‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Review – Valve Delivers One of VR’s Best Games Yet

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After years of quiet development, Half-Life: Alyx is finally here. With hype on all sides—as Valve’s first full-fledged VR game and the first Half-Life game in more than a decade—does it deliver? Read on to find out in our full Half-Life: Alyx review.

Half-Life: Alyx Details:

Developer: Valve Software
Available On: Steam (Index, Vive, Rift, Windows VR)
Reviewed On: Index, Vive Pro, Rift S, Rift CV1
Release Date: March 23rd, 2020
Price: $60

Gameplay

Image courtesy Valve

While VR game design is very different from flat-screen game design, Valve has done an excellent job in Half-Life: Alyx of keeping the essence of what makes a Half-Life game. Though the pace is slower and more thoughtful, those who have played the prior titles will feel themselves thrust into the Half-Life universe more deeply than ever before.

Gameplay in Half-Life: Alyx is split between exploration, puzzle solving, and combat. Combat is less of a run-and-gun affair than the prior games, and while you’ll be confronted with fewer enemies, individual enemies are more threatening and combat takes on a decidedly more personal tone.

Although the game is effectively linear, there’s so much visual and interactive detail in the environment around you that Half-Life: Alyx still fosters a sense of exploration. As you explore you’ll want to keep your eyes out for the game’s scarce resources like ammo, health, grenades, and especially ‘Resin’ (small chunks of material used for upgrading weapons). Where other VR titles sometimes make resource collection feel tedious, the thoughtful placement (and even occasional mini-puzzles) make finding resources in Half-Life: Alyx feel truly rewarding.

Image courtesy Valve

This is aided in a huge way by the Gravity Gloves, which let you grab objects from a distance rather than needing to walk within arm’s reach of each thing you want to pick up. To use the Gravity Gloves, you’ll need to first ‘tether’ an object and then do a ‘pulling’ gesture to initiate a force pull. When you do, the object launches in a satisfying arc right toward your hand to be caught.

This might seem like a subtle tweak to existing ‘force pull’ mechanics in other VR games, but in practice it’s engaging, fun, and almost makes you feel like you have a telekinetic superpower. The targeting system and initiation gesture also work together to greatly minimize the number of accidental force pulls compared to what I’ve seen in many other VR games. The system is so successful that I expect to see this approach to force pull used in many future VR titles.

Captured by Road to VR

One of the things you’ll often be collecting thanks to your Gravity Glove powers is Resin for upgrading your guns. Resin is not in ample supply, so diligent explorers who manage to find most of it along their way will be able to upgrade their weapons sooner than others. Upgrades feel meaningful and can only be done at upgrade stations which are occasionally found throughout the game.

While the weapons in Half-Life: Alyx are satisfying in both their interactions and firing, unfortunately there’s not many to speak of. Instead of picking up guns wherever, you’ll only get access to three weapons throughout the game which are bound to you. There’s the pistol, shotgun, and a Combine pulse rifle. Worse, as you upgrade the Pistol and pulse rifle, they overlap (instead of diverge) in their combat roles, making them less unique over time.

Captured by Road to VR

I was disappointed to not see a wider variety of Half-Life’s unique weapons represented in the game, especially when there are opportunities abound for VR-specific interactions. In particular, I often found myself wanting a precision long-range option in Half-Life: Alyx. The iconic Half-Life crossbow would have been an awesome fit, not only for its interactive affordances (loading and heating the rebar bolt) but also for the experience of pinning enemies to walls (and being able to see that up close in VR). With Valve planning to release a full range of modding tools, I hope that the modding community will be able to help out with this in time.

The tight weapon set seems partly the result of Valve’s choice to largely avoid linked two-handed interactions. While operating your weapons does require two hands, there’s no weapons in the game that are held with both hands, and very few moments in the game involve two-handed interactions.

Image courtesy Valve

The game’s small arsenal also impacts it in other ways. While in Half-Life 2 it felt like a reward to discover the rarer ammo for the game’s unique guns (like rebar for the crossbow or orbs for the pulse rifle’s secondary fire), with less gun types there’s fewer things for Alyx to reward players with for their exploration. Resin is always a welcomed find, but it can be a bit of a let down to spot a hidden supply box and smash it open only to find a single pistol magazine or a health syringe inside.

