
I would play in sessions between one or two hours long, and I’d be straight up fatigued after them. Atmosphere is a big part of VR, and leaning more into horror elements is one way to create a more visceral experience.īut it can become mentally exhausting. Now, this makes a lot of sense for the VR transition. It’s not as fast or action-based as Half-Life 2. Enemies hit harder, ammo is scarce, and health is limited. I almost feel bad holding this against the game, but now is a rough time to play something that immerses you into an intense, 10-hour long experience in a postapocalyptic world filled with monsters and lots of other things that want to kill you.Ĭompared to Half-Life 2, Alyx leans more into the survival-horror genre. I won’t spoil anything, but I was worried that Half-Life: Alyx being a prequel would mean that we wouldn’t see the series’ story move forward. And since it’s been so many years since the last Half-Life game, 2007’s Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the graphics and character animations have seen some big upgrades Even small things, like seeing a headcrab again or hearing that iconic Half-Life healing sound effect, get me excited. Half-Life 2 is one of my favorite games ever, so it’s great to finally be playing a new game in this series. You can even cover your mouth by moving your real hands up to your face. Sometimes you’ll open a door and knock over a glass, only giving you a second to reach out and grab it before it crashes to the ground. The game has a lot of fun with this part, and it’s easily the highlight of the whole experience. You can do things like throw bottles to distract it. One sequence involves a nasty monster that will kill you as soon as it comes into contact with you.
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Others are based on your environment, like figuring out how to get power to an lift and then dislodge it from a a giant pipe stuck in its supports. Sometimes you’re hacking into electronics by connecting nodes in a holographic display (which you can rotate with one hand). It’s a great incentive to have you exploring every corner and nook of every room.

You’ll be turning over buckets, looking into the rafters, and opening drawers trying to find as much resin as possible. These upgrades cost resin, which are scattered around the game. For example, you can add a laser sight to your pistol, extra ammo storage for your assault rifle, or even a grenade launcher for your shotgun. You have just a few guns in Half-Life: Alyx, but you can improve all of them with special stations throughout the game. Small things also stand out, like medical stimpacks that you have to literally shoot into your chest or thigh and the grenades that you have to squeeze in your hand to activate. This gives fights a kind of tension you can’t feel in a normal first-person experience. I was actually ducking and peeking behind cover, sometimes even dropping onto my knees (thank god I played in a carpeted room).

It makes something mundane, like picking up ammo off the ground, fun and interactive. You just aim a hand in the objects general direction and flick your wrist to whip it toward you … and then you have to catch it. You can also use these to pull items toward you. A lot of it is tied to your gravity gloves, which are both your virtual hands and user interface. MetaBeat will bring together metaverse thought leaders to give guidance on how metaverse technology will transform the way all industries communicate and do business on October 3-4 in San Francisco, CA.Īlyx has some of the most impressive VR wizardry I’ve ever seen.
