While that’s obviously still a simplified take on real firearms, it’s a fun and unique skill to master, as well as a fairly challenging one in the heat of combat. To fire a gun, you have to hit a button to eject a magazine or crack open a chamber, grab new ammunition from behind your shoulder, fit the ammo into the gun, and cock it before firing. But it has a unique design that’s intuitive yet realistically clumsy. ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ is both a great VR game and a great first-person shooterĪlyx is one of several good VR shooters. Even if it was okay, I worried encountering a new Half-Life game would expose my fandom as simple nostalgia - something I could remember feeling, but only enjoy as an echo from a decade ago. When Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx for virtual reality, promising a Half-Life 2 prequel that would address the series’ cliffhanger ending, I knew I’d end up reviewing it. A decade later, long after I gave up on the fabled Half-Life 3, Gordon and Alyx still felt like old friends. But I played the games in college, and I somehow developed the kind of obsession that leads you down a rabbit hole of Garry’s Mod fan comics because you just want to be around more Half-Life. Like a robot short-circuiting while trying to articulate the concept of love, I’m incapable of explaining my deep investment in the story of a crowbar-wielding physicist named Gordon Freeman fighting an oppressive alien regime with his tech-genius partner Alyx Vance.

They’re not my favorite games, or even my favorite Half-Life games. For some reason, though, Half-Life 2 and its follow-up episodes are special.

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