The reason this is split into two separate sections is I want to include a spoiler free review for those who are unfamiliar with the game and a spoiler filled critique that will allow me to better develop my thoughts.
Review
I liked Half-Life: Alyx a lot, having finished it. It was a fun 8-10 hour romp that has a lot of good to keep people engaged with the game. I have never completed a Half Life game before, but with HL’s existence permanently branded to the modern gaming zeitgeist I really didn’t feel too lost. You really only need to know a couple of things about the setting: aliens are generally bad, the Combine are even worse, and humanity has already lost to the Combine.
As such the story was pretty serviceable. I understood the major points: The Quarantine Zone (QZ) is extremely dangerous, Alyx’s dad was taken by the combine and is in the QZ, and Alyx is willing to brave the QZ because she loves her dad, pretty clear cut. The situation gets more complex as the story continues but this initial hook was enough to keep me invested.
The gun-play is serviceable, against zombies? Very fun. Against Combine? Not so much. Which is why chapters some chapters that focus on gunning down the combine could be a slog around the middle of the game. However, this repetitive game loop is broken up nicely by chapter 7, but I’ll save the reasons why for the critique.
The world is beautifully gross. On my GTX 2080 Super the game ran well on the highest graphics settings on my Oculus Rift S and it was all the better for it. Not much else to say here besides the visual design and fidelity were very helpful in getting me through the middle part slog.
Another thing that helped was the voice work. Ozioma Akagha as Alyx and Rhys Darby as Russell were simply wonderful. Ozioma especially. As much as I love Rhys Darby (and trust me, I do) he was just playing a Rhys Darby character : high energy, awkwardly charming delivery, New Zealand accent, he checks all the boxes (see Coran from Voltron Legendary Defenders), but Ozioma felt so natural in the role, and her delivery honest to god helped me connect with Alyx in a way that people think is only really possible with a silent protagonist. Similar to Ethan from Resident Evil 7, her dialogue is perfect not only for her character, but also as a reaction to the situation the player is experiencing, reinforcing her connection to the player.
So yeah, that’s it for the review. It’s a pretty fun game. Slogs in the middle, the art and voice work help it through for me though, and once chapter 7 hits it stays pretty strong through the end. Also I don’t really have anywhere else to put this but it will be really obvious that this game was developed for the Index in mind, and then ported on to other control schemes, as my Oculus controller had both grip buttons unbound. Not really an issue, just something I thought I’d point out for those without an Index.
Critique
Alright, let’s talk guns. The guns are alright. The pistol is a classic starting weapon and it does its job well. It sounds good, and the idea that when you reload the gun it removes the magazine and any bullets not in the chamber, potentially wasting ammo, which I really liked as a tiny bit of resource management, and felt like something out of a survival horror game. The other guns are a shotgun and an smg. Both are one handed, which makes them a little disappointing to use, but its understandable, as there is a clear separation between the left hand being used for movement, and the right hand being used for interaction.
Against melee enemies the guns are extremely fun, since movement (if you don’t want to throw up) is teleportation based, meaning you can give yourself a lot of distance between you and the enemies, and have the player control the pace of a fight. Against ranged enemies, the movement inhibits the options of the player tremendously. Because teleportation movement is too slow and digital to avoid the hitscan weaponry of the Combine, the player is forced to sit behind cover and wait for the Combine to reload their weapons. A cover based combat system is an understandable choice, but it’s so jarring compared to the previous combat loop that it really slows things down to a crawl, and I found it incredibly boring. This is the worst right after the player exits the Norther Star Hotel. So how does Chapter 7 fix this for me? It gets rid of the Combine. Hell, it gets rid of gun combat in general, and that’s all thanks to my boy Jeff.
Jeff is a large blind mutant zombie that pours out dangerous spores from his large gross pores. He’s immune to guns but can only detect things through sound. So you have to sneak past him while distracting him with the sounds of broken bottles, creaking doors, and machinery. I cannot understate how refreshing it was to face off against Jeff. The game rides the fine line of being an action horror game, and those are both admirable genres to emulate, but we humans in this current age are much more adept at using our brains to survive, rather than our bodies to fight. But what exactly do I mean by that?
