Half Life Alyx is the prequel to Half life 2 (sorry Half life 3 wanters), starring none other than Alyx Vance. Her father get's kidnapped by the combine, which leads her to attempt to save him by heading through a quarantine zone in the famous city 17


PROS:
~The world is absolutely gorgeous, even the most mundane areas tell stories and have a sense of beauty to it, the lighting and particles only adding to it, and there was dozens of moments where all I could do was stand there and look around.

~On normal difficulty, The game felt challenging, but not unfair. More often than not, any problems I had was my fault, and ammo isn't plentiful, but I never really straight up ran out.

~The ambiance and soundtrack is great, really puts me in the mood of the world.

~The gameplay is fun, forcing you to take cover in firefights, ducking down to get into tight areas, and even setting up traps for enemies to walk into.

~The puzzles are quite fun, and often involves looking ahead of the puzzle to solve it.

~Loads of little mechanics that are fun, including manual reloading, upgrading weapons, putting on hats and masks, and even manually opening doors, allowing you to take a peek.

CONS:

~There simply isn't enough time for many of the side characters. The only consistent characters are yourself and Russel, who you only see once and speaks to you via his invention. There's a few vortigaunts who appear, and a quirky character in the mid-late game you come across only has maybe two minutes of screentime in total, and that's essentially all the characters you interact without spoilers. I feel like a few more characters, or a chapter where you help a character in return for their help would have been fun.

~Some of the enemies are very annoying to fight, such as the lightning dogs, which you can only really get a single shot in before they disappear/do their ability, which if they do their ability, it takes three shots to get them out of it. The chapter where they debut was quite tedious rather than fun.

~occasionally some of the mechanics were a bit wonky, such as flicking items to yourself, it might just get lost being flung to you, or might not even work.


OVERALL RATING: 9/10

It's a fantastic game, perhaps the best game personally created for the VR as of writing this. The story is great, the world is fantastic, the mechanics generally work, but in my case, I should have waited before playing this, it was the first game I got for my Oculus Quest 2, and was the first game I really played on it, and being extremely unfamiliar with VR, it made it extremely confusing. I would certainly get this game if you have any VR, a must-have, but this shouldn't be your first game on VR.