Half-Life: Alyx
Developer/publisher Valve Format Index (tested), Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality Release Out now
Index, Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality
Every Half-Life game has had its defining tool. In the original, it was Gordon Freeman’s iconic crowbar, as useful for smashing open crates and breaking down obstacles as it was dispatching enemies. Half-Life 2 had the Gravity Gun, the perfect way to toy with the game’s unprecedentedly sophisticated realtime physics. Portal – to stretch the definition of a Half-Life game a little, though Alyx underlines that the two share a universe – introduced the Handheld Portal Device, a space-warping concept so compelling an entire game’s worth of puzzles could be built around it.
Half-Life: Alyx has the Gravity Gloves. At first contact, they lack that instant sense of revolution. In fact, the Gloves feel a little underpowered. They don’t have much in the way of offensive capabilities, and are fairly ineffective for building steps out of level detritus, try as we might. But during one of these failed barrelstacking attempts, it finally sinks in: we’re thinking of them in entirely the wrong terms. For all the immediate similarities, they’re not just a poor man’s Gravity Gun. Rather, they’re working to an entirely different end.
Here is what the Gloves actually do: they extend out the range of your arms in VR, enabling you to reach any item you can see. Simply point your hand in its general direction and, with a ‘get over here’ flick of the wrist, bring it tumbling into your palm. The Gloves free you from bending down to investigate every item on the floor, or stretching into weird positions because that one collectible you’re trying to grab is sat in a spot of virtual space currently inhabited by the arm of a resolutely non-virtual chair. They’re also a neat counter to the inevitable minor inaccuracies of hands reaching for something they can ultimately pass right through.
So the Gloves don’t revolutionise interactivity in quite the way their forebears did – they’re arguably more solution than invention. But that’s all in service of the larger leap in interaction, as Alyx removes the keyboard-and-mouse-shaped barrier between you and Half-Life’s world, and lets you get your hands dirty. The hole the Gravity Gun was patching over, we start to realise, was that tapping E to grab a crate and hold it in your hands never quite felt satisfying – so instead HL2 gave you a superpower, the ability to blast objects around as if they were weightless. Alyx goes the other way: you don’t need to fling objects because, not only can you pick them up and hold them, you can sweep them aside dramatically or prod with one outstretched finger to see if it’ll cause them to topple.
These are the nuances of motion Alyx is interested in – letting you express yourself in the way you open a door or handle a ragdolled body. Every action comes with added physicality: health is doled out in the form of syringes that you jam into your arm. You must load weapons manually, sliding individual shells into a shotgun, racking the slide atop a pistol to chamber your first bullet. You can steady your aim simply by propping up your gun hand with the other. And in this context, of delicate, almost 1:1 movements, the Gloves
are a superpower – one that, emerging from long sessions with Alyx, we are disappointed to remember we lack in the real world.
After a few hours, it becomes second nature to use your real hands and the extended Mr-Tickle reach of the Gloves in concert. We glimpse some pistol ammo off in our peripheral vision, bring it tumbling end-overend towards us, catch it with our left hand, eject the current clip with our right and slam the new one into the base of the pistol – all without looking. We screw ourselves into a tight ball on the carpeted floor so that, inside VR, we’re a smaller target than our paltry scrap of cover. We count down the shots as they ping off metal, poke out our head just enough to scoop up that grenade we spotted earlier, prime it, throw it.
The action has a very different rhythm to what you’re likely used to as Gordon Freeman. Cover is a much bigger factor, and – if you use the default teleport-based movement system – evasion is a matter of blinking instantly from spot to spot rather than strafing and backpedalling. In every other way, though, this is unmistakably a Half-Life game. There are headcrabs, supply crates to smash, and red barrels that make a satisfying boom when you put two pistol rounds into them. What’s remarkable is how many of these elements feel custom-made for VR. The traditional
Half-Life progression of enemies translates perfectly into a training course for fighting with your own hands.
