Movement through virtual space is handled equally well. It’s a typically brilliant design decision that negates the need for players to fumble around trying to pick up objects while simultaneously making them feel like futuristic wizards.
Scavanging is key for survival and help is quite literally at hand thanks to the ‘Russells’ - prototype precursors to Half-life 2’s game-changing gravity gun in glove form- which lock on to smaller items from across the room and then pull them flying towards you with the flick of a wrist. The nascent medium has been in need of its ‘killer app’ for some time here Valve have contracted a master assassin. If you do happen to have hundreds of pounds’ worth of virtual reality kit to hand - not to mention the floor space to facilitate a room-scale playing area - then Half-life Alyx might be the first game genuinely to convince you it was money well spent. In these unprecedented times, you don’t need several hundred pounds’ worth of virtual reality kit to experience that most of us can do so for free by daring to venture outside of our front doors. The flipside, of course, is that spending 20 hours creeping around an eerily deserted dystopia populated by pockets of diseased dissidents and patrolled by over zealous law enforcers is no longer the escapist fantasy it seemed even last November.
The hysteria generated by last year’s surprise announcement heralding the return of the genre-defining but long-presumed killed-in-action shooter series Half-Life was quickly tempered by news it would do so exclusively in virtual reality.įour months and what feels like a lifetime later, releasing the biggest VR game to date in the week most of the world’s gamers enter an enforced period of isolated home arrest looks like one of those once-in-a-generation moments of serendipitous marketing genius.
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