Combat pacing starts quite slowly with headcrab zombies as the main threat in the first third of the game. It’s clear that Valve wanted to give players ample time to learn how to move, use their Gravity Gloves, and operate their weapons before introducing them to more dynamic enemies. Even so, the headcrab zombies can feel like a threat in close quarters, and Valve has no qualms about putting your combat training to the test by making sure you can reload in the dark…

Image courtesy Valve

Later in the game you’ll face off against Combine soldiers which are distinctly more threatening. Even on Normal difficulty, combat is relatively unforgiving, and a single soldier won’t hesitate to take you down if you aren’t careful. You’ll absolutely want to find some cover and keep your head down when the bullets start flying your way.

Like weapons, enemy variety is minimal. Combine soldiers come roughly in three types of difficulty and don’t present particularly unique threats. Especially in the later stages of the game when your guns have seen some upgrades, killing Combine soldiers amounts to aiming your laser sight at their head and holding the trigger until they die. Getting up close and personal with the shotgun is riskier, but far more satisfying.

Though sporadic, there’s a few interesting standout enemies that add some intrigue, including a unique enemy that’s part of a masterful sequence that’s simply unmatched in execution elsewhere in VR. I don’t want to spoil this for you, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed my time with ‘Jeff’.

Captured by Road to VR

For me, Alyx’s larger puzzles felt like classic Half-Life fare and struck a good balance of challenge without tedium; I never felt completely stumped, but the game still managed to make me feel clever after figuring out the solution.

If you get stuck on the bigger puzzles, stepping back and assessing the situation is usually enough for a clue to reveal itself. Even the smaller ‘hacking’ puzzles—which open things like doors, supply bins, or upgrade stations—manage to stay interesting thanks to gently increasing complexity.

Image courtesy Valve

Though I wished the game offered a greater variety of weapons and enemies, the limited roster is part of a broader trend in Half-Life: Alyx which is all about keeping gameplay streamlined and fun. While the game doesn’t offer much in the way of mechanical innovation, what is there is polished to a sheen. Valve has managed to craft Alyx in way which avoids much of the clunk seen in many other VR titles, and I felt compelled to keep pushing forward throughout the 12 hours it took me to beat the campaign.

Immersion

Image courtesy Valve

From the first moment you find yourself standing in the menu screen, it’s clear that there’s a certain gravity to Half-Life: Alyx that you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else in VR; this is what it feels like to step into the struggle for City 17.

With heaps of environmental and interactive detail, Valve has crafted an incredibly immersive world. Aside from nearly every small object in the game being physically interactive, there’s just so much to look at. Collectively, Half-Life: Alyx is the most detailed VR game I’ve ever played. With consistently great art direction and impressively crisp anti-aliasing, the game’s visuals are top-notch.

Captured by Road to VR

While Alyx impresses with interactive details like turnable sink faucets, flippable light-switches which actually turn on lights, and liftable toilet seats, there are a few immersion misses.

For one, there’s essentially no melee in the game at all. This is a bit jarring when many of the game’s enemies want to get right up into your face, and especially after Boneworks (2019) showed how useful it is just to be able to stagger enemies by shoving them back with your hands when they get too close.

Captured by Road to VR

Another immersion issue I found is that equipping weapons is done with a gesture menu and, once equipped, the weapons stick to your pre-selected ‘weapon hand’ whether you are ‘gripping’ the weapon or not. This means that weapons can’t be passed between your hands, thrown, or anything else, making them feel decidedly less like part of the game’s otherwise quite physical world. And when you’re done fighting and want both your hands free to interact with the world, you need to use a button to ‘equip’ your hand; a decidedly non-immersive action.

While this design choice does cut out much of the VR clunk that can come from a fiddly holster system, Alyx feels a bit behind the times in this department after seeing smooth and compelling holster mechanics from the likes of Blood & Turth (2019) and Stormland (2019); the latter’s ‘magnetic holster’ system—which automatically re-attaches weapons to your holster if dropped—would have been a perfect thematic fit with the Gravity Gloves.

Much of Alyx’s rich immersion comes from its incredibly detailed world, including occasional side-paths that sometimes reveal optional scenes which reward your curiosity and flesh out the game world.

