Half-Life: Alyx
2020
Audio: English · Subtitles: Russian, Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Finnish, Vietnamese, Thai, Danish, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, English
- shooter
- puzzle
- adventure
- action
- science fiction
- single player
The story
Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. 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. Alyx Vance and her father Eli mount an early resistance to the Combine's brutal occupation of Earth.
What it’s like
Dim, rain-streaked industrial interiors lit by flickering work lamps, sickly green Combine glow and the warm amber of a lantern in a dark room, with the pale light of City 17's overcast skies bleeding through broken windows. Its sound design is the real atmosphere: a low hum of machinery, distant alien chittering that pulses closer and then recedes, and a sparse, mournful score that swells only at key moments. Played in VR, it is physical rather than watched: you pull slides back on pistols, crack open canisters by hand, and reach into drawers and crates, so the rhythm is deliberate, with long stretches of careful exploration and puzzling broken by tense, sweaty firefights. Its vibe is bleak but humane, a dread-heavy sci-fi world with quiet tenderness between its two leads, a daughter and father who are determined to keep each other going. Violence is frequent and sometimes graphic in its alien-enemy encounters, with grotesque creature designs and moments of cruelty, though gore is more stylised than splattery and fear lands as tension rather than jump scares. Best for players who want a deeply immersive, story-driven shooter, and who can handle a steady drumbeat of threat and the discomfort of VR.
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