Half Life is a personally significant series for a lot of people, but VR is still very much a luxury product. So, I wanted to review the game, but not give spoilers of any kind. Please enjoy this review of an entirely unrelated game.

Shenmue is a hard game to discuss. The “it hasn’t aged well” and “it was revolutionary for its time” factors are nothing new when it comes to analysis of old games, but Shenmue’s status as the founder of an abandoned genre turns everything into a quagmire. Its ambition was to bring games into the realm of reality, with the gameplay challenges being the same as you might face in your daily life. In any other game about a martial artist avenging the death of their father, you would assume you’re about to beat up six stages of bad guys, but in Shenmue, you call the police by looking up the number in a phone book, picking up the phone, and using a rotary dial. You walk around town and ask people in town if they know anything about the killers, then go back home when it gets late so you can be in bed on time. There’s still combat, but if you want to get good at it, you have to train. Just like dialing a phone or going to bed on time, this isn’t something that just happens as part of the story: you have to decide to visit an empty lot and perform the move hundreds of times before attaining mastery.

If that all sounds incredibly boring, that’s exactly why we’re in this quagmire to begin with. If Shenmue’s goal is to simulate day-to-day life, it’s a success, but the question is whether that’s enough to make the game interesting. In turn, that’s what brings us back to the question of how well things age. The novelty of a realistic world was interesting enough to justify its record-breaking budget back in the nineties, but realistic worlds have now become so commonplace that they’re just uninteresting backdrops. This is why Shenmue’s legacy has become so tarnished: the core of its appeal relies on novelty instead of real player agency. There’s no meaningful decision making in almost any capacity. There are no story choices, and combat encounters are too simple to truly challenge your skills. It’s not that pulling open drawers and reading phone books are a small part of a larger whole, that really is the core of the game.

As horrifying as that sounds, it’s not that Shenmue is entirely without merit, boringness can actually have an appeal of its own. If creating a virtual reality was the goal, doesn’t it make sense to replicate some of the same quiet moments from real life? In doing so, the moments of excitement can stand out, like arriving in a new place or getting taken by surprise in a chance encounter. You have the time to appreciate all the details and experience the simple joy of standing on a street corner taking in the world around you. I wish I could play a version of the game that recognized how powerful little moments like that could be, and told a story that took advantage of the player’s sense of presence in the virtual space. A story could be told directly through those little details, letting the player grow in their understanding of the world and become a part of it naturally. This concept has been used to great effect in the walking-simulator genre, with titles like What Remains of Edith Finch entirely based around imparting a sense of history to players as they explore. Meanwhile, the combat could be greatly enhanced with enemies scripted to take full advantage of their surroundings, instead of standing stock-still waiting to get hit. F.E.A.R. showed how fun it is to go against enemies that would mess with objects in the same way you do, moving them out of the way and using the room’s geometry to gain the advantage. Changes like these could tie the story presentation and combat together with a theme of being mindful of the things that surround you, whatever that may entail.

As nice as those ideas may sound, it’s not fair. Shenmue came out in 1999, and it was the starting point for generations of narrative games that experimented with those ideas. F.E.A.R. came out an entire console generation later in 2005, and it’s still unique in how well enemies respond to their environment. Suggesting specific changes is futile without an understanding of the developers’ limitations, and there’s a chance that the changes could have unforeseen consequences. The point isn’t that Shenmue could have been good from a singular change, but from a general evaluation if the game was enjoyable outside the context of technical novelty. It’s inevitable that games will look worse over time as graphics technology improves, it’s inevitable that game design methodologies will continue being refined, but interactivity will always be the essential core of the medium. I hope developers don’t lose sight of this as they pioneer new ways to play games, and we can look back fondly on the titles that impressed us without having to say “well, it was good for its time”. I would hate to see the games that broke the technological boundaries of our time end up like Shenmue.

