I've only played Half Life Alyx for about three hours but with a title like this that's enough to call it a masterpiece. That seems to be the general consensus as well, seeing as the game is sitting on Overwhelmingly Positive and 10/10 out of almost 60,000 reviews on Steam. That's very impressing for sure! Knowing all of this going into the game did without a doubt put more pressure on it. No matter I wasn't disappointed at all.

What is Half Life Alyx?

Half Life Alyx is Valves first VR title. It's the first Half Life game to be released in over ten years and apparently it's set between the first and second game. This doesn't really matter much to me seeing as I've never played the earlier Half Life games. Yes, I know. How can I be a gamer and NOT having played the Half Life games? I may have to go back after finishing this. I'm probably gonna get blasted for this in the comments.

The setting of Half Life is a futuristic dystopia where the world has been invaded and taken over by aliens. In Half Life Alyx we are in a city called City 17 and we seem to spend most of our time within a quarantine zone. Most of the locations, especially underground, are infested with some kind of organic material and there's alien headcrabs roaming around controlling people and eating their faces. This would all probably have a bigger impact on me if I had played the earlier titles.

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First Impressions

The game starts out quite peacefully on a balcony overlooking the city. This is a very good thing and a perfect opportunity to get somewhat acquainted with the controls. You interact with the world through your two floating hands that move in accordance with your controllers. Pretty much any object in the world can be picked up and interacted with which is pretty cool. I spend the first couple of minutes just throwing things off the balcony. It was quite satisfying.

Moving can be done by either walking around the room in real life or moving with the left hand stick. I have to use the latter for the most part due to not having a big area to play in. I have something like a 2x3 meter area to move around in which isn't all that much but it's enough. When moving with the stick you flick it forward and aim on the ground where you want to go. When you let go of the stick you're teleported to the location. I thought this would be weird and annoying at first but it's actually quite comfortable. I get a lot less motion sickness from this movement type over using the stick to actually walk in other games.

The camera can be controlled with the right hand stick or simply by turning your hear and body to look around. I stick to the latter 100% of the time. When using the stick the camera snaps about 30 degrees in the direction you flick it which is just not comfortable at all.

After getting acquainted with the controls I started moving off the balcony and I found a room with some markers that I could use to draw on the window. I spent a little to much time on there. Who knew drawing on a window in VR would be this fun?

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The Plot

This section contains spoilers from the prologue of Half Life Alyx!

From what I can gather we are part of a resistance movement. Our main enemies are the Combined, a faction I would probably know more about if I had played the earlier games. When entering the apartment from the balcony we are contacted by our dad who is also past of this resistance. He has secured some much sought after intelligence and we're told to meet up.

We start moving through an apartment complex and we learn of new ways to interact with the environment. We eventually get to an elevator and start riding it down to meed our dad. What greets us instead are Combined soldiers sticking guns up in our faces. This was my first meeting with NPCs in the game and that was really cool. I really flinched when they stormed through the door and pointed their guns at me. I tried to run past them but they pushed me back which was a weird feeling.

They knock us out and put us in a prison transport van. Luckily we have friends who manage to break us out. Turns out they were actually hoping to save my dad but didn't know which of the two prison transports he was in. From here on the first story point starts with us going to free our dad before he's sent off to some high security prison, tortured and killed for the highly classified intelligence he gathered.

General Gameplay

From here on out the gameplay just gets better. We meet up with a friend from the resistance who helps us out by locating our dad. He gives us these awesome gravity gloves which lets ut pick up items from afar. We can target them, flick our wrist and have the item fly towards us. We can then catch it mid air which is pretty awesome. A trick that never gets old. It's also around this point that I discover I can smash bottles on the ground so I start doing that every time I see a glass bottle.

We also get our first gun and get to do some shooting practice. Unsurprisingly you point with your hands where you want to shoot and pull the trigget on the controller to shoot. Aiming isn't as easy as it looks in these VR games. Especially when targets are moving. When the zombie apocalypse hits us VR players are gonna have a real edge over all the FPS players for sure. Reloading is done by releasing the magazine and putting in a new one just like you would with a real gun. There's no press R to reload in this game. You gotta do it yourself.

We move our way through the city, fighting zombies, headcrabs, robots and combined. Along the way there's several cool puzzles to solve and a decent amount of items to find. We find a lot of resin hidden away in clever places which we can use to upgrade our guns with extra attachments like holographic sights or laser sights. Pretty cool!

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The Verdict

Half Life Alyx is absolutely great. The further I get in the game the better it gets and the story is really starting to catch on. The game is cut in to smaller sections which you're well rewarded for being thorough going through. You'll find a lot of extra items and ammo if you don't rush it. The enemies are cool and the gunfights are a real blast. Movement is comfortable and the gunplay is satisfying. The game has a great physics engine as well which makes interacting with the world around you so much better. The feeling of seeing a headcrad fly towards your face is one I'll never get used to though. That's uncomfortable for sure.

I also discovered that there's a huge modding community for this game. People are making new weapons, new campaigns and new maps to go through. That's just so awesome to me. I'm gonna be checking out some of that for sure once I finish up the game.

I normally don't give scores to games but my first impressions of Half Life Alyx are a definite 10/10.

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All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.