Captured by Road to VR

With hands that don’t clip through the environment and so many interactive objects scattered about, there’s a sense of solidity to the world which helps drive consistent immersion. At one point I was rummaging through a filing cabinet looking for resources; after pulling open the bottom-most drawer, I stood up and just about went to kick it shut with my foot… before remembering that the game isn’t actually tracking my feet.

Captured by Road to VR

While Half-Life: Alyx’s story is engaging enough to justify the ongoing action, not all that much really happens beyond what’s necessary to keep you moving toward your goal. That’s not to say that Alyx isn’t consequential to the plot of Half-Life overall, though the way that it intersects with the plot of the other games in the franchise feels sudden, significant, and a bit clumsy. Avoiding spoilers; I’m not quite sure what the reaction of most players will be, but I think there’s likely to be a lot of discussion around this post-launch.

Comfort

Captured by Road to VR

Half-Life: Alyx supports teleportation, dashing, continuous locomotion, and a range of other comfort options like snap turn adjustments, ‘real’ ladder climbing, and whether or not you want barnacles to be able to actually lift you off the ground. Throughout my time playing Half-Life: Alyx I felt that the game did a great job of maintaining comfort.

Valve clearly spent time thinking about how Half-Life: Alyx should work with each of the VR controllers out there. While there’s some minor ways in which they don’t follow established input patterns that VR vets would be familiar with, they did a great job overall and no matter which controller you use, the game feels equally playable.

Alyx feels like it was first and foremost designed for standing play in room-scale playspaces with teleportation or dashing. Continuous locomotion works well, though the game doesn’t feature a real ‘jump’, and instead uses a ‘mantle’ (which sort of slides you up onto objects) or a teleport jump when you need to cross a gap. Sometimes the game asks you to teleport jump across large gaps that don’t look entirely jumpable at first glance, making for the occasional moment of confusion before you realize where to go.

Those with tight playspaces will likely feel cramped at times, as many of the game’s mechanics seem to want you to reach and lean quite a bit, especially the ‘power’ puzzles where you use Alyx’s multi-tool to scan for power lines in the walls.

Captured by Road to VR

For the same reason (reaching and leaning), seated play doesn’t feel great, though it fares a bit better with continuous locomotion rather than teleportation. Granted, there’s an option in the game to allow you to adjust your height from seated up to a standing position or down to a crouching position. At the time of playing I wasn’t able to get these options to work correctly, though if I did I think I would have preferred to use the option to play most of the game at standing height (even while playing seated) considering how many of the game’s environmental interactions take place at shoulder-height. I’ve reached out to Valve for more guidance on the height adjustment controls.

I found one oddity with ladders—though I had the ‘real ladder climbing’ option enabled, the vast majority of ladders would automatically teleport me to the top or bottom if I misplaced my grab on a single rung. I found this more annoying than uncomfortable, as I had already indicated to the game that wanted to climb the ladders on my own.

Image courtesy Valve

If you are especially claustrophobic or unable to handle immersive horror, Half-Life: Alyx could definitely be a challenge. Some of the scarrier sections of the game will plonk you down you in the dark with a flashlight as your only source of light, constraining the limited field of view of your headset even more.

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall
10

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • :3

  • Jack Liddon

    I thought they were called Grabbity Gloves.

  • blue5peed

    I’m disappointed to read about the gun handling/interaction I was watching the trailers trying to figure out how they were switching weapons, if you could holster them or pass them between your hands and it seems as if my fears are confirmed. I hope it doesn’t take anything away from the players immersion and spontaneity during gun fights.

    I hope the modding community will be able to pick up some of the slack on these mechanical nuances.

  • Burt Reynolds

    Did this reviewer take a Xanex before making the video?

    • Jeremy Kins

      Xanax*

  • M Rob

    I’ve been playing VR games since the first kickstarter Oclus Rift. After only 1 hours of playing this I can tell this is on a different level than anythign i’ve played in VR before. You can tell its made for VR from the ground up. Simply stunning so far.

    • Rebecca Yoder

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    • Leon Jimenez

      It’s a great game but Lone Echo is still the most mind blowing experience.

    • Matteo Valles

      So excited to play it!

  • antonio mora

    No smooth turning option? What in the world!?

    • MadMax1998

      Rotate your body. Instant smooth turn

      • silvaring

        With the caveat of feeling the wire…. not hating, just sayin’.