Valve have been proving time and time again, that they are at the forefront of innovating games. I will always remember playing Half Life 1, being the first fully 3D shooter game I played, that told a story through its gorgeous environments. Team Fortress (or Half Life Deathmatch) being the first shooter games I've ever played online. Half Life 2 revolutionizing the way shooter games tell stories yet again, bringing spectacle to it, interactive cutscenes, great character animations, believable game-physics and great set-pieces. (The episodes coming after the main game only continued to be as great - especially in terms of story-telling and ending on one of gamings greatest cliffhangers). Portal, revolutionizing first-person puzzle games and spawning tons of games aiming to copy it. Team Fortress 2 revolutionizing a very homogenic online-shooter market at that time, with character-based skills and different game-modes infused (later to be copied pretty amazingly by blizzard with overwatch and made into an even better game). I won't ever forget being on a LAN-Party and playing Left4Dead for the first time, revolutionizing the way cooperative gameplay was possible, may it be a shooter or any other genre. Portal 2 doubling down on the strengths of its predecessor and adding cooperative play to it. I'm not even going to count the hours I've sunk into Counter Strike, Dota and the likes.
Having waited for a sequel, prequel or ANY entry in the half life series for 13 years, the expectations were considerably high. And how does Valve answer that much anticipation? By creating another milestone in video-game history. A fully fledged AAA VR-Title that is truly a glimspe into the future of gaming and a testament to the masterclass in storytelling that happens in valve titles.
Half Life Alyx is the best VR-Title out there. It understands the strengths and weaknesses of current state VR and distills so so many memorable moments from the genius game development process. It's obvious that playing a shooter game in VR has other inclinations than sitting comfy in your chair and swinging your mouse elegantly on your giant-size deskpad. It's a much more physical experience, asking you to move around, consider your positioning a lot more in detail and even get on your knees to get in cover. But what really blew me away is the fact, that a VR-Experience makes so many elements of a shooter-game just SO much more meaningful. Reloading a gun takes time and movement. You have to reach for your ammuntion, have to open up the chamber and put the ammo inside one by one, you have to close it again and make it ready to shoot. Compare this with a simple press on button R. Getting in cover is similar - you have to find a spot that will suffice in height or width to really be able to find cover behind it. It's not a button press and your character just leans against a wall with his body being visible, but still invincible to incoming fire. You are low on health and need to use a syring but enemy fire is raining down on you or headcrabs are already mounting up to jump at your face? Good luck, because you have to get the syringe out, press a button and ram it into your body and wait for a couple of seconds for the fluid to be injected. All of this means, you don't have to fight hordes of enemies to feel the slightest tension. There are parts in this game, where you only have one enemy and it's as intense as it gets. I literally sweated while playing this game.
You have to find new ammo or syringes? Prepare to rummage cupboards, shelves and the likes in a world that has such a high level of detail, it will leave you in awe up until the very end. Everything reacts believably, you can write things on windows with a marker and it just works. If you grab a bottle of water and move it around, you see the fluid inside being rendered physically correct. You can even pick up a can and throw it at a pigeon to spook it, it just works. (i totally did that a couple of times :P) But more excitingly than that, to interact with certain devices you will have to hack them. And the mini-games you have to do for hacking are as well thought out as every other element of the game. Everything you do will require you to be physical, sometimes with force, sometimes with dexterity and sometimes with agility. It's a beautifully rendered world, with a sense of scale and a level of detail you just can't put into effect like that without using a VR-Headset. It's truly unbelievable and something I won't be able to convey with words. You just have to see it to believe and especially FEEL it.
Everything I've so far covered is absolutely great, but Half Life Alyx is also masterclass in level-design/mission-design and storytelling. The way tension is built up in here is a peak in the industry, rivaling and even surpassing great moments in movie-history. I somehow always ended up thinking about peak Spielberg, with the kitchen-scene in Jurassic Park, or later on the hiding-sequence in that abanonded house in War of the Worlds. Chapter 7 of Half Life Alyx is so well made, I can't even put in into words. Without wanting to spoiler, you will shit your pants so many times while playing this game. (also big big trigger warning for anyone with a variant of arachnophobia, this game doesn't mean well for you).
The voice acting is equally good, it compliments the great moments the game has to offer so well. As an example: the first time you enter a very dark area and barely see anything, Alyx starts talking about random things because she is scared. That's soooo ME, when I'm scared. The conversations you have with Russel throughout the game are sometimes funny and always a great insight into the world and lore of the game.
And they cap it all of with a mind-bending finale that is a massive fan-service in terms of story, but also a loud and clear SCREAM for what you can expect to experience with VR in the future.
I can't praise this experience and valve as game developers enough. Even though TLOU2 is probably my favorite game of all time, Alyx is definitely my game of the year 2020. Because something like this has no right to be out in 2020. With nothing coming even close or anything that might come close announced for the future.
VR is still niche, the pricepoint is just too high, the headsets are uncomfortable and the quality of those headsets is far from perfect. But what Alyx has showed me 2 years after I purchased this headset and played through a handful of good and a lot more mediocre and half-baked productions, is, that VR is the future of gaming.

