess you’d call this an Alien: Rogue Incursion review… but I’m really just biasing towards the good parts here (and there are many more good parts than bad).

What Alien: Rogue Incursion Does Right

Blasting Xenomorphs in Alien: Rogue Incursion is an Unmatched Aliens VR Experience.

So ignoring the technical faults of the Quest 3 port, what does Alien: Rogue Incursion do right that makes it such an enjoyable VR shooter adventure game?

I think the foremost thing that it does, and how it utilizes Virtual Reality the best, is it immediately gives you a pulse rifle. No intermittent period of the game where you just use a pistol or something stupid like that, you just get a pulse rifle at the very beginning.

Oh and what a pulse rifle it is. It’s got the sound, the heft, the feel, and the firepower of a hundred round magazine that you’d expect from such an iconic weapon. Alien: Rogue Incursion has a pulse rifle that is really the closest you could get to using a real one, since they don’t actually exist. It’s a magnificent and iconic weapon to any lover of the Alien franchise.

Check out the Pulse Rifle in Alien: Rogue Incursion.

The other weapons in the game, while not as unique as the pulse rifle, are also all well implemented and fun to use. Though it would be nice if there was a way to turn off the “snap aim” feature the game comes with that forces your sight down the barrel of a weapon when your eye gets close enough to it.

I’d rather aim the old fashioned way, thank you very much, but this is a feature that you can get used to. I’ve also heard some complain about how slow the weapons are to move and load, but that’s another thing that I think is actually really great about this Aliens VR game.

Guns are heavy, and you can reload guns ridiculously quickly in many Virtual Reality games because you don’t feel the weight of them. Well Alien: Rogue Incursion is part horror game, just like all Aliens games are, and the horror of trying to reload a weapon as quickly as possible mid combat should be well known to any VR gamer. Drawing that out and giving the weapons some real heft as you try to aim and load them not only increases the feeling of immersion with the items you are using, but also increases the tension of every situation.

Of course these situations wouldn’t be tense without a proper creepy setting, and Castor’s Cradle is a really good choice. It’s a barren icy planet, and you spend your time there inside of a Xenomorph infested clandestine research base. It is about as grim and creepy a setting as you could hope for out in space. The place is trashed, it’s cold, and it’s creepy.

Castor’s Cradle is your classic creepy Alien infested facility… but now in a Virtual Reality shooter!

The Xenomorphs themselves, the titular Aliens, also make a pretty fine showing. Though they may also draw criticism as being “not clever” or running into your gunfire too easily.

Sure the Aliens take chances on frontal charges often, but also consider that in this game you have a motion tracker on you at all times. If you consider the Aliens to be too dumb, then turn that tracker off and never use it. It gets a lot harder to even know when a Xenomorph is nearby, and twice as much so to be looking in their direction as they charge you.

Every sound might be an Alien in a vent sneaking up on you. They really are hard to see, and often flee or try to attack you from another angle when a frontal assault isn’t expedient. Though you can tell that they don’t try to attack you from behind as much as they could. Likely for balance purposes.

Let’s face it, fighting a facility full of Aliens that are as stealthy and clever as those in the movies would be a suicide mission.

Where Are All Of The VR RPGs?

Seriously, where are all of the good VR RPGs?

Okay, sure, you might be thinking that there are “real” VR RPGs out there. You might point to The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners as an early example, or maybe Skydance’s Behemoth or even Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR.

Well the Bethesda VR ports are only decent with a ton of mods so they don’t really count. I’m talking about out of the box VR RPG games with meaningful choices and character customization, but made for Virtual Reality.

Take games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as more recent examples. Games that give you expansive choices, a huge world to explore, and a path of character progression and story exploration that isn’t just a linear series of challenges. Are there any Virtual Reality games that really give you the same level of world immersion and personal choice as those do?

There Are Some VR Games That Are Close To Being Roleplaying Games in Virtual Reality

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners might be close… but it’s really more of a survival game with a good story than a real RPG.

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is superb, but it’s not a VR RPG.

Sure there are some story choices that are meant to feel impactful, but you don’t really customize your character, just decide which upgrades to invest in until you’ve got them all.

