About the Half-Life Series...

Back in the day, I played and enjoyed the original Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, some mods (such as They Hunger), and the Uplink demo version of the game that featured unique areas.  Later, I played Half-Life 2 and found it to be better from a technical standpoint, but not as intriguing in premise as the original.  I never played Episode One or Two, and I have little interest in the Black Mesa update of the original.  All that said, Half-Life: Alyx has sparked my interest much like the original did.

I don't own a VR headset.  I don't have the space, money, or large blocks of free time that such a device would require.  Even so, I appreciate the fact that Valve went out of their way to make a proper Half-Life game in VR.   Up till now, it has felt like pretty much every VR title has been little more than a tech demo.  Thankfully, Half-Life: Alyx actually has some meat on it's bones; both in terms of length and content.  One of the neat things about VR is its ability to turn environmental detail into gameplay.  Rummaging through drawers and dumpsters in the game is kind of like going on a fun little scavenger hunt.  This tactile quality transfers over to the shooting and puzzle solving as well.  There's also a much more vertical quality to everything, since the act of looking up and down in VR is much more instinctive/intuitive than when using a monitor (plus mouse and keyboard) setup.  In short, there are some gameplay mechanics VR adds or enhances, but there are a few things that are decidedly worse when it is employed.

For reasons I don't fully understand, movement in video games always feels more plausible to me if it's in a vehicle of some sort.  To me, first-person shooters always come across as a conceit of sorts in that the player is really more of a floating gun than an actual character in the game...sort of like a hovering drone being controlled remotely by the player via a camera and monitor...anyway...my point is it doesn't feel especially natural.  In VR though I find this problem of physical movement amplified unless there's some kind of design conceit such as the player character being in a wheelchair or a cockpit.  Oddly enough, it's not an issue for me at all in the third-person perspective because I can trick my brain into thinking I'm manipulating my on-screen character like an RC car which brings us back to the drone analogy. I'm not sure if my own personal reaction holds true for most other people though.  The fact that the gameplay in Half-Life: Alyx is smaller in scope than previous entries in the series makes me think that some design concessions had to be implemented for the sake of accessibility.  Having said that, the fundamental mechanics still retain the same spirit as earlier entries in the franchise.

I think, when it comes to Half-Life, Valve feels pressured to make each entry innovative in some way.  In the case of Alyx, I believe they succeeded.  However, it is very much the same kind of "innovation" as before in that isn't truly innovative.  Instead, it's more of a big-budget polishing and of mechanics introduced in other smaller titles years prior (oftentimes the kind of niche games that get ignored by mainstream gaming culture).  Still, if you're one of those rich people that can afford a high-end personal computer and a thousand dollar VR rig then at least now you got something that does the hardware justice.