Half-Life: Alyx full review: the first true AAA VR game

Yesterday, I finally finished Half-Life: Alyx. It has been a very long ride, and I had a lot of fun. I am now ready to write you a full review of this game. Some days ago, I have written a first impressions article on this game, and it made some people unhappy because I somewhat criticized this game. Have I changed my opinion? Does Alyx live up to the hype? Discover everything in this detailed article!

Before you start: it is impossible to write an article absolutely spoiler-free, but this review will feature just little spoilers, so it won’t ruin at all your surprise in playing the game, especially for what concerns the plot.

Game Review – TL; DR

Usually, I write my final considerations in the end, but for all the “tl;dr” folks out there, this time I’ll write my final opinion on Alyx upfront because the post is pretty long.

I have not changed much my opinion with regard to this game from my first impressions. From Valve I always expect nothing less than the best, and from a Half-Life title, I expect that it changes forever the history of gaming. So, I played this game with extremely high expectations, that haven’t been completely met.

The greatest disappointment for me has been that this game doesn’t add any true disruptive innovation to VR gaming. It is an AAA shooter with a great UX, but we already had it in other titles like Epic’s Robo Recall. It features riddles to solve in a dystopian creepy scenario with writings in Russian… but it feels so Red Matter; it has a very long gameplay with astonishing graphics (Asgard’s Wrath); it lets you interact with all the objects around you with quasi-realistic physics (come on, Boneworks); it features a very famous IP (Skyrim VR, Star Wars: Vader Immortal); it has horror vibes (Resident Evil 7); etc…

I haven’t had any mind-blowing moment, where my mind clicked and I thought “VR gaming will never be the same”. I had this kind of moments with for instnace Echo Arena because it has basically invented a new genre, the one of VR sports. Or Dear Angelica, that put me inside a living painting. Or yesterday when I tried Spatial, when I saw some innovative solutions for XR collaboration.

Half-Life: Alyx is not the game that adds innovative features, but its true innovation is in the overall quality. The game looks and feels like a gaming masterpiece, where every feature, from the graphics to sounds not mention the user interface has been crafted and refined carefully. The visuals are incredible and detailed, and even just exploring the worlds is pure pleasure. The audio sets the tone for you to feel the tension. The interfaces are natural and well studied, and the use of the Grabbity Gloves makes picking objects in VR so easy. Every aspect of the game is of a so high-quality that most other VR games pale in comparison. Alyx has shown to the world how an AAA VR game can be, and this is probably the first time that a game with this quality arrives in our ecosystem. It will be hard for competitors to match this level of polish. So, we can say that Half-Life is rewriting the history of gaming again.

Anyway, I have also some critics: while the bugs I have found are part of every product, what I critic more is that the game in Normal difficulty feels a bit too easy, and I defeated the final boss in minutes. Also, there wasn’t a very compelling story, if not for the last bit of the game. But the game improves while you play it, and I can say that it becomes more interesting to be played in the second half, where you have some challenging moments.

In the end, Half-Life: Alyx is a game that every person owning a VR headset should play. The quality of the experience is super-high, in all its aspects, and it paves the way for future AAA games. There are some magic moments when playing it that really makes you feel amazed, like when you see an enormous spaceship in front of you, and it feels so massive in front of your eyes, or when you interact with objects and they behave exactly as in real life.

It may not be a perfect game, but it raises a lot the bar of VR gaming. And thanks to this wonderful quality and the use of the Half-Life brand, this game will make more people buy a VR headset. My best compliments to Valve for what it has been able to achieve.

