Let’s discuss Incursion: Red River. I’m going to cut straight to saving your cheeky breeky wallet and give it to you straight: do not buy this game. I cannot stress how important it is that you heed some caution with this one on the Steam page: The game is not a singleplayer nor coop Tarkov experience. The game is not even a shell of a singleplayer Tarkov experience. I say this as someone who desperately wants Escape from Tarkov, or its competitors, to make a competent solo experience that tries to match the highs and lows that Tarkov provides, Incursion Red River is not it.
I’d actually venture to say that even for a pre-alpha experience, Incursion shows all of the signs of being a game that will never come into its own. The developer, or developers, show great ability to copy aspects of EFT: The weapon inspection system, the ammunition descriptions, weapon modibility, fire modes, magazine checks, hell, even double tapping the reload button to get your character to drop his magazine instead of putting it in his vest or bag for quicker reloads, that’s all in there.
But this doesn’t mean it’s in there in the same way it’s in Tarkov’s genetic makeup, not at all. If Tarkov is a painting on a linen canvas, then incursion is an outlined attempt to copy its surface-level details with crayons on construction paper in the hopes to pawn it off to suckers as an interesting take on the original.
According to the Steam reviews, this hope has been moderately successful. People are praising the game for being a potential Tarkov replacement for those who want a single-player or coop experience. Some of them are praising the game as something that has long-term potential, and others are pointing out that the game isn’t quality enough in its current state to justify a cheap purchase. I’d expand on that by saying if the game was free, it still wouldn’t be worth your time.
Now here’s the thing, when these people recommend the game because it has long-term potential, I do disagree. Not because it doesn’t have long-term potential, that’s inherently true as far as anyone who isn’t the developer is aware. I disagree because you shouldn’t be spending your money on a game that might be worthwhile in the future. Thirteen dollars spent on Incursion isn’t an investment, it’s a gamble. And it’s a gamble that I think will end with the developers ultimately abandoning their product, and we’ll go over why I think that. But for starters, just know that the gameplay you see here is not the developers taking a formula and expanding on it. It’s actually the developers taking a formula, quickly strapping the easiest variables to the rig, and setting it out to work a corner on the Steam page. That’s my interpretation of what’s happening.
If you check the Games of Tomorrow GmbH’s steam page, you’ll see that Incursion is their only title so far. Operation: Harsh Doorstep is also listed, but this is because that a game developed by a different studio that has jerry-rigged itself to Incursion in a bundle. In fact, Harsh Doorstep seems to be a game that’s bundled with a shit ton of other games my god!
Incursion is GmbH’s only title, it’s managed to succeed in vaguely copying Escape from Tarkov in certain aspects, it’s been released in a pre-alpha, bare-bones state, and it barely displays any signs of wanting to be its own piece of art. Although I will say the work that’s gone into building up the story surrounding its location in Vietnam is at the very least intriguing.
To me, this reeks of a game that will never be finished. A game that’s final state will be beta-stage at best. I could be wrong, but I implore you to at least head some caution and save your money for the time being. Now let’s talk specifics.
The meat of the game is the gunplay. You have a hideout with a stash and quest givers, but the main reason you’re playing this game is to shoot people with your friends, right? The gunplay is not fun. It’s decently constructed from the player’s point of view, at least in terms of recoil and weapon models, but the combat itself is against simple, unimaginative AI.
In a game that wants to be Escape from Tarkov but “offline”, it’s important that the AI you fight be leaps and bounds ahead of at least the Scavs in Tarkov, but the AI in incursion is legitimately boring to fight. They see you, turn and shoot, and walk towards you. That’s it.
You will not feel as though you’re put to task with any level of difficulty playing this game. The loot you get through rummaging through crates or killing enemies is never in any real danger unless you get just extremely unlucky or stop paying attention altogether.
If you do get hit, your armor’s rating is dropped a bit and you can pop a medical item to get your HP back. From what I gathered, these HP items are instant uses and don’t cause any side effects, though I might be wrong about that if something is working under the hood that I didn’t notice. If I am right, the healing system is akin to picking up a medkit in doom. Classic.
But you know what, a lot of people play Tarkov for the immersion of the thing. They hardly care about the combat at all, despite its strengths, so does Incursion have any of that going for it?
No.
Part of the draw of Tarkov’s immersion comes from the visuals. Weapon models, character models, clothing models, ammunition flying out of your rifle’s chamber, magazines being swapped, all of that in Tarkov looks amazing, and all of that in Incursion looks pixilated and overall just worse in quality.
All of what I just said can be applied to the audio of both games as well. Tarkov is known for having crisp, realistic audio for everything from the thumping of boots running along the ground to the clacks of magazines being exchanged, bullets being loaded into a mag, and weapons firing. The audio system despite its occasional flaws with directional and height accuracy, is a joy to listen to. You don’t even need to fire your weapon or get into danger to enjoy playing Tarkov as an immersive player. Just moving around the map is content worth playing. Incursion’s audio is, like everything else, barebones. And I know for a lot of these complaints, the easy argument to make is “Well, it’s in early access, so of course it’s barebones.”
Before going any further, yes, I am aware that Incursion has a planned roadmap.
I think the “early access” argument is foolish, and I think it’s an argument that a lot of early access games rely on to deflect genuine criticisms made against their foundations. A game being in early access is a reasonable defense for why a particular aspect of that game is unfinished, bugged, or simply needs improvement. It is not a reasonable defense for a game that lacks any sense of original vision or refuses to make its intentions known to the player. As far as I was aware, all I was playing was a game developed in Unreal Engine with surface-level aspects of EFT slapped on it with some basic AI placed at key points in the one map available.
