It's been thirteen years since Valve has released a title with the half life name. And with that noted, many have been anticipating the continuation of half life 2 episode 2. I want to make it clear that this game in particular is not a continuation but rather a prequel to the second game. Other than that I will finally get to what people want to hear from someone who has played it start to finish.

Is the game good? I'd say ♥♥♥♥ yes. Its without a doubt one of the best games I have ever played and one of the best vr games to come out. Half life Alyx takes advantage of the fact you're using a vr headset and wraps the mechanics around it very well.

One of these mechanics are the gloves that Alyx uses in the entire game, similar to the gravity gun you can pull objects from the environment and use them or play with them. Most of the time you are grabbing ammo with them or finding resin, which is essentially "currency" to upgrade weapons at these combine upgrade stations found around the campaign.

The gameplay is divided in two sections: Combat and puzzles. Combat unfortunately does not have melee combat however, the shooting in the game is well done and it feels amazing when you fight against various creatures or combine enemies. The puzzles for the most part are enjoyable, but later on they do get a bit repetitive. These puzzles can vary from moving boxes around to get to other places, using your tool to open ammo caches and unlock upgrade stations and opening doors. Keep in mind that a lot of the gameplay has a ton of puzzles to do in the game and I'd say percentage wise it's like 60% puzzles and 40% combat. Some puzzles I will not mention here due to them spoilers, but I assure you that you will like what you find.

Finally I'm gonna talk about performance, the game itself is well optimized for the most part, there were times that even on lower settings(I changed them to check), i did have moments where the frames dropped even though nothing that hardware intensive was happening on screen.
I should mention that my PC is on the higher end with a ryzen 3900x and a 2080 Super. So even with the recommended settings that they gave me(high) it still had framerate drops and in some cases there were moments of freezes. I want to note that these are few and far between, but they are notable. Then there are bugs and while there isn't many of them to hurt the experience, there are some that i have seen that can be a bit annoying to deal with. Some of these happened when i messed around in certain environments, but they weren't gamebreaking, some of them i just got stuck but used the teleport to get out of and some killed me. For playing on release the game does not have that many bugs and the perfomance is fine.

In conclusion Valve has proven yet again they still can make great singleplayer titles and I cannot wait for their next game VR or regular. I'd rate the game a 9/10.

P.S for those who are worried about smooth turning, i want to mention that smooth turning is now in the game. So please can you stop lowering the game's rating just because it wasn't in the game? Trust me I get it's annoying and it is, but even without it I still played the game fine.