Gameplay

Half-Life: Alyx features the typical gameplay of Half-Life games, that if you are a fan of the saga (who isn’t?) will immediately recognize. It is a mix of:

• Action: shoot that damn headcrabs or soldiers;
• Stealth: you have to hide from an enemy you can’t defeat yet;
• Enigmas: sometimes you have to solve some conundrums to go on in the game;
• Exploration: find ammo, First-Aid stations, etc…;
• Story: that unfolds in the Half-Life plot, in this case between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2;

Most of the game is about shooting and exploring. You will start with your gun, and you have to make your way through headcrabs and people infested by headcrabs that look like zombies. The more you go on, the more you get advanced weapons with which you can fight more advanced enemies. As in the previous Half-Life episodes, at a certain point, you start shooting soldiers, that are tougher than the headcrabs, and this will require you having better weapons.

Shooting is fun in every game, and so is also in Half-Life. Since you don’t have infinite ammo, you should also think about how not to waste too many ammunitions while shooting the enemies, because especially in some fights, you get very short of them. So it is not advised to just shoot like crazy a la Unreal Tournament: you also need some strategy and think when to use the grenades or the explosive barrels that are scattered all around the levels.

I love FPS games, and I loved shooting in Half-Life. It is especially cool that thanks to VR, all the most famous Half-Life enemies become scary as hell: headcrabs really try to jump to your face, and when they do, Alyx start panicking (and you with her). When barnacles start to bring you up to eat you, you really feel the terror of being eaten. Thanks to virtual reality and the realism offered by Valve’s superior graphics, the feeling of tension that is present in every Half-Life game is multiplied by a 10x factor, and this makes the game really intriguing.

There are some occasions where you can’t defeat an enemy, and so you will have to hide from it until better times come. In these cases, you will have to think more and act less, hiding from the enemy’s attack and trying to understand how you can survive until you will have the opportunity of killing it. These moments are very tense, and I had some heart attacks during them.

Exploration is instead needed to find ammo, and resin, the element that you need to upgrade your weapons. It is nice that Valve has hidden the goodies that you need during the gameplay everywhere, so you had better explore ever room, and search for magazines, health syringes, resin and so on, if you don’t want to run out of ammo and health soon. This is good because it makes the game last longer, because you spend so much time moving objects, opening drawers, etc… in search for elements to use in the game. And the more you explore, the more you appreciate the astonishing environments created by Valve.

Enigmas are instead of two kinds. The one I liked the most is “understand how to go on in the game”. You have shot all the enemies, and you find alone in a place with all doors that seem closed… how can you exit? So you have to explore all the details of the place you are in, and have some genius idea to come out. These moments make you think and are very stimulating because you have to solve sometimes tricky conundrums. The second type of enigmas is “3D puzzles” that you have to solve to unlock cabinets, machines, doors, etc… These are dull mechanical tasks that you have to perform in 3D, like moving one blue point on the surface of the sphere from a point A to point B, while avoiding some red points moving on the same surface. I found this kind of puzzles incredibly dull and frustrating, getting annoyed every time I found one: they are no stimulating at all, just a waste of time you have to perform every time you want to unlock a mechanism.

Valve made a very good job of alternating all these different game modes. Usually, you have a very tense moment where you have to shoot many enemies, then you have a more relaxing exploration to find ammo, then some minor shootings, then a riddle to solve to go on, etc… This way the game feels more variated and the player always feel challenged. And with the continuous mix of tense moments and more relaxed moments, the flow of the player is guaranteed. Kudos to the game designers.

What has disappointed me of all of the gameplay is that the game felt a bit too easy for me. I played in Normal mode, and I remember only one moment where I had to repeat a boss fight various times to win (you can see it in my 4th gameplay video linked below), for the rest, taking down the enemies was quite easy. Especially the final boss fight is the most disappointing moment of the whole game. Who has played Half-Life 1 remembers that the last boss is something enormous that takes you ages to defeat. In this case, I was expecting an epic battle, and instead it was like: hide, shoot, hide, TATATATA, boss dead. WTF, really. I think in 10 minutes I had taken it down.

There have been some moments where I had to think and observe to come out, there have been some nice enigmas, and some bosses that were worthy opponents (like Jeff: Jeff was probably my favorite opponent), but I never felt the game was difficult. Anyway, my opinion on Half-Life: Alyx has improved with respect to my first impressions because while the game is very easy for its first 30%, it becomes gradually more challenging and so more fun with time.