Maybe you’d point to A Township Tale or Asgard’s Wrath 2 as VR RPGs worth mentioning. Still… where’s the in depth character customization? Where are the decisions that affect the story and world? These games come closer, but they just aren’t quite there.

These VR games all really just give you multiple avenues to get to the same result. Even Medieval Dynasty VR doesn’t give you greater choice than where to build your first settlement.

Crafting doesn’t make a VR RPG, though some crafting systems, like in Medieval Dynasty VR, are pretty great.

Oh, and before Legendary Tales is mentioned… it’s just too shallow and linear of a game to be an RPG. The same goes for Grimlord. You do get stat choices, but these games are just so damn linear at the end of the game that you never get that RPG feeling of exploring a huge world. They’re more binary choices between more health or more damage. Nothing that feels like you’re creating your own vision of a character exploring the world you are presented with.

At the end of the day the choices in those games really boil down to whether you use a bow or a sword or magic. Is this really a bigger choice than what gun you use in a VR survival shooter? Maybe I’m being too picky there, and as much as I love those games they just don’t give much of that RPG feeling.

So What Would A True Virtual Reality RPG look like?

It’s hard to define a genre, so let’s look at a supremely popular recent example for some inspiration. Baldur’s Gate 3.

In this game you get to choose your character and class and background. There are meaningful characters you interact with, and how you interact with them decides what happens in the story and what challenges you need to overcome.

You have equipment and items and stats that are all meaningful and impact what you can do and how you do it. Do you smash your way through the door or lockpick it?

Maybe something like Into The Radius can argue that your choice of equipment as you progress through the game makes it an RPG. Despite Into The Radius being a superb VR game, it’s just still not an RPG. It does give you a great world to explore, but no characters to interact with and no meaningful progression choices that can’t just be changed by grinding out more missions and artifacts for a different piece of equipment.

Into The Radius lets you customize your equipment… but those are the only meaningful roleplaying choices you get.

If you don’t agree with the premise of this article you might start seeing what I mean. There is so much potential for a Roleplaying Game in Virtual Reality.

Low strength score? Then maybe if you try to pick up a huge hammer your VR arms are barely able to move it. High perception score? Then secret doors and tunnels are highlighted or interactable when they otherwise wouldn’t be. Sided with one character over another? Then you get a completely different mission depending on who you picked, and the content of that mission reflects the type of character you decided to side with.

VR games that are RPG-lite don’t make you make meaningful choices with long lasting impact. They more just end up with your grinding to the same conclusion.

Orbus VR is probably the closest thing that we have to a real VR RPG, but its an inherently Multiplayer experience, being a VR MMORPG and all. There’s even Morrowind VR, but it’s a mod and doesn’t really count either.

Why? There are so many ways in which VR specifically can be leveraged to create new and interesting RPG mechanics that haven’t been thought of or utilized yet. Years ago I had hoped that the first big Virtual Reality RPG was just right around the corner, but every project I’ve kept my eye on or hoped for has flopped or been stuck in development hell with a buggy and forgettable demo.

The first developer to put the Roleplaying into RPG in a game made for Virtual Reality will have a true hit on their hands. I just wish we would have already seen one by now.

If I’m wrong and there’s an example out there that I haven’t seen or somehow forgotten about then please let me know. I’d absolutely love to be proven wrong.

Clone Drone In The Hyperdome Combines Character Drama And VR Sword Combat

Clone Drone In The Hyperdome is the most dramatic VR Sword Fighting Game I have ever seen, and if you want to see some gameplay of it you can on the Reality Remake Youtube Channel.

As for what I mean by the “most dramatic” VR sword fighting game… it’s that this game is basically part Soap Opera, part Survivor episode, and part VR combat roguelike. The bosses you fight aren’t just bosses. They’re characters in their own right with stories of their own.

How Clone Drone In the Hyperdome Works

In Clone Drone In The Hyperdome you are a new clone drone that must fight and scheme your way to the hyperdome.

To make sense of how this all works let me set the stage for you.. You’re a human mind inside of a robot body and you’re the newest member of the clone drones fighting through the never ending “Crash Loop” on an alien planet.