Pasó tiempo desde Half-Life 2 y su imagen cada vez perdió más y más poder. De ser un emblema no sólo del shooter o de Steam, sino del videojuego, queda poco ya. Cambió mucho la forma de ver los juegos desde 2004, y con eso salieron muchos detractores (totalmente válidos por supuesto), o el típico "capáz fue muy bueno, pero ya fue superado". A lo que quiero llegar es que Half Life 2 a día de hoy, al menos por mi circulo, está visto generalmente como un juego entre malo y del montón. Yo, habiendolo rejugado varias veces ya, mantengo mi postura, es uno de los mejores shooters que pueden encontrarse; con problemas, por supuesto, pero transforma lo que en otros juegos sería una galería de tiro por pasillos en una aventura única en la que cada capítulo es un "¿y ahora con qué va a salir?". Claro, cada capitulo le da la vuelta a la formula, y cada uno tendrá sus preferencias, pero la montaña rusa de emociones que logra eso transforma a Half-Life 2 (y al primero tambien, ya que estamos), en un juego divertidísimo.
Pero bueno, acá venimos a hablar de Half-Life: Alyx, ¿qué pasa con ese? sencillo, una profundidad mecánica sin precedentes, con el movimiento humano como herramienta y dotando cada habitación, enfrentamiento u obstaculo de una energía sin igual. El juego es consciente de la realidad virtual como limitante, pero se asegura de enseñarte a usarla como si fuera el primer juego que jugaras con ella (que fue mi caso). A sabiendas de estos límites, se presentan menos enfrentamientos y se requieren menos reflejos mecánicos que en las anteriores entregas, sin llegar a sentirse vacuo tampoco, ya que para llegado el final los combates se sienten terriblemente frenéticos e inmersivos. Donde los nervios para apuntar, recargar, lanzar una granada o ponerse a cubierto crean situaciones donde sentís que estás realmente en un campo de batalla y que todo depende de vos. Esto empieza muy bien, porque como dije anteriormente, el juego nos lleva progresivamente a ese punto de tiroteos tan adrenalínicos. Asegurandose de que nos acostumbremos a sus sistemas antes de soltarnos contra decenas de soldados combine. Y con esto viene una pequeña reflexión. Porque sí, el juego pierde credibilidad y con tanto esfuerzo por hacer que nos sintamos en un entorno realista, la lógica interna juega mucho a favor de Alyx y el jugador. Con secciones claramente de aprendizaje antes de que venga el verdadero peligro, o con enemigos que se van volviendo más peligrosos progresivamente avanzamos. Es algo que puedo dejar pasar por alto tranquilamente, ya que como dije sobre Half-Life 2, es una montaña rusa, no una simulación. El objetivo del juego es claro, que llegues al éxtasis jugable y al terminar una sesión de juego te vayas pensando en cómo van a superar en genialidad lo que viste el capítulo anterior.
Ahora si, lo que no dejo pasar es que para la mitad del juego combatir con enemigos que prácticamente son hitscans y vienen en oleadas tan seguidas puede hacerse un poco cuesta arriba. Esto lo empecé a sentir en el capitulo 5 y 6, y al pensar que el juego iba a tomar ese derrotero, ya mis expectativas estaban cayendo. Nada más lejos de la realidad, llega el capítulo 7, la destilería, y desde ahí el juego no hace más que mejorar. Conviertiéndose para mí en el mejor juego de la saga y demostrandome de que el equipo desarrollador no perdió el talento.