Barnacles, static on the ceiling, provide initial target practice and teach careful spot-to-spot movement as you dodge their lolling tongues. Next, the zombies introduce human-shaped targets that give you time to study them before engaging – and even then, don’t move too much, or too fast. By the time headcrabs start launching themselves at your face, you should be proficient enough to pick them out of the air, or at least know how to sidestep. Not that this makes encountering them for the first time any less horrifying. Headcrabs are, after all, essentially a fleshy VR headset, so the threat of them enveloping your skull is uncomfortably real. VR is great at scares, and Alyx frequently dials up the horror elements, especially in a couple of sections that are seemingly waiting to be branded ‘the new Ravenholm’.
Like the other Half-Life games before it, the campaign is built out of this kind of set-piece, each introducing a new spin on the formula then riffing on it for half an hour, before dropping it entirely and moving onto the next idea. The whole thing is strung together into a story, but for the most part it just feels like an excuse to move you between set-pieces. You rescue the
Evasion is a matter of blinking instantly from spot to spot rather than strafing and backpedalling
princess, Eli Vance, who at this point is so accomplished at getting captured you rather suspect he’s on a oneman crusade to gender-balance the damsel trope. You make preparations for an attack on your own personal Death Star (the Vault, a floating hunk of angular metal architecture that looms over City 17, home to some kind of Combine superweapon). The plot beats of Alyx don’t stray far from the rails of videogame action storytelling (with the exception of the final movements, which are breathtaking) but what really matters here isn’t the story as much as the way it’s told.
This is, by far, the chattiest Half-Life game you’ve ever played. Unlike her predecessor, Alyx Vance is a far from silent protagonist, and she has almost constant company from a voice in her ear – provided by Russell, a would-be Black Mesa scientist and inventor of the Gravity Gloves. Through conversation, the pair fill out their personalities, and the backstory of this world, but most of all they make jokes. Honest-to-god funny jokes. There’s a large helping of Portal in Alyx’s script – no surprise, given the game shares two-thirds of its writing staff with Portal 2. Russell, played by Rhys ‘Murray from Flight Of The Conchords’ Darby, recalls Stephen Merchant’s role as Wheatley in that game. He’s a safe pair of comedy hands that make sure every line lands. Who needs complex plotting when a game can consistently make you laugh?
And then there’s the world itself, which is immaculately realised. Alyx, sitting between Half-Life 1 and in the timeline, does a good job of not only updating the visuals of both games but also harmonising their aesthetics by demonstrating the effects of Xen infestation on the world we know from HL2. As you explore, the hard Antonovian lines of City 17 blend smoothly into the buboes of the Quarantine Zone. These spaces, overtaken by otherworldly flora, are the star: The Last Of Us by way of the Upside Down, fungal motes drifting in front of your vision, walls seeming to breathe, the gap between inanimate and alive blurring.
Alyx gives you time to take in these environments. For a shooter, the pacing is relatively contemplative, with gunfights portioned out sparingly. It’s a long while before you go head-to-head with your first Combine soldier. But once those battles do arrive, they’re some of the most thrilling we’ve ever experienced: a mad dash of ducking shots and unexpected flanking manoeuvres. We learn the true meaning of ‘blindfire’, squeezing off shots over one shoulder until the clip is dry, then praying for that telltale flatline sound. Using the Gloves, we pull an incoming grenade off its trajectory and toss it right back. We press our spine straight against some imagined cover, waiting with the shotgun at chest level for a Combine to round the corner.
And, once it’s all over, we take a moment to catch our breath. In part because fights are physically demanding – at least the way we play – but also because it’s an opportunity to admire our handiwork. What the game asks of you might be fairly standard shooter stuff, but the act of playing it out with your own hands lends it a fresh magic. That’s Alyx in a nutshell: this is a Half-Life game almost to a fault, the old formula polished to a 2020 shine, made new again by the way you manipulate it. The Gloves aren’t the new crowbar or Gravity Gun, the defining tool of Half-Life: Alyx. Your own hands are.