Half Life: Alyx - Game Review

On my birthday last year I put a grand away to buy myself Valve Software's own VR headset, the Index. Why? I wanted to do more than just sit in front of my computer while gaming. I wanted to stand up and move about in front of my computer while gaming. It finally arrived at my doorstep in November, but I found out to my dismay I couldn't fully play the games because my graphics card was not up to date. So earlier this year I put in almost another grand for a new graphics card and now I am able to play my VR games without any lag or any possible dangers of my computer crashing (it almost happened once and that was all I needed to stop using my headset). Since I bought the full grand package I got the headgear, the controllers, wireless transmitters, and a few other goodies. As well as big VR game from Valve: Half Life Alyx.

Half Life: Alyx is the sequel to the original Half Life, but takes place before Half Life 2. In it you play Alyx Vance, daughter of Eli Vance. The Combine have taken over Earth and during your own undercover work against them you are captured. Very quickly you're broken free from the transport and are given a mission: Save your father from the Combine before they can extract any information on the resistance from him. When you start your mission you are given a pair of gravity gloves called "Russells," and a gun. And with that you begin your grand adventure throughout and under City 17, discovering new threats you never thought possible and clues to something even the Combine might fear.

I have done VR before with a friend's headset and Beat Saber, along with some VR time when I was at a convention in California some years ago. So when I finally owned my own VR headset and booted up Half Life: Alyx what did I first do with my incredible new gaming power? I littered. I'm not joking, I spent my first 20 minutes of VR throwing trashed from a balcony into the city streets and I was having a blast! Valve really did a lot with their first major VR title and I felt so interactive with the world. There was even a window I could draw with some markers that were laying about. When the game first came out a few years ago I remember a seeing teacher using this starting area and drawing area to teach his science class when quarantine was much more important.

With my updated graphics card the performance of the game was a lot better. Very smooth and quick, with tons of detail to it. The level of detail throughout the levels was really high and I felt right at home in this universe. And with so many object around that I could play with I was having a blast! However I did have a few instances where I had sudden, intense stuttering. The solution to those was often just reloading the save and it was back to normal. In my second playthrough this was happening quite a bit during the last few levels of the game, which was very irritating because I was trying to run a secret achievement. For the most part though I was very pleased with how the game ran.

While the list of tools at your fingertips isn't much, especially at the beginning, I found them incredibly necessary throughout the whole game. You start off with your gravity gloves and a pistol. The gloves are incredible, I can grab items like gun magazines and shells from long distances and store them by reaching over my back and dropping them off in my "backpack." The gloves also come with a wrist pocket for grenades and healing devices. Soon after those you bring our futuristic multi-tools that fixes wires and solves different types of electrical puzzles. Later on in the game you obtain a one-handed shotgun and an SMG and I loved the using both! I was disappointed though that I didn't have a melee weapon to knock away foes, but I kind of understand that having one might make the game a little too easy. Especially with zombies and headcrabs.

After playing through the game twice I've concluded that the way ammo and consumables are spread throughout the game was very well balanced. In my first run I did run out of ammo faster than before, but in the later levels of my first run and all of my second run I learned to use ammo more effectively. I do wish there was a training area in the game so I could practice shooting without using up precious ammo, but like a melee weapon that also would have been a little too convenient to have. There are also some collectable resources called Resin which are used to upgrade your weapons. I might be wrong in this, but I think it might be impossible to collect enough resin for every upgrade in the game. So you have to be careful with what you upgrade. I do wish some of the resin were harder to find though and not just mostly around eye level.

One problem I do have to mention though is doors. They were... kind of messy for me to open. Any doors you can open always have to be opened by pulling the handle down and either pushing or pulling it. The problem with this is that for shooters you don't want to open it up and leave yourself exposed, but it's hard to open doors in VR. A trick I used for opening doors it pulling the handle, moving it slightly, then using my gun push or pull it fully open. But having a hard time opening doors broke the immersion for me sometimes. Plus the doors had a bad habit of being loose and swinging back in on me as I'm trying to walk through.

An element of the game though that really makes it stand out is the story. I didn't know much about Alyx as a character from my playthroughs of the other Half Life games and her journey in this game was very exciting and meaningful. Rescuing your dad and finding out what the Combine have been planning were intense and unlike Half Life 2 I quickly got the picture of how much the Combine have been ruining Earth. The VR made me feel more into the story and having a gun pointed at my face really unnerved me. I had a hard time putting down my headset and I only did so when I needed to go to bed or if my the face gasket for my headset was getting too sweaty (I just bought myself some additional ones, so that problem will be fixed soon).

There were new additions to the Half Life lore in this film that I found interesting, from new varieties of headcrab and zombies (like... Jeff (how I hate Jeff)) to the technology of the Combine. Some of these get answers, some do not. I still found a majority of the new additions to the Half Life lore to be great and makes me curious about what could happen in future games. The biggest addition I saw with this game is how all the alien life is integrating into Earth, some of it taking over and changing the environments to be more fitting for creatures of Xen (like Headcrabs). The ending was very surprising and it set up something that I'm very curious on how it's going to be solved in the next game. It absolutely blew my mind!

While the game isn't long (it took me around 12 to 15 hours to beat) I think it's plenty long for a VR game. Some levels I was idling to make sure I found everything and some levels I was dying every so often due to Combine or a certain nasty enemy later on in the game. I kept picking myself up though because it was just so exciting. There are some places where you can just goof off and throw around random objects. One of my favorite idle things to pass time was to throw glass bottles about. It's just so fun smashing them and hearing how they break apart. I kind of wish I had a chance to throw these at enemies.

This leads me to my final topic of this review: How was the shooting? It was very fun. I felt like I was really getting into the fights when I ducked behind corners, threw grenades back at enemies, and had to be conservative with my ammo. You have to manually reload your guns like in real life, pulling out clips and shells, sticking them in the gun, and cocking the weapon before you can fire it. That made it all so more immersive and exciting! There wasn't as much recoil on the guns like in real life, but I didn't mind at all since this is the future and most gamers don't really have to worry much about realistic gun recoil in their games.

Half Life: Alyx is an incredible first step for Valve in the world of VR. While this was my first VR shooter I found it highly exhilarating. I did have a few moments, even with my upgraded graphics card, in which I had a terrible lag. Thankfully though those were very rare. Other than that I found the doors to be annoying to open and close, very few varieties of consumables, and as I mentioned before the lack of a melee weapon were my only other issues with this game. This was very well done and Half Life: Alyx has set a high bar as to what VR games should be like.

Tentative Score: 9/10

Definitive Score: 9/10

You know what Valve could do next? They could remaster their older games like Portal or Portal 2 to be VR. I know that's simple concept and all, but I'd love to use a VR portal gun! Though I have gained an immunity to VR sickness so some others might not be so able to do deal with that kind of virtual movement.