*IF YOU ARE USING META QUEST INPUTS WITH STEAM VR / STEAM LINK, YOU WILL GET AN ERROR THAT YOU NEED TO CHANGE API. YOU CAN SAFELY IGNORE THIS. - To pause the game, there are community steam input bindings you can grab to map pausing to a double click of the stick, or pause the game with the bottom corner of the PDA pad. The game functions as expected other than this.
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Rogue Incursion is NOT Alien Isolation in VR, and doesn't attempt to be with the range of offensive items you have. What it does give you is the power fantasy of a single marine trying to infiltrate an abandoned, infested base as a last resort.
The game design takes more queues from Resident Evil than Isolation, featuring an expansive base to explore, find new tools, backtrack, and manage your items and ammo that you'll find as you play.
Normal difficulty gives you plenty to take on most threats with relative ease as long as you can react fast enough and land your shots, or plan ahead with strategic setups of motion trackers, grenades, and choke points to cover an area while you handle a task. On harder difficulties the game turns much more into a survival horror, with aliens being much harder to kill and becomes an instant threat as soon as more than 1 are on screen or close enough to execute you.
Interactions in the world have a good amount of weight and reaction that you would hope from a VR title. Some of the default settings like the arm/weapon sway, aimlocking to shoulders, and body models can be disabled from the settings to make the title much more immersive and removing a lot of the problems that many VR veterans will identify as soon as they try to aim a rifle. Turning this off makes it much more natural to other VR games and instantly improves the combat and movement feel. Interacting with the terminals, repairing power conduits, and even using some out of the box thinking like storing an entire area's excess ammo in a cardboard box to carry it to a panic room are all possible, if slightly infuriating when your perfectly collected box of ammo gets kicked over or blown around the room in a fight with an alien. Combat feels weighty enough with the shotgun, pulse rifle and revolver all handling and reloading as you would expect, with everything remaining in their designated body locations even if you drop them in an intense firefight. Set pieces are varied enough throughout the campaign to not feel samey or like you're playing an on-rails experience, with enemy AI being randomised and encounters can play completely differently on a second attempt after a death. You won't find tapdancing xenos who can't navigate a corridor like the days of Colonial Marines.
Design wise, the game looks & sounds great while feeling grounded within the Alien universe, and has a number of options for refining the look, disabling blur effects, film grain, upscaling and framerate locking options to keep the experience consistent, only really experiencing hitches during loading zones in airlocks or elevators. Hendricks, Davis, and the various voice logs and synths all sound natural, even if some timing issues can have you losing the end of one conversation if another is triggered. Davis will have a habit of either reminding you way too often in some specific points, and his constant lying of "That's the last of them" "I'll cover you" and "Area is safe" will get comedicly annoying as he confidently states it while another xeno is making his way between himself and you to tickle the back of your skull with its teeth.
Unfortunately, with the developer getting gutted by WB, its unlikely to either recieve its second and final part to complete the game. However if you can pick it up on sale or in a bundle somewhere, its worth it for fans of the alien universe, and acts as a slight continuation of the events from Isolation, but is mostly self contained. Just don't expect a full game, as the renaming to "Part One" makes it evident that this was not the entire vision of the team, and will likely never be finished without a hail mary from WB.
TL;DR - It's a good game, but as its only half of an experience, don't expect a complete story, knowing this, the asking price is a bit high, but will still give you a good time if you can grab it during a Steam Sale.