        • Leon Jimenez

          Trust me. Get the VR pulley system on your ceiling (or a boom light stand) and a counter height stool. No more feeling the cable.

  • Kyokushin

    Excellent game (playing on Reverb).

    There are two issues so far:
    1) Smooth turning is NOT working
    2) Alyx is walking very slow and there is no ‘running’ option.

    • silvaring

      No sprint / quick run option? What the fuck.

  • Jeremiah Tothenations

    The review didn’t read like a 10/10 tbh., the reviewer sounded a tad underwhelmed to me.

    • Dave O’Reardon

      I liked that the reviewer pointed out what he saw as flaws (e.g. lack of weapon and enemy variety). Makes the review more credible. But, like you, I was then surprised that it got a 10/10. According to the reviewer it clearly isn’t perfect.

      • benz145

        Per our review scale:

        We made the purposeful choice to reserve the 10 rating for ‘Excellent’ games, not ‘perfect’ games, as the literal definition of ‘perfect’ often leads to endless arguments that ‘no game can be perfect’. When we score a game at 10 out of 10, we aren’t saying it’s perfect, we’re saying it’s a thoroughly well crafted experience and stands above what’s come before.

        • Dave O’Reardon

          Fair enough. Thanks for pointing this out.

        • Baldrickk

          Given the 8, 10, 9 breakdown scores, I’d have thought that a 9 would have been fair.

          If they were to sort out ladders, get rid of (or put in option to do so) the menu weapon switching and give those who can handle it a jump and sprint, get rid of the weird slow mo falling, odd crouch traversal…

          That’d be a 10 in my book.

          I’d still rate it as #1 Game in it’s current state though.
          (And yes, completed it)

        • silvaring

          It would reflect better if you guys reserved a double scale for perceived 10’s. In other words you have every right to give a 10, but its BEN-10…. and not ‘Roadtovr’ 10. I’m not sure I feel comfortable with big publications being able to assign 10’s. I know it sounds stupid to some people probably but its just a thought that occurred to me just now. Because if the scale is 1-10 then theoretically 10 is the limit, in other words 100%, or ‘perfect’.

          • Leon Jimenez

            Ben is RoadtoVR and RoadtoVR is Ben

    • M Rob

      You have to take into account the site and the reviewer. If this was an Oculus release it would be a gushing review full of platitudes and extravagant praise. Because it is a Valve release (SteamVR being a rival platform to Oculus) you get a reserved, low key review that seemed to focus a little too much on the negative with only fleeting mentions of the positives. For example the graphics are simply outstanding and I could write a whole paragraph on the visual feast that this game serves up but in the review the graphics are reduced to these two short, lackluster sentences.

      “Half-Life: Alyx is the most detailed VR game I’ve ever played. With consistently great art direction and impressively crisp anti-aliasing, the game’s visuals are top-notch”.

      I understand not wanting to give spoilers and I agree with that. The 10/10 score is because they just can’t get around the fact that Half Life Alyx is one of, if not the best VR game to date.

      • Zantetsu

        This site has years of credibility posting balanced articles about VR. The reviewer has years of credibility posting reviews of VR games. I have been reading this site for years and have never detected any bias towards or against any platform.

        Do you have any evidence for your claim of bias?

      • Immersive Computing

        Perhaps your comments are directed at the “other” VR news website, there is a strong Oculus vibe there?

      • benz145

        Erm… we’ve rated plenty of Oculus games poorly, like Marvel Powers United VR which was the biggest production in VR at the time but not deserving of more than the 5 out of 10 that we gave it:

        https://www.roadtovr.com/marvel-powers-united-vr-review-oculus-rift/

        And for that matter, no Oculus game has earned a 10 out of 10 from us.

        The score is the final word on how we felt about the game. Just because a great is great doesn’t mean there’s not interesting critiques to talk about.

        Half-Life: Alyx won its 10 not on innovation but great immersion, extreme detail and polish, and some really well executed gameplay segments that we didn’t want to spoil.

  • HoriZon

    Can’t wait to play this just need a finished built PC to play it on :) got my Link Cable!

  • Hivemind9000

    Seems like a very mechanical review – in that it discusses all the movement/interaction/gunplay mechanics (which is important of course), but says nothing much about the game overall – e.g. story, satisfying ending etc.

