Half-Life: Alyx first impressions: an amazing but not mindblowing game

Half-Life. A legendary game for us millennials. A myth for all the Web, that was waiting for years for a new episode. And then, when we thought to have lost the hope, Half-Life: Alyx came in, bringing the genre we love to the technology that we love: virtual reality. Today, March 23rd, it is the historical day of the launch, and at 6 pm CET we were all there trying to playing the VR game of the century.

I’ve just played more than 2 hours of it, streaming it online on my Youtube channel, and I plan to continue playing it tomorrow, probably with various different headsets (I’ve used the Quest+Link until now). I’ll write a full review when I will have finished the game, but today I want to write immediately my first impression on it, while my T-shirt is still wet for having played the game. Notice that being at roughly the 15% of the game, this can’t represent a full review, and maybe I’ll change my impressions on the game later on.

But now, let’s dig into it: does Half-Life live up to the hype?

The Hype and why Valve should never release Half-Life 3

The answer to the previous questions that comes up to my mind is “not completely”.

Hype is a double-edged sword: it can give you customers, it can bring you attention, but it also creates unrealistic expectations. The bigger the hype, the more the business is profitable, but also risky. Let’s take an example from our ecosystem: Magic Leap.

Has it created hype? Yes. Has it been useful for its business in the short term? For sure, it has had great sales the first day. Has it been good for them in the long run? No, it has been a disaster, actually. No one is praising Magic Leap because as a startup coming from nowhere it has been able to craft an AR headset, but instead everyone is criticizing Magic Leap because their headset is “normal”. They created unrealistic expectations, that they haven’t been able to meet.

Half-Life: Alyx is another product for which there was a hype over the roof. It has made almost all headsets go sold out, and Valve has teased how the game would have been fantastic. All Half-Life games have changed the history of gaming, and I was waiting for Half-Life: Alyx as a game that could have changed all the rules of virtual reality. A disruptive game, something that would have blown my mind completely.

It’s my fault that I played the game with these expectations, that until now during my play time, have not been met. I mean, the game is wonderful, and I’m loving spending my time playing it. I think it raises a lot the bar of the quality of VR games. But… I have not found something that it’s changing completely the rules. I found a massive level of polish, new interactions, great graphics, etc… but due to my high expectations, this still doesn’t satisfy me.

And I think this is the reason why Valve should never release a Half-Life 3 game: the hype for that title would be so high, that no matter how good the game can be, it can never meet the expectations of players. 3 is the number that must never be pronounced.

After having clarified why I’m not completely satisfied with this game, let me explain to you what I liked about Half-Life Alyx and what not (until now).

What I liked

Half-Life: Alyx is a game of superb quality. While you play it, you notice how Valve has spent a lot of time and effort in curating every detail of it.

And this reflects itself especially in one feature: most things just work as you expect. There are some moments during the game when you do an action, and you’re surprised that things go exactly as in real life. If you throw a bottle, it shatters when it touches the floor. If you throw a plate, it flies in a different way from the bottle. You can move objects, corpses. You can open lots of suitcases. When you touch some surface with your hands, the hands assumes the right pose to interact with that object, in any case. Most things just work as you expect them to work, and this increases realism. I can only imagine how much time they have spent in developing such kind of physics system. It has been one of those features that have increased the sense of immersion for me while I was playing the game.

Then there is the UX. Lovely, there is a great attention to every interaction so that to make it natural. Attracting objects at you with the Grabbity Gloves feels so cool, and it is a great compromise between a natural interaction and something that is easy to do in VR. After you learn how to do it, attracting ammo and storing it behind your shoulders become second nature. And the fast inventory near your wrists is very nice and comfortable. When there is a ladder, you can climb it, but after a while, the system will take you automatically to the top of it, so that you don’t get tired. There must have been a long study on the User Experience, so that to design everything so that it feels natural, but not too natural to be frustrating.

But the best thing is probably the Half-Life vibes. The environments feel creepy, and all the weird alien stuff and the corpses that you find during your quest keep the tension high. If you have played some of the old episodes of Half-Life, you can finally find yourself into your favorite game. Seeing the headcrabs trying to jump into your face is very scary. Finding the health-stations, that remind the ones of Half-Life 1, so beautiful, there in front of you, ready to repair you, is something that I thought could never be possible many years ago.

The game has a wonderful atmosphere, thanks to the mix of studied visuals and audio, that put you really into the mood of the game. And there is also the usual combination of enigmas and action that has made the Half-Life genre famous. Regarding the multimedia elements, both audio and visual, the quality is extremely high, and we should all compliment the artists working on it.

Mostly these elements are what I loved of the game until now, what made the time fly for me while I was in.

What I haven’t liked

The first thing that I haven’t liked of the game has been… waiting one hour and a half to play it. At 6pm, Steam started unpacking the game, and it took ages on my PC to do it. I was so pissed off.

Then, I found some little bugs and problems here and there with the game. For instance, I activated the Subtitles to understand better the dialogues that are in English (there’s no support for Italian), but the game never showed me the subtitles. Then at a certain point in the game, in one of the moments that were visible in the gameplay videos shared some days ago by Valve and IGN, my left hand disappeared completely from the game, and I had to return to a previous saving to make it appear again (weird).

But what has surprised me is that some of the interactions were frustrating to me. One simple example is what the game shows when you try to put your head into the walls. Most other VR games show you a fade-to-black, while Half-Life shows a bright yellow color that flahes the eyes.

I also found the guns pretty frustrating. I’ve played with the Quest+Link, so I don’t know if it is better with the Index Controllers (I think so), but reloading the guns is a confusing mechanism. What you have to do to shoot with the pistol is: eject the old magazine with the B key, then take a new magazine from the shoulder, put it into the gun, then press the A key to load the bullet, then shoot. It’s all made for the sake of realism, but when you have a headcrab that is jumping onto your face, having to perform all this sequence of operations becomes a bit of a mess. Especially because if you don’t put the magazine exactly into the hole, it falls onto the floor and so you have to recover it from the floor or grab another from the inventory. And it was not unusual for me, while I was worried not to die in the game, missing the gun with the magazine or forgetting to press the A key or the B key and getting confused in the process.

With the shotgun, this was even worse, because the process is completely different from the one of the gun, and so you have to learn a completely new procedure… that still requires you to put the shells exactly into the barrels (something that I missed a lot of times), and then load them. I don’t know if this will come natural into the game after many hours of play, but until now, I find all this realism a bit unnecessary and a bit frustrating.

But most of all, as I said in the beginning, I’m disappointed by the lack of a moment that has made my mind melt completely. Again, this is probably my fault because I was expecting too much, but it has been what has disappointed me the most until now. I haven’t found something that makes me say that “Half-Life: Alyx has started a new genre of VR games”.

Final impressions

After 2+ hours into the game, my impressions is that Half-Life: Alyx is an astonishing game, and it will be difficult for competitors to catch up with its level of quality and polish. It has some imperfections here and there, but it is a very solid game. I still have not had my WOW moment, but I hope in the next 10 hours. If I had to give a mark until now, I would say something around 9/10.

See you tomorrow on my Youtube Channel for a new gameplay streaming, this time with the Vive Cosmos!