Can you play Incursion Red River solo? The honest answer

By WillyB · tactical PvE + open-world since 2012 · 22 June 2026

Yes, Incursion Red River is fully soloable, offline, with no PvP and no forced squad, and I have loaded every map and the new campaign on my own without ever seeing another human. The catch is not access, it is solitude, because there are no AI teammates and it is you, your kit, and a jungle that does not care about your plan. Search this question and the answers are a mess of half-truths, since half the threads tell you it is a co-op game, half say it is brutal alone, and almost nobody answers the thing a solo player is actually asking, which is whether the game will let me play the whole thing on my own and whether it will be miserable when I do. I dragged the difficulty sliders as far as they would go and walked into the worst day of my operator’s life to find out, with patrols stacked on patrols, every gunshot pulling a fresh crowd, and my ammo economy collapsing long before my nerve did, and that is still a yes.

What the myths were, and what the game actually is

It is a PvE-only extraction shooter set in modern-day Vietnam, with no human enemies, no PvP, and no other players hunting you, and the squad of up to four is entirely optional, so you can load in alone on every map and every task, including the campaign. That is the headline and it is not in doubt, because the Steam page lists it that way, and the community threads asking how the solo experience feels keep landing on the same word, which is playable. The first myth to kill is always-online, since most extraction shooters are server-locked and Incursion is not, and the developers market it as an offline single-player and co-op PvE game. Owners on the Steam forums confirm you can run the solo side with no connection at all, while co-op obviously needs you online, because you cannot host mates from a cave, and the solo loop and campaign run offline as of mid-2026. If you play on dodgy hotel wifi or just hate server queues, that matters more than the marketing copy, because the solo loop is the one I am actually loading.

PvP is not a thing, and that is the whole point, because every enemy you fight is AI, so nobody extract-camps you, nobody third-parties your firefight, and nobody one-taps you from a bush they paid for. For a solo player this removes the single most stressful variable in the genre, and the flip side is that there are no AI squadmates either, so when you go solo you go genuinely alone, with no Ready or Not style commandable team to lean on when a doorway looks expensive.

How hard it is when you are on your own

It is manageable if you play like a ghost, and the recurring word in the community is that solo is 100% playable, though the AI can punish you if you charge around like an elephant instead of using the gaps the map is actually offering. Suppressed weapons, slow movement, cover, and picking those gaps are the loop that works, and I learned it the expensive way, which is the version I trust more than the tidy advice. Never hold an angle, because smart AI ranges you in fast, and treat sound as the enemy, since one loud fight summons the whole map and a suppressor is worth more than a scope. Carry far more ammo and far less loot greed than you think you need, and pick your fights at the edges of the map, never the middle, so you always have a quiet line back to extraction.

Crucially, the AI difficulty is fully tunable, so you can dial enemy aggression, vision, and accuracy at any point, and the 1.3 patch shipped an overhauled enemy AI system, RedFor, built by Solarint of SAIN and SP-Tarkov fame, on top of that. If the lethality is cooking you, turn it down, because there is no PvP balance to protect and the sliders are not a confession. I went deep on the spawn side in the max enemy count piece, which is the other lever solo players forget exists, and maxing the count tests your stamina while maxing the AI tests your decision making. Neither is a daily driver, and both prove the game has more depth than the chilled PvE label suggests, which is the part the marketing undersells.

The campaign, and the reason to keep grinding

Patch 1.3.0.0 on 25 February 2026 was a big one, and SteamDB has the notes, with Act 1 of a planned three-act story campaign, 23 missions with proper voice work from BAFTA-winner Jane Perry, plus player levelling, Safehouse upgrades, an overhauled economy, and a new Delta map. Insider Gaming covered the story arc, and this is the first time the game has had real solo progression to chase rather than just raid-and-repeat. It is still Early Access, out since April 2024, with the devs targeting a 3 to 4 year run, so I am treating it as a foundation rather than a finished story, which is the honest size of what you are buying.

The base game is around £18 on Steam, £18.48 at full price, and frequently around 20% off in sales, with a Supporter Edition if you want to fund it, and for that you are getting an unfinished but genuinely solo-respecting extraction shooter. If you want a feel for how it stacks up against the obvious rival, my Incursion vs Gray Zone Warfare breakdown covers the PvE-versus-PvPvE split, and the beginner guide gets you through your first few raids without dying to your own grenade. The room has a habit of treating Incursion as the smaller toy you mention if you are being thorough, which is fine, because I was already in the jungle, and the night I refused to extract and the AI came looking was personally rude in a way a lot of prettier extraction shooters never manage.

Yes, you can play Incursion Red River solo, fully, offline, with no PvP and no forced squad, and the catch is solitude, with no AI teammates, you versus tunable AI, and the new campaign finally giving solo players a proper reason to grind. If that loop sounds like your thing, line it up against the rest in my best solo PvE extraction shooters rundown, sanity-check it with the should-I-buy tool, and the rest of the tactical-shooter intel lives over in the intel index. The camera version on this page is the one where the jungle ignored the plan, and I still queued again, which is the review I trust more than a thread that never loaded the map.

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