Here you are the playlist of the videos recorded by me while playing all the game. I played it with all headsets I had here at home, and if you want to read a comparison on how it is playing Half-Life: Alyx with the different HMDs, you can read this other post of mine.

A final word on the length of the game: it took me around 17 hours to finish Alyx in Normal mode, exploring all the environments. A very long duration if compared with many other VR games on the market.

Immersion

Whoever says that Half-Life: Alyx isn’t immersive is lying. This game really takes you deep into its environments, thanks to carefully studied environments and sounds. Whenever I started playing Alyx, I lost completely the sense of time and space: I needed people to call me for dinner because I had no idea I had already spent hours into the game, and while playing I always punched whatever stuff I had around me. This game sucks you in.

The reasons are mostly three:

• The world you are in is really well-made in all its aspects, and so you feel it as believable. It is not “realistic”, so you don’t feel like being inside a real world, but you really feel as being inside a beautiful videogame. I mean, for all my teenage years I dreamt being inside a game like Max Payne, and Half-Life: Alyx gave me exactly that sensation. The quality of the graphics is above 9000, and so is the audio. There are some moments of true terror, like when you are in the dark, armed only with a pistol and a flashlight, and you have headcrabs all around you. And there are moments of awe when you have around you the environments infested by the aliens that are so rich of details that are truly believable. All these beauty and all these emotions give you a deep sense of presence;

• The interfaces are studied to be natural, and this increases the immersion because you play the game without thinking too much;
• The world has believable physics, and you can interact with almost everything. You can move boxes, destroy bottles, open cupboards, etc… and this makes the world become believable. I had some WOW moments when the world elements reacted to my actions exactly as in real life, and I wasn’t expecting it. For instance, the first time I threw a dish and it flew like it should have to; or when I let a paint can fall to the floor and it spilled the white paint on the ground; or when I launched a telephone on the ground and it made “ding”. I could put on my head a hard hat or a traffic cone. I could open a door by pulling it with my gun. And the physics is believable also because it considers the weight of the objects: for instance, you can’t take a heavy object with only one hand, because it falls down, and you have to use both of them. The possibilities of these natural interactions are endless: I have seen a video where someone stopped a headcrab with a chair and then threw it out of the window. Valve did an amazing job in offering believable physics that make the game so immersive.

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Another thing that is interesting regards the impersonation of Alyx: Alyx Vance behaves like a true person, and there are moments where you feel connected to her. For instance, when she founds herself into the dark, she wants to speak with Russell, because she is afraid and doesn’t want to feel alone. She sometimes jokes. These are all elements that make you feel more embodied into Alyx.

Comfort

Valve offers the game with many comfort options so that you can pick up the comfort configuration you prefer. For instance, to walk you can use smooth locomotion and teleport. And even when you use smooth locomotion, there is still the possibility of teleporting if you wish. This sometimes create the possibility of hacking a bit the game, since teleporting is much more easier to use than smooth moving when you have to run away from enemies, or when there are some moments when you have to move carefully on a path where you should keep your equilibrium to survive. Sometimes this helps you in cheating some challenges.

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The designers have also cared about the comfort of the viewers of the game streams, adding a spectator mode that writes on the screen the current status of the player (health, ammo, resin, etc…), and also smooths the movement of the visuals so that the game gives less “seasickness” when you watch it from the outside.

The game has also many accessibility options that let you play the game with only one hand and/or seated. There are subtitles, for who can’t hear. In this, I have to praise Valve to have worked hard so that everyone could play the game his own way, including also people that not always manage to play VR games.

I had some glitches while using these features, though: the spectator mode sometimes didn’t work, and the subtitles never showed to me, notwithstanding the fact I activated it many times. But I guess these are just bugs that will be ironed out soon.

