It might not be Half-Life in feel, at least not straight away, but it’s unmistakably Half-Life in approach. But there’s a smoothness to it, a certain amount of hassle-free fluidity that games like say, Boneworks, don’t quite match, that gives it a sharper edge. What the game loses in its transition to VR - namely intuitive movement and weapon variety (there’s only three guns) - it makes up for in the versatility of full human control. But when they hit they’re absolutely fantastic, like the act of following wires inside the walls to reconnect electricity which might require you to push items out of the way or create makeshift platforms to find the right path forward. They’re hit and miss, with some of the more menial challenges getting tiresome - like guiding a beacon on a holographic sphere past a maze of mines. Your Multi-Tool is in constant use to unlock doors and ammo crates by beating holographic challenges. Alongside streamlining scavenging without sacrificing it, they’re a big part of what gives Alyx’s action flow, a mechanically dependable linchpin in the middle of the juggling act firefights often prove to be.Īlyx is also more directly interested in puzzles than previous games, keen to utilize VR to the fullest extent. Oh, and those gloves - more appropriately nicknamed ‘the Russells’ after their inventor - are a wonderful thing, effortlessly intuitive and moreish to use by executing a simple flick of the wrist to summon an object to your hand with a well-timed catch. In its tougher battles I’d find myself huddled on the floor, opening car doors to fire through the gaps in driver seats, instinctively flinching at the hammer of gunfire above and then poking out remaining shards in a shattered window to access a stray ammo clip with the flick of my Gravity Gloves before fumbling a hasty reload. If you’re prepared to pantomime, Alyx holds some of the most active and immersive combat you can experience in VR. It’s a game of physics and, now more than ever, the physical Combine encounters, for example, evolve from their run-n’-gun roots to heftier, more tangible slowburn shootouts in which the world is both a weapon and a shield. Much of Alyx is spent both re-familiarizing yourself with the world of Half-Life and re-examining what its staple elements mean in VR. More importantly, though, it’s a great way for the franchise to find its feet again, especially in uncharted territory. And, conveniently, it pits Alyx at a crucial and unexplored time in the Half-Life canon, with the human race still licking its wounds as it adapts to life under the rule of Combine stormtroopers. The decision to double back to a time before Half-Life 2 and cast you not as the crowbar-wielding Gordon Freeman but instead the pistol-slinging Alyx Vance is a wise one, freeing Valve up from at least some of the crushing pressure that putting a ‘3’ in that title would apply. But what it does right, it almost always does the best. For a long-time VR player, Alyx doesn’t hold a lot of ‘new’, and it doesn’t have many answers to the medium’s more persistent issues. And yet, for better or worse, Alyx is also a game of surprising familiarity, not just in the DNA it’s dusted off after these many years but in how it approaches the platform. Alyx has a world so lavish in apocalyptic dressing and setpieces so thoughtfully sequenced you’d be forgiven for mistaking the game for a flagship PlayStation or Xbox exclusive. Half-Life’s big return is, for starters, unparalleled in production.
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