One of the first things I noticed when I started playing Half-Life: Alyx was the grime under Alyx Vance’s nails. Such a simple thing, but it speaks volumes about the level of attention to detail rarely seen in other VR games. Typically, virtual hands are transparent with little detail or covered by gloves. This grime tells us something about the character we’re playing – Alyx, a fighter surviving in harsh conditions after the “Seven Hour War” where alien combined forces conquered Earth. This detail immediately clarifies that we won’t play as the MIT graduate geek, Dr Gordon Freeman. Small but brilliantly setting the stage for the best VR shooter I’ve ever played. Because I have the Quest 2, I used ourSVR-LC-5Mcable to connect it to my PC to enjoy this game.
The next thing that grabbed my attention and interrupted my study of my hands, as if I were some stoner, was the 30-foot-tall Strider’s gigantic leg descending right in front of me. This firmly established the incredible size of these alien tanks with mosquito-like legs that we first encountered in Half-Life 2. You never took them too seriously, but now it’s impossible not to with this realistic sense of proximity and magnitude. The utterly alien sound design that made City 17, the city-gulag, memorable to players back in 2004 is back, with full 3D surround, making all those familiar sounds much more intense.
Half-Life: Alyx Gameplay
Besides the new perspective, Alyx is, in every way, a traditional Half-Life game. It’s set up as a straightforward series of zones, starting with the familiar City 17 neighbourhood and then venturing underground through industrial zones like the distillery, high-tech Combine factories, slimy alien nests, and more. Each chapter of this 15-hour campaign has its unique feel and significantly differs from the previous one, including a level where you must outwit an immortal antagonist or one where complete darkness is broken only by the flashlight attached to your wrist.
Combat is the mainstay of this journey, but puzzle-solving also plays a significant role. Some hacking puzzles pop up when you try to unlock various Combine technologies. They’re not overly complicated; for instance, there’s one based on memory and matching symbols on a holographic sphere and a very cool mini-game where you follow the path of electricity through walls and rotate connectors in the style of classic power-flow puzzles. Yet, all these seemingly simple puzzles make great use of VR’s ability to add a third dimension to the equation, becoming quite challenging later on when their scale increases.
In true Half-Life style, getting from point A to point B is often more complicated than it seems. Sometimes, you’ll wander around, wondering if you have broken the game because the path forward isn’t opening, or perhaps a triggering event that should lead to further progress didn’t occur by mistake. But after a few minutes, you’ll feel foolish when you realize that the solution was right there in front of you a while ago or that the marked wire was right there, but you didn’t notice it. Everything is always there; you must learn what clues to look for.
Half-Life: Alyx Storytelling
Brushup on the Half-Life lorebefore you start playing Alyx. This is a prequel story, happening five years before Half-Life 2, but it’s high time to refresh your memory on the Half-Life lore. You’ve had 13 years – it’s about time. Alyx’s quest starts with a simple mission to save her father, Dr Eli Vance, but quickly turns into a heist to seize the Combine’s super weapon hidden in a massive floating vault above City 17. Of course, it won’t be easy.
The ending is fantastic; everyone invested in this story should see it. Make sure there are plenty of surprises you shouldn’t keep from spoiling before playing.
Then there’s your dull sidekick Russel (voiced byRhys Darby), who incessantly chatters into your ear through the radio, talking about vodka, sandwiches, and other nonsense. It’s a similar type of humor that Valve already treated us to with (personally, pretty hilarious) Wheatley in Portal 2, except this time, your sidekick isn’t vicious. Most likely. His interactions with Alyx give her the chance to shine as a character as well, allowing her to express her optimism for the future and naivety from the pre-invasion world in her lines. Naturally, communication with Russ is lost during the darker, almost horror moments, where Half-Life: Alyx creates a fantastic spooky atmosphere.
Half-Life: Alyx The Look, The Feel
Valve excels at details. The environments look amazing, but it’s the tiny details that make the game truly shine. You can see every hair on the legs of the bloodthirsty headcrabs as they jump at your face, trying to eat your brain – though counting hairs will be the least of your concerns as pure instinct kicks in, and you react in panic. Healing stations, for instance, crush bug larvae in a vial, inject their juices into your fingers through delicate robotic needles, and you witness it all in minute detail right in front of you. Every poster or newspaper clipping on the wall contains written text in English or Russian, which you can read if you get closer (and if you know Russian). When you smash a wooden box, foam packing materials fly in all directions along with the items you can pick up.
The level of detail is truly remarkable, and it’s fantastic. Just like the way you interact with all these objects. Apart from Boneworks, this is the first time I have seen such a level of physical interaction in VR. Physics plays a huge role here because many objects don’t stick to the floor, and you can pick up anything with your hands and toss it around. Even better, your hands are genuine objects, colliding with everything realistically. Movements such as running your hand across a table surface will dramatically knock everything off the table, pushing doors, not just the doorknob but anywhere on the door, will open them, or sliding your hands between bars where you must precisely manoeuvre your hand rather than pass through like a ghost. All these moments make a huge difference in establishing your physical presence.
In Conclusion
Like in previous Half-Life games, you’ll need to move around a lot in Half-Life: Alyx, so several options allow you to play from a seated position to full-room immersion (there’s even a one-handed mode). As someone with a strong stomach and the ability to move their coffee table, I had ample space to play, so I spent most of the game standing and moving around, with complete control of movement instead of teleportation. In this way, the motion was possible using the left analog stick, just like in any FPS game on a console, while the right thumbstick allowed for quick turns, limited to 45 degrees, to avoid getting tangled in the headset cables.
Occasionally, it would help if you jumped over obstacles in the game. Still, all it takes is pulling the right stick, which allows you to choose a teleportation spot, making you feel like you’ve executed an athletic leap (without actually moving). This is also useful if you want to avoid crouching behind barriers (although that’s certainly an option) or when you find yourself stuck on some terrain.
There is no official ESRB rating for Half-Life: Alyx, but we would give it an M-rating. There isn’t any limb loss, but that doesn’t matter in some cases. Having “too” much blood sometimes gets you “blood and gore”, but in most cases, simply blood. You’ll be in several intense combat encounters with blood splatters. And we would recommend something other than this to our younger players.