    • benz145

      That’s fair. I was trying not to spoil much. A lot of the game is about being immersed, and much of that comes from not knowing exactly what to expect. I didn’t talk about several significant parts of the game to avoid such spoilers.

      • Immersive Computing

        Any thoughts on using free locomotion? I must admit the Index controller joystick does not feel good here, it’s difficult to move in a straight line?

        I’m actually starting to prefer using my right stick to teleport for gross movement, and left stick for fine movement.

  • Excellent game. Phenomenal VR game. Must have!

  • benz145

    Thanks for reading our Half-Life: Alyx review! Please note the following before commenting so that we can have a thoughtful discussion:

    • We scored this game 10/10 – ‘Excellent’ by our linear scale.

    • Even if the text of the review focuses more on critique than praise, or vice versa, the score aims to boil down the reviewer’s overall opinion of the experience.

    • If you haven’t played the game, understand the limits of your knowledge.

    • If you have played part of the game, your experience may differ from those who have completed it in its entirety.

    • Road to VR does not ever accept payment for reviews or any editorial content.

  • MadMax1998

    Over several paragraphs the author is talking about rewards and how little rewarding it feels to pick up the same magazine or Resin. I say, the focus on rewards in video games has already gone too far in flatscreen gaming; many gamers seem to play only for loot/rewards and not to enjoy the experience and gameplay. In VR, the whole point of the activity is to sightsee and engage in fun exercises (i.e. gameplay). Looting should be the LEAST to focus on in VR. HL Alyx is so engaging that I’d suggest it doesn’t need rewards at all; the experience itself is the reward for getting off your couch and putting on a headset!

    • benz145

      I don’t mean reward in the sense of ‘oh wow I progressed or unlocked or collected something’ I mean reward in the sense of ‘oh I found something which is now going to enhance my gameplay’. HL2 very much had this by giving you rare ammo for guns that were especially fun to use.

  • GUEST

    Resin is the new currency. Forget bitcoin. I have a resin mine in Florida for sale cheap…

  • ShiftyInc

    It’s a great game and for sure the best looking VR game out there. But it does not reinvent the wheel here really. Feels more like an 8.5 for me. Then again if you are starving then a cracker would feel like a 10/10 as well. For me it did not kick Lone Echo of its throne for best VR game.Though its good to see that Valve still got it when it comes to make proper games.

    • In fact if you look at the single votes, they are 8, 9 and 10. This is not a perfect game, as I’ve also highlighted in my review on my blog. I’ve also mentioned that I think Lone Echo was more innovative (high five for that), because it invented a new genre. But let’s be honest, this game has a quality so high, that give it an overall score below 9.25 is hard…

    • Jeremy Kins

      I think the thing to remember here is that it’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. Much like the Index headset is the perfect culmination and distillation of everything great about gen one VR, so is HLA. It’s meant to be the peak experience of what’s possible right now to showcase that to new users.

  • JesperL

    So you give it 8, 10 and 9, and say its overall a 10.
    I love the game, but it looks like you inflate the overall score, just because its HALF-LIFE.
    You are a VR media, and VR needs a win? is that it?
    If you have an 8 in there, then the overall should not be 10. It should be 9 or 9.5!

    • benz145

      Per our review rating scale:

      Sub Scores

      In addition to an overall score, we separately score several key metrics: Gameplay, Immersion, and Comfort. The overall score is not a mathematical average of the sub-scores, as some metrics matter more in some games than others.

  • Matteo Valles

    I gotta get this game! From the pictures, it looks fantastic

  • I think Valve made some sacrifices in the name of the usability. For instance, having only 3 weapons helps you in selecting the weapon with one hand even without looking at the menu by just moving your hand in one direction (up for the gun, left for shotgun, etc…). The UX is very handy. But yes, the game looks a bit dull in this sense.

    I have one critic to your review (awesome as usual): I’ve played Alyx with four headsets to write a post about the best headset to play the game for my blog, and I think that the Vive wands have really bad usability to play this game. Not for the dimension, but for the controllers input buttons

  • oliversl

    LPT: apply the health syringe to your stomach or arm, not just your hands

  • DeanVega

    I tried this game on the Oculus Quest 2 and it blew my mind so hard. The graphics quality reminds me of MirageVR, one of the best VR porn games I’ve tried lately. Even though it’s still not finished, it looks promising as hell!