Half-Life: Alyx (PC, 2020)

As a fan of both Half-Life and VR I’ve been itching to play Half-Life: Alyx from the moment it was announced. Everything I read indicated that this is the true VR killer app: not just continuing the story of a beloved and much-missed classic gaming franchise, but breaking new frontiers in what can be done in the promising new medium of VR.

Actually playing it (for a reasonable price) proved somewhat more difficult. At first, I held out hope it’d land on PSVR. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen I decided to wait until I’d scored myself an Oculus Quest 2. That arrived, I linked it to my gaming laptop, fired up Alyx, and was met with a juddery broken mess. Oh well.

Salvation came via my lovely girlfriend, who upgraded her gaming PC to the point I could play Alyx on Ultra settings via the Oculus Quest in AirLink mode. It’s a big ask to play as I’m effectively taking over her PC and the entire living room to duck and dive around like a massive dork in VR.

But Half-Life: Alyx was finally here! I cleared some space, strapped on the headset, stepped back into City 17 for the first time in fifteen years and… it’s fine.

Don’t get me wrong, Alyx is about as impressive a VR game as you can get. It looks and sounds beautiful, expertly balances comedy and horror, and has the classic Half-Life vibe in spades.

But (perhaps unfairly) the hype had me expecting a quantum leap in VR game design. Alyx isn’t that, it’s more of a consolidation of what we know already works in VR wrapped up in a beginner-friendly package.

If this was your first time playing a VR shooter I’m sure Alyx would blow your mind. The simple act of aiming and firing a gun in VR is radically different from a regular game, with combat sequences seeing you lining up shots through broken car windows, blind-firing around corners, and struggling to stay on target as you empty the clip.

Reloading is practically a minigame in itself. You must eject your spent cartridge, grab a new one from your backpack, slam it in, and then cock the weapon. Doing all that when there’s a couple of Combine soldiers bearing down on you is intense, particularly when you panic, fumble your clip and drop it onto the floor in panic.

These are the experiences that make VR gaming such a breath of fresh air for anyone that’s spent years in front of a boring old flat screen. Alyx has a whole bunch of “great VR moments” but I’ve played every big VR game I could get my hands on since the mid-2010s and that took some of the shine off this.

The one genuinely neat innovation are the Gravity Gloves, which allow you to point at an object and send it heading towards you with a flick of the wrist followed by you then snatching it out of the air. This neatly solves problems of reaching objects in 3D and catching things feels innately satisfying, especially when you zip an enemy grenade from mid-air and pitch it back towards those Combine bastards.

There are a few flies in the ointment. Valve is obviously enamored with their VR unlocking puzzles. These generally involve moving points of light around a globe and dodging obstacles or manipulating balls of light in 3D space to line them up with one another. In early stages they’re barely an inconvenience, but by the end of the game they’ve mutated into multi-stage instadeath monstrosities. Considering that there are just a few clips of ammo it’s rarely worth the time to unlock them.

Other minor complaints are the somewhat unimaginative weapon selection wheel ( other games put your guns on your ‘body’ and making you unholster them as you need them), unwillingness to let you dual-wield weapons, and the fact that you can’t use physics objects as weapons to bonk enemies with. C’mon Alyx, let me bonk a zombie to death with a steel bar or smash a headcrab out of the air with a baseball bat!

I was probably setting myself up for mild disappointment after waiting so long for Alyx. What’s here is a great game, but even now it still feels like VR hasn’t quite taken the training wheels off yet.

Here’s hoping that final crowbar-based tease before the credits bodes well for the future… however many years it takes to become reality.