Played on Oculus quest 2

With the sole exception of Beat Saber, which I gave an absentminded spin on in the local gaming bar, this was my first proper foray into the VR landscape. I had no point of reference for what to expect, but what I did have was a condescending attitude, despite that I had fun with the aforementioned title. My negative supposition stemmed from my inability to view these titles as ’’serious games’’, much like mobile games and for similar reasons. One expects them to use the technology as a crutch and in the process, forget the myriad of things that make a game, like narrative, length, pacing, progression ,variety and so forth and so forth. Games for VR have, it feels like, just recently started evolving and on account of the major financial investment they require to be played I expected it to be years before they developed their sufficient language. In a sense, I just expected a glorified tech demo.

This changed the moment I put it on. The whiteness of the loading screen and its opening titles slowly dissipate to lay bare an image of a city engulfed in smog. Before its immaculate detail can make an impression, a plethora of veiny cables supported by huge steel rail systems force your gaze to follow them upwards to an oppressive megalithic structure- The Citadel. Your nape has to bend backwards for you to investigate its ending, lost somewhere between the sky and sun, blocked by thick haze. It’s in my first moment with the game, that the VR system makes me feel something I wouldn’t have without it. The towering presence of the Combine Headquarters has its intended dominating effect on me precisely because real life movement enabled me to feel it. Speedy aircrafts take off left and right; huge mechanical spider-like government sentinels roam the rooftops scouting for trouble; the only organic life form is a tiny (in comparison) pigeon flock that wizzes past you in a second; I veer my head frantically to catch it all. I haven’t even started moving yet and I’m dumbfounded. Looking around is more than enough for my first minutes with it. It’s surprising to me that I have found the space to be as immersive as it has been, that I immediately accepted the presented reality and found it palpable. I see a railing in front of me and cautiously peep my head over it as if a chance of a fall existed; I already respect the depth of the world subconsciously. It also helps that Valve have gone to extremes to describe the detail of this world, both visually and mechanically. After I surveyed the street and its passengers I noticed a radio on my right. A core frequently asked question that comes to you throughout the entire game arises in that moment: ’’Can I ?’’, a mark of any great game. My fingers aim for its little antenna and I raise it to receive the signal. It works. I go for the knob and it turns. I bend over, pick up a matchbox and shake it beside my ear to hear the trembling of the matches inside. I lift a pot and wonder if can time it’s fall and drop it on a pedestrian's head. It doesn’t work ( didn’t expect it to), but I'm already in play with the systems. The physics engine reputation Valve has built hasn’t been damaged and City 17’s tangibility invites one to see what it’s made of. My appetite for experimentation is growing and I begin to see how much unknown the space for play is.
I wonder if it is a coincidence that VR has finally emerged as a real thing when graphics have become photorealistic, or hit the gradient of becoming. I’m sure a basic, low poly version of this would still extract a reaction out of me and have merit; yet, it’s full mesmerising effect hits due to the cutting edge graphics worthy of a non-vr competitor game. While you enter your first interior in the game, you walk through a dingy corridor. Not that it has anything to do with it, but at that moment I got reminded of P.T, Kojima’s infamous unreleased cult project and its treatment of light shadow, texture and reflection (The Order 1886 also sprung to mind for similar reasons). Naturally, graphics have been moving the bar ever since 2014, but it was at the beginning of that demo that I thought a new graphical fidelity plateau was established, and not just by pure graphical horsepower alone. It was in the way it gave them the opportunity to express drama through it, how light reflected off different surfaces, while still allowing for the personality of the material to be noticed, like stains on mirrors or smudges on the floor. It could account for the whole spectrum of light and shadow, having a corner of room in pitch darkness, and then gradually transition to full lightning. The same physical based rendering techniques are present in Alyx and it is many a times where it’s detail made an impression; entering an abandoned hotel lobby, singularly illuminated by sunbeams suggesting all the unclear air and accumulated dust by the years of neglect; fighting for dear life in a pitch black basement with a flashlight, only having some light reflect of smeared old monitors and dirty ceramic tiles or just taking in the last sunset rays bathing the industrial buildings sheet iron rooftops.