The comfort of this game is top. The problem is more on the hardware side than on the software one: I mean, after hours with a headset on my head, I started feeling some ache. And also being standing all those hours was an issue for my legs 🙂 But these are problems common to VR in general and are not Valve’s fault.

If you want a final piece of advice regarding comfort: don’t play this game too close to when you go to sleep. I had nightmares all nights that I played with Alyx… I guess all those monsters were not good for my brain 😀

Story

In Half-Life: Alyx, you impersonate Alyx Vance, a member of the resistance that fights against the Combine. I can’t talk about the plot because, well, I want to keep this post spoiler-free… so I can just say that the events unfold between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2.

If you don’t know the plot of Half-Life, you had better reading it online, so that to understand what is happening, otherwise what you see makes no sense to you.

I have to say that I haven’t found the plot much interesting for like 70% of the game. In the beginning, the game is mostly “go there, do that”, and only towards the end you have some interesting events unfolding around you. Personally, I haven’t felt much drawn from the story… I just found the end truly worth seeing. This is something that has disappointed me a bit.

Graphics

Forget what you’ve seen in other VR games. In Half-Life: Alyx, you have impressive graphics, that will amaze you during the game. What has impressed me is the level of detail of every environment, that makes it so real. For instance, when you are in the environments infested by the aliens, you can see the alien material affecting and absorbing all the objects it is on. And this alien slime is so full of texture, and it has some luminous parts, that react to your touch. And it may emit some colored dust particles, that spread in the air in front of it. Every little detail has been carefully crafted.

When you are in the metro, there are all the elements of a metro station, including the newspapers with the titles of the various news actually written, and there are also various cartels, objects on the floor, trash bins, etc…

The Source game engine proves to be very powerful in VR, and the lighting of every scene is fantastic, and for instance, the reflections of the lights on the water on the floor work very well. The shading, that feels very “soft”, is something that adds magic to this game.

There are some moments when the graphics are pure bliss: when I found myself on a balcony looking at the big spaceship of the combine above me, I was amazed by this quasi-realistic vision, and I truly felt the scale of the enemy station. When I entered the “Northern Star” hotel, looking at its lights, I thought that I’ve never seen something so beautiful and realistic in VR. There’s nothing to say on the graphics side, apart from that it is marvelous.

All these amazing graphical elements contribute to giving the typical vibes of Half-Life games, that always happen in dark or desert environment, with a horror touch. Audio and visuals always convey a sense of fear, and this keeps your tension (and so your immersion) always high.

A special mention should also be said about the human characters (the NPCs), with the facial motions captured performed by Cubic Motion that feels very realistic.

There are some little downsides as well. For instance, I noticed the LOD changing on elements more often than I hoped for (LOD is Level Of Detail, basically it is a trick of us game developers, that lets you switch at runtime the 3D model of a given object so that to show the high-poly version only when the player is close to it so that to spare computational resources). And when in the game you die, you took ages to respawn because the reloading of each level is very slow (I advise you to use an SSD).

I have to say that, as I told you before, I have never had the sensation of being in real life. This is something that I told you in the Immersion section and that I want to stress again. For whatever reason, while my brain was always like “OMG, this environment is so wonderful”, it always had the sensation of being in a videogame. The feeling that I had all the time was like “It’s fantastic that I can really feel inside a videogame” and I never thought “this is real”. I think that one of the reasons is that the graphics are astonishing, but are not photorealistic… but this is just because the technology is not there yet, and so such a sensation is just impossible.

Audio

I don’t understand much of audio, but I can understand when something is well made. The audio of Half-Life: Alyx has a quality in par with its graphics. The soundtrack is fundamental to let you feel the dark vibes of Alyx, and to make you feel fear. The sounds of the game prove also to be a great feedback to let you understand if an enemy is still alive, if an area has still to be cleared, if you have to worry or can relax and so on. All the audio of Alyx is carefully studied and very immersive.