You’ve got to run this loop full of sword fighting robots and other dangers over and over again alongside your fellow “Loop Runner” robots. Each has a special ability “fist” that they drop when defeated. So you start your loop and then fight some generic robot enemies… until you decide which of your follow “Loop Runners” you want to fight.

The runner you pick to fight first is important, because if you defeat them then you’ve “KOed” them. KOs look very bad and nobody wants to be KOed so if you KO a character then they get very mad at you. That’s the basis for the drama.

Your Story Choices Do Actually Kind Of Matter In Clone Drone In The Hyperdome

Unlike most Virtual Reality roguelikes you get to choose which bosses you fight in Clone Drone In The Hyperdome.

Clone Drone In the Hyperdome wants to get you to buy into the drama of its characters through the gameplay.

Of course before you even start picking who to KO and really start playing the game, there’s an introductory bit that reveals and explains each of the other characters who you fight during the loop. They’re all essentially bosses… except unlike in most Roguelikes you get to choose which ones you fight… and there’s some personal story incentive for which one you choose.

Myself, for instance, immediately didn’t like the attitude of a cocky robot called MX2. They and their mentor Overclock immediately rubbed me the wrong way, so I kept KOing MX2 and Overclock exclusively. Due to this they had words to share with me each time a run was finished, and other loop runners liked me more for not KOing them… especially those that were not fans of MX2 and Overclock.

The clone drone that you play as is completely silent, but the others are all extremely talkative. You’ll often enter the loading room between matches and they’re spouting monologues off at each other like WWE wrestlers, going on about their theories and past dramas.

There’s a lot of drama and arguments between characters to be witnessed in Clone Drone In The Hyperdome.

What’s most interesting about all of this is that this drama not only affects your choices of which of these “boss” loop runners to fight yourself, but also who they fight. Overlock will not KO MX2, and MX2 and Knight Mode have a preexisting squabble that causes them to KO each other all of the time.

So you can always play your opponents off of each other and choose which one you fight not only for your own preferences but also for who you think you are most likely to beat. There’s an interesting interplay of drama and roguelike systems in Clone Drone In the Hyperdome, as well as some interesting VR melee combat.

Strayed VR Is Just As Ruthless As Rust

As evidenced by the Youtube videos I’ve released showcasing some gameplay stories in Strayed, it is worthy of being called a Rust VR Game. That’s probably why everyone call is that (it’s also good for SEO).

You can look at a lot of elements in Strayed and say “Oh so they just did what Rust did, but in a Virtual Reality game.” That’s pretty true, and I don’t see anybody else other than Combat Waffle Studios rushing to make another Multiplayer VR Base Building survival game ala Rust. So I’d also hesitate to try and call Strayed a copy of any sort because well… VR is a whole different medium from flatscreen games. Either way somebody is going to make a game like Rust in Virtual Reality eventually.

I’m glad it’s Strayed that is currently really shining as that VR Rust game though. Outside of the fact that you spawn in as a naked baldy and that a lot of weapons and structures sort of fit the scrappy apocalyptic Rust aesthetic, it really nails the Rust feel in VR in the way that matters the most.

It is an absolutely ruthless game.

Strayed Is As Rust Is - A Dog Eat Dog World

In Strayed it’s all about having better equipment than the other guy… and then taking the other guy’s stuff.

Just like in Rust, Strayed nails the feeling of living in a world where the strong prey on the weak. That’s evidenced through the progression of the game.

You don’t get better stats to get more powerful, you get better equipment to get more powerful. You start with a rock that is a barely capable of hurting someone when you hit them with it. You can quickly upgrade that to a bat by hitting a tree. Hit a tree and a rock and gather some plants and you’ve got a bow.

With a bow you can easily defeat anyone with a melee weapon. Boom, you’ve moved up the Strayed food chain. Now you can look down on the people who are just like you just were, practically unarmed. You can take them out with ease.

Someone who has managed to scavenge or craft a gun and ammunition for it though… they’re still a level above you.

Every upgrade feels like going another rung up the totem pole in Strayed, much like in Rust.

