Half-Life Alyx review roundup: the greatest VR game yet?


The reviews are in for Half-Life: Alyx, the first game that Valve has developed in ruddy ages. And guess what? Those reviews are golden. They're glowing, in fact.

Better yet, the game is actually out now! The Half-Life: Alyx release date is today, with the game being made available on Valve's own Steam launcher around the same time that the reviews dropped.

The Half-Life franchise's first venture into VR, Alyx, is set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. You'll need a headset to play, with the game working on Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality.

Could this be the game that convinces a huge number of people to finally buy a VR headset? Based on these reviews, we'd wager that it could well be. And if you don't have time to read a whole article, this Tweeter did a fine job of summing up the hype...

IGN's Dan Stapleton gave the game a perfect score, saying, "Valve has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology. In a lot of ways, it feels like a game from the future, and one that the rest of VR gaming will likely take a good long while to match, much less surpass."

VG247's Kirk McKeand also gave a perfect score: "'Convincing' seems to be the key word. From the moment you boot Alyx up, you are fully spirited away."

Eurogamer gave out their coveted 'recommends' tag, with reviewer Christian Donlan saying this: "There are ingenious set-pieces, increasingly piling up towards the end of the campaign, but I'm so struck through by the sheer thrift of a lot of it. It's that restraint again: make the VR work, get a handful of killer things out of it, and then repeat and remix without breaking the spell."

And Gamespot's Michael Higham gave a 9/10, offering this tantalising quote: "Not only has Half-Life: Alyx made good on its shift to VR, it has elevated many of the aspects we've come to love about Half-Life games."

And if these reviews, some of the best a VR game has ever received, are not enough to tempt you into buying a VR headset... we don't know what will be.

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