Also, the dialogues of Alyx with the other people help in increasing the sense of embodiment with her and in letting you discover the story. There are also some cute moments when audio surprises you and adds realism as well. For instance, the first time I opened a toilet to look for hidden ammo, Russell told me via radio “ehm, Alyx, do you need a minute?”. It was very fun.

The only critic to audio is that as a non-native English speaker, that is anyway used to listen to many videos in English language, I found the dialogues a bit hard to understand. I don’t know if it was for the accent of the speakers, for the volume of what, but I missed a lot of what has been said.

User Interface

Valve has made this game to showcase the potentialities of the Index Controllers. But it has also made it compatible with all headsets on the market, and has studied interfaces that should be natural for all controllers. And apart from the original Vive wands, I think that for all the other controllers, it has made a great job.

I was expecting a UX disruption by Alyx, but actually I haven’t seen it. The biggest innovation is the one of the Grabbity Gloves, officially called the Russell’s, that let you take objects from a distance. This is very comfortable, because it lets you interact with objects without moving from your position, and this means less time spent and less fatigue felt in moving in the room and in crouching to get objects from the floor. As soon as you learn how to use them, attracting objects become second nature and you wonder how you can live your daily live without having the Grabbity Gloves. I hope many VR games in the future will adopt this kind of system because it is very comfortable: you point an object, you attract it, and then you use it or you store it.

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Apart from the gloves, that are the true innovation, all the rest is a series of very nice improvements. For instance, you have two inventory slots on your wrists, so that if you need an item like a grenade fast, you can take it easily with your hand. You can store ammo in your backpack just by dropping the magazines behind you, and taking them from there when you need it. Reloading the weapons requires using a combination of buttons and movements that is quasi-realistic, and this improves immersion.

The choice of the weapon has a smart interface: clicking a button on your left controller, you see the list of your weapons, that is not a list, but actually a cross showing the icons of the weapons with info on the ammo, in which you can select your weapon by moving your controller on a particular icon and then releasing the button.

It is very smart, because you can select a weapon by just pressing the button and moving the hand in a particular “direction”, even without looking at the interface: for instance, the gun is “up”, while the machine gun is “right”. Being 3 weapons + 1 tool, disposed on a cross, every one can be identified by just its direction. Even during a thrilling fight, you can select fast a weapon by just moving the hand in the right way, without having to look or think. This is very handy, and just one of the many little UX refinements that Valve has made.

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Anyway, there are little problems on this side as well. Dropping the ammo behind the shoulders is nice, but it doesn’t work always well with inside-out tracked headsets like the Cosmos. Reloading is too long and complicated: it requires you to press a button to unload the gun, then taking a magazine from behind the shoulder, put the magazine into the gun, being sure to insert it into the proper place (or it falls onto the floor), and then do another action to actually load the bullets. This is a realistic reloading sequence, but it is quite long and requires you to remind an exact sequence of actions, that when you have a headcrab that is jumping on your face, it is easy to perform badly. Most of the time, I reloaded the weapons before entering a fight, because it was much easier that way… during the fights I was so worried not to die that I always performed a reloading in the wrong way. I think this part of the UX could be still improved.

Final impressions

Half-Life Alyx is an impressive game that raises the bar of VR gaming: it is Valve’s way of showing how a well-made VR game can be. It is a fantastic game, and you all should play it.

But don’t make my same mistake: don’t think that this game is perfect (it is not, it has its share of little issues), is super-realistic (it is not, it feels like a game), or completely disruptive (it is not, there are no mindblowing features). Don’t have unrealistic expectations and you’ll be fine, because this is truly the new standard for high-quality VR games. A game that is years ahead most of its competitors.

Everything from the graphics to the audio, not to mention the UX has been studied in detail to provide a game with the highest quality possible, and Valve has managed in its purpose. This game is a total pleasure to be played. And if you have not bought it yet, you can find it on Steam now for 50€.

Go playing it and then let me know your impressions in the comments here below or on my social media channels. And don’t forget to sustain me on Patreon so that I can keep being a VR blogger 🙂

(Header image modified from an image by Valve Software)