Well let’s talk about genre conventions for moment. Action games, specifically first person or third person cover based shooters, rely heavily on a player’s reaction time, which fits in a scenario where the appropriate reaction the stimulus presented is using a finger or thumb to hit a button within millimeters of you on a controller at all times. Your brain is fast enough to line up a shot using a control stick and press a button in a split second. However, your entire body is not fast enough to get up, aim a gun, and fire in that same amount of time with as much accuracy. As such, to compensate for your body’s slower completion of your mind’s reaction time, the game has to go slower, and fights go slower. This can be seen with the Combine easily. They rarely move from their positions, and when they do the movements are either slow (like Chargers) or small (like Grunts). This also means damage in some cases is inevitable, and its hard for your body to react immediately to stimuli, like taking damage from an smg, and because guns deal so much damage in this game, and there are no invincibility frames you can use to damage buffer through hits, you have a high change of dying before even beginning to understand what’s going on. This sort of thing keeps ranged combat as a slow, careful exercise in patience or sacrifice, as you either wait for enemies to come at you one at a time, or prepare a ton of healing syringes to get through a fight. Luckily the designers realized that and generally have healing in ample supply around areas they know are going to have large fights, but it doesn’t make taking basically guaranteed damage any more fun. You already know what to do, but your body can’t react fast enough to act on that plan without taking some negative consequences.
Horror games, on the other hand, play like puzzle games. While the overwhelming feelings of fear and paranoia may distract from this, horror games are traditionally tactical games revolving around puzzles like resource management, danger avoidance, and free-form or obtuse objectives (find the lever, solve the block puzzle, etc). As such, it is welcome when a horror game moves slower than compared to an action game, because it gives a player time to think, and then execute on a plan.
And this is why Jeff was so much fun. Because VR is just tailored better to experiences that don’t rely on quick and jittery movements, but rather thoughtful and deliberate ones. Jeff forced me to pay attention to the game again, and not just try and brute force my way through like I did while fighting the Combine. So when the game doubled down on classic horror game tropes (smart weak player, strong dumb enemy, etc) I loved every minute of it.
What impressed and surprised me after Jeff was that the developers did incorporate some deliberate and thoughtful strategy into the gun-play later on in the form of the Antlions. Like the Combine, they have weak spots that you can shoot for better results, but unlike the Combine, Antlions’ ranged attacks (when they do have ranged attacks) are projectile based and easier to dodge, and it is immensely more satisfying to hit the weakpoints of an Antlion. Sure, when you shoot a Grunt Combine in the gas tank and they explode, that’s great, but you have to shoot that same Grunt in the head 3 or 4 times in order for him to drop, and that’s his other weakpoint! All he does before that is jut his head back like you punched him in the face, not a whole lot of positive feedback for landing “critical” headshots. But the antlions? Oh they’re awesome, sure you can shoot them in the thorax and kill them instantly, but the thorax is hard to hit. The legs however, can be shot clean off, and removing limbs impacts the mobility of the creature! This results in clear and quick positive feedback for the player. Instead of the player disappointingly lamenting “I shot that guy in the head, why didn’t he react?” the thought is “OH! I blew that leg clean off! That’ll slow ’em down!”
I haven’t even spent any time talking about the puzzles. Similar to my discussion on genre the puzzles work because it’s fun in VR to complete precise and simple feats of dexterity because the movement is more analogous to real world movement when compared to a controller. It feels way better to hold a globe in one hand and guide a signal through it with the other than using the left control stick to move the globe and the right control stick to guide the signal.
Overall Half-Life: Alyx was a very fun game that comes close to being a true VR experience. Unfortunately its adherence to its more conventional predecessors meant that some systems that don’t translate well into VR had to be transferred over to not alienate consumers expecting a comparable experience to what had come before, forcing the game to snag in the middle under its own slow and cumbersome ranged encounters against the Combine. But when the game adheres more to the strength of the medium and technology it was delivered on (specifically in the beginning and towards the end), it shows a promising future for the development of mainstream VR gaming.
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