It was after my initial techno stupor wore off, that I noticed my hands and was intrigued at how they shadowed my real life movement so well. The mind connection I made between my real hands and virtual counterparts was mind boggling. I inspected them thoroughly, their back and front and I moved them closer to my face and really far from it. For all intents and purposes these were my ’’real’’ hands, and as such, they became the most intuitive controls any game has ever had. I had many of my friends come and try it out and it’s always the same, despite the major difference in gaming experience we all had. By the fifth minute of the game, by the time you go down the elevator, they play with it as if they have done this their whole life, and in a sense, they had. Drawing from real life experience of the physical world, walking, crawling, tip-toeing to see something, even shooting had become a second nature in the game. These types of controls minimise the gap between intent and execution of action so much that it practically opens a new horizon for 3D space. An interesting instance of this is the concept that hands and head are tracked separately, which might not sound like much, but brings so much more life to the virtual world. You can open a door with your right arm slightly, just enough for you to peek inside and have your gun ready to terminate with you left, while you still hold the door with your right one, prepared to close it and protect yourself from danger. You turn cranks in panic, hoping for a door to open before some (beautifully rendered) freak gets you, cycling in the process between him, the door and the crank. Chances are you fumble in your haste to reload and drop the life saving mag you could not reload. I could also never resist the temptation to break glass whenever I had the chance. To watch it shatter piece by piece while I was trying to make an opening in for my grenade was a delight .The examples of this are many and it made me think that I hadn’t really noticed how classical controls lacked this continuity of motion and made these in-between moments of tension and discovery get lost between the cracks.
The remarkable thing all of this manages to do is make you reinterpret conventional video game syntax. It is indescribable how different the process feels, when you have to perform an action in its full capacity. It reinvents the basics, like walking, picking ammo, reloading, throwing, aiming a flashlight, lining a shot yourself, and even the tedium of looting. Raviging kitchen drawers and cabinets has never been this involving. Changing ammo isn’t a heedless press of a button, but a whole affair of reaching behind your shoulder to an imaginary backpack and performing the magic hat trick of pulling out not a rabbit, but a fresh clip. After that you have to manually cock the weapon to use it, which you often do and it never gets old.
The shooting is in the same vein, familiar and also different, enhanced by a witty gameplay addition on Valve’s part, very similar to the Gravity Gun in Half-life 2. The big deal with that weapon, despite that it was really cool to play with, was the use it made of the groundbreaking physics engine made for Half-life 2. In a similar stroke of pragmatic genius, they’ve replicated this in Alyx with the introduction of the Gravity Gloves. The VR realm is a great place to update this concept, because on one hand it provides a tool for you to experience the tangibility of the objects in the world while you zap them around; on the other hand, it swiftly deals with a problem the devs would’ve had, that is present in any normal shooter i.e the picking of ammo, or for that matter, everything else. In Alyx, you just extend your arm and beckon at the desired object (usually ammo) for it to soar in your direction. Before you know it, you already use it on the baddies and continue on your path of destruction. Could you imagine if you had to walk to every piece of ammo or collectible on the ground and bend over to pick it up? With the gravity gloves you avoid redundancy and insert a really fun sense of pace into the gameplay, which consists mainly of shooting stuff hither and thither.
It's enjoyable to face off against the headcrabs and their hosts, but the action shines once you have your first fight with enemy soldiers that can shoot back. As the synth and drums start blasting their beat, enemy fire becomes the supporting background music to the encounter. I land a couple of shots, but then duck behind a shielding concrete column and cower on my left knee, waiting for the enemy fires to cease. I pop up from my cover for a second, enough for me to squint an eye and headshot a dude, immediately after which I renew my safe position that's still getting shot at by the remaining soldiers. I giggle, imagining myself in my living room, hunched, playing pretend. It looks like a scene in a sci-fi movie that’s not even twenty years old, yet it’s my current reality and I participate in the outlandish scenarios people envisioned we’d have in the far future. Sure, it gets you a little dizzy if you play sessions longer than an hour and a half and you second guess your judgement of reality in the first moments you remove the headset, but it doesn't have the dystopian feeling I expected it to have. Instead, I’m engaged in a game, something that happens less and less in today's overblown mega budget titles and want to see what its systems can do.
