Half-Life: Alyx Reviews
Half-Life: Alyx has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology.
With old friends, new enemies, and an exciting story, revisiting City 17 in VR is a thrill in Half-Life: Alyx.
City 17 provides the setting for a VR adventure filled with brilliant detailing.
Alyx doesn't propel VR to unseen heights, nor does it overcome the limitations of the platform. What it does is provide an exceptional name-brand experience that is extraordinarily polished and just about the best example of what VR has to offer right now. Every puzzle is satisfying, every gunfight is a thrill. The environments are beautifully horrifying and the interactables are absurdly detailed. It has no lulls, nothing ever gets played out or boring. It has a ton of fan service and builds some really exciting hype for the future of the series. However, I wish that the game built its core mechanics over time the way Portal 2 so famously did. Alyx is much more akin to a rollercoaster ride than a hill to climb. If you can afford the price of admission though, it's one wild ride.
Not just a Half-Life game, but an invitation to live in its world.
The dense campaign never lets up with surprising reveals, new enemies, and witty dialogue to carry you through the exciting journey
Half-Life: Alyx is a tremendous VR experience that captures and elevates what makes the series special.
Valve has succeeded at just about every goal it must have had for this project. The only thing left is whether hardcore fans will be willing to buy, and use, a virtual reality headset in order to learn what happens next in the world of Half-Life. The good news is that those who do will experience what is likely the best VR game released to date.
Half-Life: Alyx reaches some astoundingly high heights while also managing to be both too ambitious and too conservative for its own good.
The masses may not rush out to buy a VR set to play Half-Life: Alyx. But anyone who loves video games should look at this game as a next logical step in the possibilities of dramatic, interactive storytelling. Bravo, Valve. Bravo.
It turns out Valve just needed new tech. It just needed VR. And it’s what I needed, too.
Alyx is a trooper throughout the entire adventure, and while she can get freaked out by the places she needs to go, she never stops moving forward.
I hope I don’t have to wait for brain-computer interfaces to exist before the series returns again, because despite a handful of complaints, I still think Valve make the best first-person shooters around.
But judged on its merits as a VR game, it excels. If you're looking for something to wow you with what the technology can do, this will get that job done.
An incredible, best-in-class achievement that could only be done in VR, with excellent voice acting, sublime visuals and audio and, yes, a truly Half-Life story.
Half-Life: Alyx is the new bar for Virtual Reality. Valve has made a game so realistic, immersive and detailed that we can consider it a main iteration of Half-Life. Only its story, something fair in what it contributes to the saga make it not have a perfect score.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Through the lens of VR, Half-Life: Alyx is an amazing experience that blends action and storytelling with a profound level of immersion.
Half-Life Alyx is proof that Valve is still at its best creatively. This emblematic franchise has been brought to virtual reality; in Alyx we enjoy an immersion never seen before, with comfortable and intuitive mechanics as well as excellent visuals and atmosphere that accompany this interesting adventure within the iconic saga.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
“Half-Life’s” ties to survival-horror shine in “Alyx.” One enemy that most who have played “Half-Life” will remember are the Barnacles — monstrosities that attach themselves to the ceiling and dangle their long, thin, dark tongues close to the ground. VR makes their presence more unnerving. A random moment I loved happened when I pulled an object toward me that a Barnacle caught then with its tongue and devoured. I moved into place underneath it while carefully avoiding its grotesque appendage and fired a few shots, killing it and causing it to spit up my item. In that moment, and several others, I felt noticeably transported to one of the most vivid science fiction worlds I’ve experienced.