It’s the story of an impossible fight against a vicious alien race known as the Combine, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. But Alyx is the only game that lets me hang out with a mystical three-armed alien before getting my face eaten by a headcrab, and that feels just as good as I remember.Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. 2020 has offered lots of strong contenders for the year’s best games I’m certainly on board with universally beloved picks like Hades or the creepy and narratively innovative World of Horror. But I’m unreasonably excited already, because seriously, who is that guy working for? Why is he so interested in Alyx? What’s his deal?Īnd again, I can logically explain why Alyx is great, but not quite why it makes me so happy. I’m not going to raise my hopes too much just yet.
It also teases a true sequel to Half-Life 2. Its story - surprisingly sweet, serious but unpretentious, and sometimes endearingly corny - focuses on Alyx Vance and her bonds with an older generation that still remembers the pre-alien invasion world.Īlyx concludes with its own cliffhanger involving the G-Man, a powerful and enigmatic agent of some unknown power. (Well, maybe not compelling enough to dig up all the old comics again.) Like Half-Life 2, it’s about a post-apocalyptic world that combines decaying brutalism with serene natural landscapes and lots of alien weirdness. Because as it turns out, I find Half-Life’s world as compelling in 2020 as I did years ago. I’m hoping Alyx gets more of the attention it deserves in 2021.īut Alyx is my game of the year for more personal reasons, too. I went back to Alyx this summer with the Quest 2, and nearly all the inconveniences I complained about in March were fixed or improved. It’s easier to find a headset with the new wired HP Reverb G2 and the convertible Oculus Quest 2, and we’ve seen some restocks of Valve’s Index, the best way to play the game. But it’s only become more accessible since launch. Unlike most of my colleagues’ favorite games this year, lots of people can’t easily play Alyx, since the game requires both a wired VR headset and a gaming PC. Alyx is long for a VR game - which means it’s about as long as a traditional mid-length shooter - but the system never gets old. While that’s obviously still a simplified take on real firearms, it’s a fun and unique skill to master, as well as a fairly challenging one in the heat of combat.
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To fire a gun, you have to hit a button to eject a magazine or crack open a chamber, grab new ammunition from behind your shoulder, fit the ammo into the gun, and cock it before firing. But it has a unique design that’s intuitive yet realistically clumsy. ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ is both a great VR game and a great first-person shooterĪlyx is one of several good VR shooters. Even if it was okay, I worried encountering a new Half-Life game would expose my fandom as simple nostalgia - something I could remember feeling, but only enjoy as an echo from a decade ago. When Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx for virtual reality, promising a Half-Life 2 prequel that would address the series’ cliffhanger ending, I knew I’d end up reviewing it. A decade later, long after I gave up on the fabled Half-Life 3, Gordon and Alyx still felt like old friends.
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But I played the games in college, and I somehow developed the kind of obsession that leads you down a rabbit hole of Garry’s Mod fan comics because you just want to be around more Half-Life.
Like a robot short-circuiting while trying to articulate the concept of love, I’m incapable of explaining my deep investment in the story of a crowbar-wielding physicist named Gordon Freeman fighting an oppressive alien regime with his tech-genius partner Alyx Vance. They’re not my favorite games, or even my favorite Half-Life games. For some reason, though, Half-Life 2 and its follow-up episodes are special.
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