It doesn’t take much time for me to fully roleplay while doing this. It's definitely not required, but it feels like such a shame if you miss the opportunity to do so; you have the tools to take so much out of this. The Combine militia enters the arena and I reach for safety. They open relentless fire on my position and stop me from moving anywhere. A grenade lands beside my feet, thrown by a frustrated soldier that can’t get to me. Escape is impossible due to enemy fire and death seems imminent. It’s out of reach, but I have a couple of seconds to get to it before the explosion proves fatal. The looney tunes bulb above my head lights up and I remember my trusty gravity gloves. I extend my arm and the speedily beeping grenade teleports in my grasp. The physics engine of the game creates a reliable realistic world and the intuitiveness of the controls invite you to test its limits and it’s so fun when you do and have your curiosity rewarded. I throw it back at them, which opens a window for me to escape. Later, they have me pinned down again and force me to crawl to my nearest cover. I frantically exit my shielding and shoot, then duck again several times. My health isn’t enough for me to stay in the dangerous open for long. I try to shoot blindly by bending just my wrist and pistol around the corner, while the rest of my body is still protected. I empty the entire clip and it seems in vain. I can’t tell if I got someone but the prospect of it was fun. I lay on my belly and press the stick forward, while moving my limbs like a crab, emulating the real life motion of crawling to escape the situation. I move intensely in real life and in the game and my heart is racing from the physical activity. Everyone, but an advancing heavy combine soldier is terminated. A remaining shotgun shell is my only ammo left available and I scour the surrounding for anything that can help me. I'm out of luck and wait for my demise with my last remaining drop of health. Like Trinity in the iconic scene in The Matrix, I wait flat on my back, both of my arms pointing at the space where I expect the grunt to appear to finish me off. His breathing and walking can be heard and is clearly getting closer. The intensity ramps up and I can feel the salt from my sweat dripping from my brow to my mouth. I'm frozen like this and starting to feel fatigue in my upper abdominal muscles because I’ve been contracted in this position for a while. The thumping gets louder and louder. I dare not blink, for I could miss the exact frame he appears to end me. As soon as his silhouette appears above me I blast him with my last remaining shell to save myself and continue on. If that ain't cool I dont know what is.
The biggest fault of the game is how uninteresting the plot and narrative are to the point that Alyx might not even classify as a game that has them. You just fuck around a lot to get MacGuffins and listen to people who give you instruction via comms. Not that different from it’s predecessors, but this one has a distinct lack of character and even semi-interesting writing. I doubt a single line of dialogue will affect you in any way. It’s easy to speculate that they deliberately made it this way in order to protect the ’’canon’’ of the Half-life universe by making a game that wouldn't make a dent in the overarching narrative. Is it because they didn’t want to alienate people that could not afford the hefty asking price of a game and whole system or was it due to fear that a bad experimental title would tarnish the legacy of the series. I personally couldn't care less but this franchise has zealous fans and Valve is aware of that. It’s a shame that they did not try more in this department, but in the end, it doesn’t bother me that much and I close my eyes to this just for the ending. So much else is at offer here, that it feels petty to critique.
All these descriptions I have given of the Alyx experience is to illustrate how special a step it is, if not the leap people fear it could be; it doesn’t work if it’s not in VR. I watched as my friends gave it a spin and it was boring as shit. It looked like any old game, or even worse, thanks to the inherent jankiness and silliness of titles made for VR. The shift in perspective is just untranslatable to normal screen based gaming. The success of this title is summarised in this quote by lead designer David Speyrer: ’’... yeah, we’d watering down the VR experience to try to do both at the same time, and as we explored the idea it just drove us in a place where the game became essentially VR, not just superficially VR.’’
With that core production philosophy Valve also crafted the epilogue. Right at the tail end of it, a final moment of interactability is presented to you. In a standard game, a press of a button would suffice, even if the physical action was the same. In Alyx, you have to do it yourself. Extend your arms and receive what is offered. As I was doing it, I felt the weight of action more and was awestruck again by the wit of it. This one moment made me excited for the future of VR and how a story might be told uniquely by this specific branch of gaming in the future. Hands off to Valve for that. It's insane that they put their chips on niche hardware that only bourgeois gaming royalty will be able to afford, made an exclusive twenty hour game for it that actually delivered both a worthy sequel to a beloved franchise and made a technological leap in history. It doesn't birth anything new, but brings a different perspective that shows what we had before in a different light and gives a glimpse of what we might have in the future. I can’t wait to find out what that is.

