There are the makings of a fantastic game in here, I truly do mean that. The physics of sledding/skiing/flying/etc. feel great, the world is huge, and the ragdoll physics when you wipe out are really fun. However, I should have known better than to trust it, being a Ubisoft title. It's always online, and impossible to play any objectives/races/etc without being connected, so anything in the game that isn't free roam essentially has an expiration date of whenever Ubisoft pulls the plug on the servers. Aside from that, when I first started playing, my controller was completely unusable. It would work for a second, not work for another second, and the button inputs would randomly change while playing the game. Once I sorted that out (for some reason it requires Steam Input) after an hour or so of playing I started getting ads between gameplay sections telling me to buy the DLC, even though I had bought the "X-Games Gold Edition" that supposedly came with all the DLC. I refunded it after that.

I've owned this game ever since being a kid and while I was never very good at it back then, I did play it often. I hadn't touched it in a long while since then, but the last couple weeks I've been recovering from some weird digestion issues and on a whim picked this game up to pass the time. It's really, really fun. The amount of love and care that went into this game really shines at every moment and there is so much to do in it that you could spend weeks or longer playing it just to complete everything or even to improve your scores. I didn't technically "finish" it because later in the game you start facing harder and harder objectives and it eventually reached a point where I was happy with what I got out of the game and didn't feel like stressing myself out with completing everything, especially since I was playing while getting over an illness. I'll surely revisit it again.

Hands down the best VR game that exists. It's one of the only two I've played where it actually feels like a genuine video game and not some kind of tech demo (with the other being SUPERHOT VR). Everything in Half-Life: Alyx feels like it was designed from start to finish to cater to the VR experience and make the absolute most out of it. I am entirely convinced from this game that VR is not just a gimmick, and I fully intend to buy my own headset if these are going to keep being made (or even to just play this one again).