Even a pistol is very superior to a bow, unless you’ve got a ton of practice and are fantastically accurate with a bow. Of course even then the armor either party wears can be the deciding factor in who walks away with the other person’s stuff and who respawns in their base with nothing.

Up and up the food chain goes until you’ve got the best armor in the game, pipe bombs, healing syringes, and assault rifles. Even then, when you’re the most powerful player around and you can take anything from whoever you come across… what if you run across a large group of players? There is strength in numbers.

The ability to take what other people have gathered in Strayed with just a little bit of force can easily propel you through tons of otherwise tedious gathering and scavenging, and it’s much more fun to fight than to grind. So people naturally do that in Strayed just as they would in Rust. That is the best way Strayed continues the legacy of Rust, but as a Virtual Reality experience.

At a certain level most people aren’t even threats anymore.

It is this more than anything else that gives Strayed the moniker of a Rust VR game, and why that title is so fitting. People who know they stand no chance against you because of your equipment advantage will mostly beg for mercy, and people above you in regards to equipment will generally shoot first and ask questions later. You’re just a free bag full of gathered valuables to them.

The only separator is stuff. Equipment, armor, weapons, and whatever else you can store in your base is all that differentiates you from the horde of nakeds freshly spawned on the beaches. Lose those things and you are back to square one no matter how much you scavenged or how many fights you succeeded in.

Of course you can always reject violent human nature and try to encourage peace and understanding. You could work together with those you come across and try to succeed more together.

Where is the fun in that? There’s only so much scavenge to go around in any given area and well… any stranger could easily ambush you if you turn your back to them.

Strayed, much like Rust, is an apocalyptic dog eat dog game.

3 FANTASTIC VR Soccer Games And VR Football Games

I’ve talked about a lot of fantastic VR sports games here on Reality Remake. From VR American Football games, to VR tennis games, to even a fantastic VR Pickleball game.

Now let’s finally get around to talking about fantastic Virtual Reality games that let you play the most popular sport in the world, Soccer (or football if you prefer).

There’s finally some fantastic VR Soccer Games and VR Football Games to talk about, so let’s crack right into it and talk about the best ones you can try right now.

VRFS - VR Football Soccer Simulator

The VRFS - VR Football Soccer Simulator Logo.

You might be thinking that the number one thing which makes VR Soccer hard to pull off is that VR devices don’t have very good foot tracking (unless you have some very specific extra hardware).

Well VRFS tackles this problem by making a VR Football game that turns your hands into your feet! Your height is calibrated so that if you leave your arms hanging at your sides the feet extending from your hands will reach the ground. After all why would you need hands in a game that is played entirely with your feet anyway?

Unless you’re a goalie of course, but you can switch to being a goalie as well in VRFS, and that turns your hands back into hands.

You can be a player or a goalie in VRFS.

VRFS - VR Football Soccer Simulator really does its best to be a Virtual Reality Soccer simulator. Though when you’re used to playing real soccer it is awfully strange to go from kicking the ball with your feet to kicking the ball with your arms.

Still, the tutorial does a great job of getting you familiar with the concept, and the practice field gives you a lot of different ways to practice playing soccer with your arms instead of your feet.

This VR Soccer Game also features some AI bots that you can play against, though at the time of writing this they’re not much to speak of. The real magic of VRFS is in the multiplayer.

Kicking the ball with your arms instead of your feet takes some getting used to in any of these VR Football Games.

That’s where this game really shines. You can freely join any of the Multiplayer lobbies out there and just hop into a pickup game of soccer. Some are more rules light, and some more rules heavy.

Getting the hang of kicking the ball properly and also managing your stamina, which determines whether you can run more quickly or not for a short period of time, isn’t simple, and VRFS is a solid VR Football experience. It’s easy to pick up and yet hard to master, with a lot of other opponents to play against others online.

There are other Soccer VR games that work just like VRFS, such as Premier League Player and Soccer VR. These games also replace your hands with feet and have you play Football in VR that way. I’d still recommend VRFS over those games though since VRFS is free and is just as high quality as those other games, though Premier League Player does have a bit more polish and the official backing of a soccer league.

VRFS excels in giving you a great multiplayer Soccer VR Game.