P.S the Jeff chapter rocks and the collapse of the Vault was one of the coolest things

Half-Life: Alyx is a 10/10 masterclass in VR gaming.
It is both a wonderful introduction to the world of virtual reality and a blast for those who already have experience with that world.

Valve has absolutely nailed the atmosphere, presentation, and gameplay here, making this game incredibly immersive and memorable. You can practically feel the world around you as you venture through new perspectives of City-17, with a soundtrack to boot. And let me tell you: Mike Morasky absolutely killed it with the soundtrack. It not only enhances the atmosphere of the game's environment but also hypes you up for its action.

Half-Life: Alyx is a must-play for anyone interested in virtual reality, and I cannot recommend it enough.

When I first started hearing about VR, I had all these grand ideas about what could be possible with the medium. How amazing it would feel to be immersed in all the types of games I loved to play. Once I started playing games in VR, it didn't really feel how I expected at all, and the games I enjoyed the most were not really immersive but sort of rhythm or novelty action games like Beat Saber.

Half Life: Alyx is the first game I ever played that came close to realising the initial fantasies I had about the potential of VR gaming. It's immersive, explores game mechanics that could only ever work in VR, looks and feels great. The gravity glove mechanics are a total revelation, the shooting and reloading is intuitive and fun.

Truly a showcase for VR as a platform - this absolutely has to be the greatest immersive/campaign style VR game to date. Anyone who has a way of playing this should definitely do so.

My experience with this game seems to have been very different from everyone else's, and I would definitely like to set up the disclaimer to disregard this write-up if you found yourself genuinely enjoying this game. My time with Alyx was coloured by the fact that VR makes me drastically motion sick after even a few moments of playing, I finally completed this game after about five months of short intermittent sessions. I ABSOLUTELY would not have even bothered if this didn't just so happen to be a mainline Half Life entry, a series I love.

Compliments to the chefs, the game is stunning looking. I'm sure they used every trick under the sun to get this game running smoothly while looking great on my ageing pc (which I'm sure plays a part in how VR affects me). The sheer level of mechanical detail, the variety in the pieces of graphic design illustrations throughout the city lending every area its own sense of lived-in plausability. Oo mama the posters and stuff around the zoo. Much of the stuff I love Half Life for is here and urbex is alive and well.

The problems for me really do arise around the fact that the act of playing the game was akin to strapping a microwave to my face and having my eyeballs burst like blueberries under the scorching tropical sun. I simply don't believe it's worth the strain, because the game itself is a fairly standard rail shooter affair. Once the fully-realised vr simulation euphoria disappeared I realised I was just walking from one gunfight to the next with alarmingly few tools to actually play with. I put up with this and even enjoyed it in Half Life 2, because my movement felt unrestricted. If Alyx is as good as VR games are at right now, I'm happy to just. Hibernate on the shit.

As a kid I always wanted to touch a Combine forcefield and this game let me carry out my dream, thamks valve

I wasn't the biggest Half Life stan. I thought the franchise was good but it wasn't anything special to me. Then I played this game and my mind has been blown out the water. This is my second favorite shooter ever made, despite being in VR, mechanics aren't stripped back, in fact, it's the most involved Half Life game I've played. Combat is intense and exciting, ducking for cover in real life is just so cool, aiming feels satisfying, reloading with gestures just feels so great. Puzzle solving requires a lot of physical precision, thought and speed. The exploration for weapon upgrade crystals encouraged me to explore every nook and cranny from opening shelves to smashing boxes open. The entire game is immersive but also mechanically satisfying and well designed. It's almost perfect. The story is the best Valve has ever told, it made me care about the Half Life world, I did care a little bit from previous games but this game's characters, world building and plot twists near the end got me fully immersed in it's world Valve is trying to show. The ending which I won't spoil had me so freaked out due to how insane the plot twist was, it leads so perfectly into Half Life 2 since it is a prequel. Overall, this is easily Valves best game ever made, I hope it becomes more accessible in the future through platforms like Oculus Quest platform and PS VR. Awesome experience.