The developers clearly want to explore the singleplayer niche of extraction shooters, and again, I think that isn’t just great for me as a fan of extraction shooters but is very smart from a business standpoint, and I haven’t seen anyone else manage that sort of niche well in recent times unless you count games like Darkest Dungeon in that, which clearly don’t lean into the military crowd despite having an extraction looter aspect to them.
Incursion is in early access, and I don’t think that has any bearing on the criticisms I’ve made so far. The game has no discernable features to set itself aside from anything else on the market today, and there is no system it currently shows off that could be worked on for the next thousand years that can change that. It’s just a poorly made, contentless shooter at this point.
Consider the game’s identity from the perspective of someone inspecting in-game items. Double-click on a stack of rounds and you’ll be given information regarding their caliber and construction.
“The 5.45x39mm PS gzh is a Soviet/Russian military cartridge known for its penetration and stopping power, it features a 7.9g bullet with a heat-strengthened steelcore and lead tip, enclosed in a durable bimetallic jacket. Introduced in 1974, it’s favored for its ability to defeat body armor and barriers, making it a trusted choice for military and law enforcement.”
Looks fairly in-depth, doesn’t it? Let’s take a look at the description you get when you double-click on a similar caliber in Escape from Tarkov.
“A 5.45x39mm PS gs cartridge with a 3.4gram steel core bullet with lead cladding on the tip and a bimetallic jacket, in a steel case. The PS cartridge was introduced inot service in 1974 alongside with Soviet 5.45x39mm caliber weaponry, providing the soviet army with capabilities to pierce basic ballistic body protections, however due to its design, it has a high bounce probability off various surfaces.”
I’m not including EFT’s description just to show that Incursion is straight-up ripping UI and information elements from it, but also to show an element of game design through writing.
You see, Battlestate Games, EFT’s developer, is a big fan of hiding information from the player. They like to avoid giving the player encouragement to make the game spread-sheety. Of course, people are still going to take it upon themselves to do that, and before the listed penetration statistic was introduced in-game, the behavior of bullets could only be learned through reading these little descriptions and through personal experience with using specific bullets. The same is true for armors that a spreadsheet would suggest work in one way, but effectively work in another.
Competitive players prefer having access to the numbers in-game and immersive players prefer having, at most, vague information given to them like they’re humans and not robots to work off of. EFT’s systems work in favor of the immersive player. In EFT Each round features very human, honest descriptions of the round’s behavior. Rounds with almost no penetrative power are described as having problems with even basic protections, Rounds with very little penetrative power are described as being able to pierce basic body protections, while rounds with moderate penetrative power are described as being able to pierce intermediate models, and so on.
The thing is, EFT’s descriptions are consistent with bullet, slug, and buckshot behavior across all of the different calibers, and are indicative of Battlestate game’s vision for their game. They want players to be immersed, they want them to have just enough information to get the job done, and they don’t want players using spreadsheets to evaluate their game, but rather personal experiences.
This is true for the quest system as well, which features a very old-school design, generally giving players barely enough information to go off of before they take it upon themselves to investigate further (or look up a guide and ruin the fun).
Now, BSG has softened up on this approach as made evident by their inclusion of the bullet penetrative values, but they still hide the exact percentages associated with penetrating specific armors, and the quests are still just as vague as they’ve ever been, so you can’t say they’re exactly betraying their vision here.
Even if you don’t like that design, you can’t deny it’s a core part of EFT’s identity. In Incursion’s case? What’s the identity of this game? Where is it? All I see are attempts to copy UI elements from EFT. All I see is a very basic shooter with no discernable features.
Additionally, there’s a myth purported by a number of steam reviews stating that EFT runs worse than Incursion. Now, look, EFT is far from well-optimized, but this is just blatantly untrue. From my playtesting, it was apparent that Incursion, even with all of the settings thrown to the floor, ran with constant FPS drops and occasional stutters that were unbearable. Tarkov, despite all of its optimization problems, runs infinitely better at this stage of development.
Honestly, all of the aforementioned problems would be completely fine if the game was at least fun. It’s not. Ignoring the lack of vision, ignoring the painful inventory system, ignoring the simple armor mechanics, ignoring the ammunition options being skeletal and medical system being straight out of the 90s, the game is just not fun to play. The gunplay is okay, but the AI is simple, the looting feels unrewarding and to no end, the act of extracting has no high or unnerving risk associated with it, the quests and quest factions have no real flavor associated with them. This game isn’t worth your money and, more importantly, isn’t worth your time. If what you’ve seen here makes you think it has potential, then keep an eye on it, fine, but don’t give the developers your money until the game is in a state that satisfies you. And if this game does satisfy you, honestly just go play Tarkov, you’ll love it.
TLDR; Games in an early access or alpha or pre-alpha state should prioritize having clearly defined visions for their full build. People playing these games don’t expect content to be fleshed out, or be bug free, and they do expect them to be subject to change. But what a good early access build does is advertise the developer’s vision for the game, and so far Incursion only advertises the developer’s ability to try and copy EFT’s UI and hideout system in a 1 to 1 fashion. I’ll be keeping an eye on this game, and I am rooting for Games of Tomorrow GmbH to do something clever with it. But for now, when you’re scanning its Steam page and you see a high number of positive reviews, keep your wallet secure. These reviews are the products of imaginations running wild with possibilities and make no effort to shake hands with the boring reality of Incursion’s current state.
Now go play Tarkov or watch the video version of this review.
GLHF,
-E