As more people have had the opportunity to play Half-Life: Alyx over the first weekend since its release at the beginning of last week, the game’s user ratings have surged yet higher. Surpassing all other Half-Life games along its way, Half-Life: Alyx is now among the top 10 best rated games on Steam, ever.

Half-Life: Alyx continues to show a strong impact in its first week since launch. Despite the much smaller audience of VR players compared to general gamers, reviews continue to pour in for the game, recently passing 15,000 user reviews on Steam. 98% of those reviews are positive, pushing Half-Life: Alyx to rank #10 among the best rated games of all time on Steam.

Top rated Steam games according to Valve

Alyx is arguably #9 considering the original Witcher 3 and its Game of the Year Edition take the #2 and #3 spots. On the way to the top of the charts, Alyx has surpassed all other Half-Life games, though Valve’s Portal and Portal 2 still outrank it at #8 and #5 respectively.

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Steam appears to use a relatively naive ranking when sorting by the top rated games; with some minimum threshold of reviews, it orders the top rated games by the whole number percentage of positive reviews, and then settles any ties by ranking games with a larger number of reviews higher than a game with the same percentage of positive reviews but with fewer ratings.

Other ranking sites use different weightings between the percent of positive reviews and the total number of reviews, resulting in a different ranking of the best rated games on Steam.

Steam250, for instance, puts Alyx at #17, just barely under Half-Life 2 because even though Alyx has a higher percent of positive ratings, Half-Life 2 has more than four times the total number of reviews. You can read about Steam250’s approach to ranking here.

Top rated Steam games according to Steam250

SteamDB has a slightly different take on deciding which Steam games are the top rated, and by its count, Half-Life: Alyx is at #16 with Half-Life 2 at #20. You can read about SteamDB’s approach to ranking here.

Top rated Steam games according to SteamDB

Elsewhere, Half-Life: Alyx is topping charts too. Among critics the game has become the best rated PC title of 2020 so far and the 31st best rated PC title of all time. On Steam, Alyx has become the best rated VR game ever and has broken records among VR games for concurrent players and concurrent Twitch viewers.

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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."
  • dextrovix

    Half Life Alyx is absolutely superb- and “I hate you Jeff”..! ;)

    • Mike “Sh1neSp4rk” Lamble

      That’s probably my favourite line delivered by Alyx in the whole game.

      • kuhpunkt

        Oh my god, Jeff. Are you ok?

    • Jeff is the best moment of the whole game!

  • Zachary Scott Dickerson

    God Damn there are some obscure ass titles on that top 10 list. UGhhhhhhhh. HL VR is amazing though, and for sure top 3 VR games now.

    • J.C.

      Like what? They’re all big sellers.

      • Sven Viking

        I admit, I’d personally never heard of the top two. I’ll check them out.

  • That * could mean X in which case you already know what it is now .

    Youre welcome :D

  • Sven Viking

    It’s just moved up to 17th top rated PC game of all time on Metacritic.

  • Eliott

    So I don’t like that it’s exclusive to VR, so I’m a little biased:
    But a game that isn’t available to the vast majority of half life fans, the sample size is a little small to draw these conclusions.

    Like, this game is rated 10/10 by all players, therefore it’s the best ever!
    Sample size: 10 people who invested heavily in the required hardware to playthe game.

    • Patrick Hogenboom

      Would you want a racing game to be rated by people playing it on a keyboard ?

      • Eliott

        No, but how is that relevant?

        • Patrick Hogenboom

          Those 10 people you mention are those who bought into VR and they are all giving it top marks.
          Those who don’t buy the platform can get annoyed that it’s not available to them, that’s the similar to console exclusives.
          Only this is a game which has been built from the ground up as a VR game, a AAA VR game.
          The bar of entry is about $400 for a Rift-S, considerably lower than a console (I leave the PC out of the equation as you’re clearly a PC gamer and HL:A runs on average gaming PC’s).

  • impurekind

    And it deserves the praise. Bet full game in VR by far.

  • I have just watched the trailer… I guess anime tits everywhere. Now I understand the rating

  • Yes, to be fair this game is dedicated to a little niche where it has provided an amazing value compared to other games, while other PC games have to fight against other kinds of standards. Anyway, well deserved of course

  • david vincent

    98% positive is strange since a lot of players are struggling to run that quite demanding game…