Thank you Survios for providing us with a review copy!

Alien is a franchise I had not experienced much of personally. The most impactful personal experience I had with it until recently had been playing Alien: Isolation over a decade ago. When I got a chance to review this game, I'd already seen a full playthrough on YouTube, but I figured I'd give the Switch 2 version a go. And then...I finally got the chance to see Alien and Aliens. I've seen my fair share of old movies that simply didn't live up to the pedestals many people had put them on (*cough* Highlander *cough*). But Alien & Aliens? They are rightly regarded as two of the best horror and action movies, respectively. All that to say, I generally like the Alien franchise, and the setting makes for great action and horror when the story makes good use of it.

Alien: Rogue Incursion (Part 1) was originally a VR experience that released in 2024. In September of 2025, the game was re-released as Alien: Rogue Incursion (Part 1) Evolved Edition, modified to be a typical first person survival horror experience and released on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Playstation 5. The final leg of the evolutionary journey came in April 2026 when it finally made its way to the Switch 2 a whole $10 cheaper than it costs for the other platforms! Not only does the Switch 2 have the benefit of being a mobile console, but it's also got the mouse Joy-Con controls to play this like a real mouse-controlled FPS (first person shooter). What could be better? (Answer: the graphics...and the controls...but we'll get to that.)

A:RI(P1)EE gives players control of one Zula Hendricks, an ex-military combatant with some unknown back injury. She is accompanied by a synthetic named Davis, who is himself well versed in the art of combat and emotionally invested in Zula's well-being. The two head to a research site where an old friend of Zula's named Ben Carver has sent her a warning that something shady is going on and she is needed to help stop it. What follows is what you'd expect: another company with no morals was attempting to weaponize the xenomorphs for profit, lost control of them, and the site is now completely infested by them. Your goal is to find Ben and stop the local xenomorph menace.

The game is more action horror than survival horror. You get an arsenal of guns with which to defend yourself, proximity mines, a motion detector, and enough injectable healing items to supply a small army. While you may run low on any one weapon's ammunition, you'll basically never find yourself completely tapped. There are lockers, lock boxes, and shelves brimming with consumables in every room. The biggest threat the xenos pose is that they are sneaky, though never so sneaky that they don't hiss at you long before they pounce. On the one hand, it's nerve wracking to hear the sound of them, then spend the next several seconds desperately flinging your camera around to try and find them before they get to you. On the other, it does take a little of the tension out of the whole experience when you are always alerted to the presence of a xeno nearby by its hiss and the sudden musical queue telling you that you're in danger.

Beyond the gunfighting, the gameplay mostly involves exploring the complex, reading messages at terminals to piece the story together, and the occasional "reroute power at a power junction" mini-game to gain access to various locations. I actually found these puzzles a little confusing, because it seems like sometimes, there are multiple outputs that cannot all be powered at once, but the item they power seems to stay powered even after you've routed power to something else. This doesn't happen all the time, but it did happen enough to make me think I was doing something wrong.

Graphically, Rogue Incursion is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, its got a very cohesive look and feel; the entire research station feels right at home in the Alien universe. On the other hand, the actual fidelity of the graphics leave more than a bit to be desired. I know that the Switch 2 doesn't have the same graphics processing capabilities as the other modern consoles, but so many of the game's textures feel...well, textureless and smooth. The Switch 2 version has two graphics modes: Performance and Quality. I played on Quality for less than 5 minutes; the frame rate was below 30 frames per second (fps), which was an immediate dealbreaker for me. Not only that, but comparing the graphics between the two modes, I personally couldn't tell a difference. There must be some, though, because Performance boosts the fps up to a reasonable level, probably between 45-60. Not only that, there were several actual graphical bugs, including one where I was stuck in the game for a fair bit of time because a door showed as not being totally open when it actually was. There was one instance where parts of the walls simply didn't load in and you could see through the map. The xenomorphs, who can crawl along the walls and ceilings, are constantly clipping through terrain and objects. And when Davis talks, his mouth movements would frequently just freeze up. Add to that the incredibly long load times, even in Performance mode, and it made for an overall underwhelming experience.

Luckily, the music and sound showed up to work. The game is incredibly atmospheric, and the music and sound effects really hammer home the tension of each situation. In those moments when something loud is going off, like an alarm or an airlock sequence, you find yourself flicking your gaze into every corner, just knowing a xenomorph is making its way towards you. My one complaint is that, in many instances, it is easy to accidentally cut off dialog between Zula and Davis by simply walking too far towards the next objective.