Premier League Player also has a mode which recreates some fantastic plays that really happened in Football games of the Premier League, which is a very impressive feature. Though unfortunately the Multiplayer is not as good as it is in VRFS. Still, if you want a paid option with a bit more polish then give Premier League Player a look.

CleanSheet Soccer

The CleanSheet Logo.

CleanSheet is a little more of a limited Soccer VR game. Instead of trying to abstract VR Football by simulating your feet it just keeps your feet removed entirely as most Virtual Reality games do.

So what does that mean? It means that CleanSheet is entirely about being a goalie.

That being said that doesn’t make CleanSheet a limited or boring game. It is the best goalie simulator in existence out there, and you can have it running in your VR headset whenever you like.

Blocking a shot in CleanSheet. This is a fantastic VR Goalie Game.

There’s the typical ball machine randomly shooting ball towards your goal that you might expect, but also so much more than that. There are special challenges, and the AI can run plays to try and get past your defense of your goal. You can even recreate famous shots from real life Football games!

There are also various competitive multiplayer modes, like one where you and an opponent launch balls at each other’s goals and attempt to block them. Though you launch the balls with a cannon instead of your feet. Still, it seems like very a very fun idea. Though unfortunately it’s kind of hard to find an opponent.

CleanSheet is a fantastic VR Goalie trainer and another fun VR exercise game that makes for a fantastic warm up to a more intense workout session. It truly tests your reflexes.

Though I will say that it is much easier (and safer) to defend your goal space if you have a larger playspace to physically move around in. Not to mention physically diving for a ball while wearing a VR headset is NOT a good idea.

While other Football VR Games do offer goal keeping in addition to other positions, none do goal keeping as well as CleanSheet. Though unlike other games on this list, it is not free.

Motion Soccer

The Motion Soccer Logo.

You might be reading this list of VR Soccer Games and be wondering “Why doesn’t somebody just make a FIFA VR game?”

Well if that’s what you want to see then luckily for you you’ll find a Virtual Reality Football Experience that is somewhat similar to FIFA in Motion Soccer.

At the time of writing this game was recently released on the Meta store and Steam as well. There is a free version that you can try without paying a cent on either platform.

There are three different ways to play Motion Soccer that you can mix and match. This is what makes this a VR FIFA game.

What separates Motion Soccer from other VR Football games is that instead of purely controlling a single player as in VRFS, you can freely swap between players on your team.

This is what makes this a sort of FIFA VR Game despite not being officially affiliated with any football league. You’re not just playing as an individual player, you’re playing as the whole team and you can switch between players whenever you like.

So there’s no holding a spot and hoping you get the ball. You can always be the one with the ball. Just look at the player you want to control and press the grip button.

There’s even a third person view mode that lets you view the entire field and control your players from a god’s eye view just like in FIFA.

Passes, kicks, slide tackles, Motion Soccer lets you do it all using your controller joysticks and buttons.

That’s one of three different methods for controlling your players that you get in Motion Soccer. You can also swap your hands with feet just like in other Football VR Games mentioned here, and there’s a goalie mode as well that has you using your hands to block shots.

If you don’t like the idea of using your hands as feet to play VR Soccer though, then you will be excited to hear that Motion Soccer also has a mode that uses just your joysticks to control where your player goes and dribbles the ball, and you shoot just by pointing at where you want the ball to go and pressing trigger.

So if you want to get a fantastic first person VR Soccer experience without having to learn how to dribble and shoot with your arms then Motion Soccer has you covered. All of the intense first person Football experience, but none of the awkward controls. It plays like a first person VR FIFA with the option to get close to the ball or zoom out for a more tactical experience.

You can command your players on the field from the top down just like in FIFA… but in Virtual Reality.

Though at the time of writing Motion Soccer does have a bit of an unpolished feel to it, and I encountered a few bugs while playing it. None of these bugs broke the game entirely though. While there is a free version of the game that lets you do the tutorials, trainings, and 3v3 matches, to play the Singleplayer campaign you’ll have to pay for the pro version.

Well that’s all the fantastic VR Football and VR Soccer games that I’ve got for you. However you decide to get on the pitch in Virtual Reality, enjoy!