There were a few times where the music and sound couldn't save the atmosphere, though. Specifically, near the end of the game, there is this big new area you gain access to, with a lot of extra side rooms to explore. However, the game just throws a pair of xenomorphs at you every few minutes, like it's trying to force you forward. It was one of the few portions of the game where the alien threat became less stressful and more annoying. This was the worst of it, but it does happen during multiple points of the game. There are terminals everywhere for you to piece the story together, but very often you'll have to quickly back out of one when you hear the telltale hiss of an approaching alien, dispatch it, re-enter the terminal, and get back to what you were reading. For a game that has a ton of exploration options, they rely too much on random encounters as opposed to scripted ones to keep the tension at the precise levels the series is better known for.

Then there are the controls. Playing with the Joy-Cons normally is fine; it's a first person shooter with two joysticks, so it's not going to be anyone's favorite playstyle. Luckily, the game does give the player gyroscopic aiming options. I opted to only have this enabled when aiming down my guns' sights. But of course, this is the Switch 2, which means we have to talk about mouse aiming. Honestly, given that this is my third review title utilizing that feature, I have the same 3 problems with the mouse aiming in all three games:

1. The mouse pads on the Joy-Con strap do not make for an easy gliding experience if you do not have a perfectly flat surface or a mouse pad on hand.
2. The sensitivity of the mouse sensor is often not enough to give you the fine control you'd actually want from a mouse. In this title especially, the game would sometimes just forget that I was using the right Joy-Con in mouse mode unless I moved the mouse a significant distance again. This could be fixed by simply changing the settings to have mouse mode always enabled by a Settings menu option as opposed to auto-detecting the mouse sensor movement.
3. Most importantly, when you are holding the right Joy-Con in mouse mode, you cannot feasibly reach the A/B/X/Y buttons, and yet the game still expects you to use them. Your right thumb naturally rests directly on the right joystick, which you now no longer need while in mouse mode. I wish the game developers would switch the right joystick to take over the functions of A/B/X/Y by flicking it in the four cardinal directions; that would actually make this mode viable.

Given that this title was also released for PC, and given that Cyberpunk 2077's Switch 2 port actually worked with a real mouse and keyboard plugged in, I did try that same trick, but unfortunately, it's Joy-Cons or bust.

Morally, if you've seen the Alien movies, you've got a pretty good idea of what to expect here. Every major curse word is thrown around: s**t, f**k, d**n, a**, FUBAR, and the use of God's name in vain. On the sexual front, some homosexual couples are mentioned in the logs around the station. And there is corruption of various kinds present. Audio logs show the research company threatening the lives and livelihoods of employees who take umbrage with what they are doing. More logs show that the company is buying lobotomized death row patients and purposely impregnating them with the xenomorphs. Zula herself is listed as being AWOL and having a history of fratricide, so even the protagonist's hands aren't clean.

But the biggest concern is the violence. Blood is everywhere around the station, and you will stumble across many a corpse. The aliens bleed a yellowish-green acid when shot. There is also a dream Zula has of a chestburster ripping through her chest, and a time when you see a chestburster emerge from another victim's chest while you are just inches away from it. The xenomorphs can tear through you with their tails, graphically piercing through you like a spear. One part of the game requires severing a synth's head with a torch, then plugging it into a device by jamming probes directly into its ear, temple, and eyeball. (For those unaware, synths are very human-like in appearance, with white blood and human facial features.)

Alien: Rogue Incursion (Part 1) Evolved Edition, at the end of the day, is fun, atmospheric, and has a great story that I am very interested to see the second part of. The relationship between Zula and Davis is emotional enough to make you love both characters, but not so much that it takes away from the fear you experience walking the darkened research halls. Where the game ultimately falls short is in its graphical presentation, which simply leaves something to be desired on the Switch 2 compared to the more graphically-advanced consoles and PC. The Switch 2 version may not be THE way to experience the Alien menace, but if it's the console you have, at least it is A way to experience them. And credit where it's due: the $10 drop in the price tag does at least make up for that. If you are a lover of the Alien franchise and want a game that lets you confront the xenos head on, Rogue Incursion is a fun entry.

- maestro_dana