Half-Life Alyx improves on the shortcomings of earlier Half-Lifes and leverages the advantages of VR into a borderline captivating experience. Specifically, HLA nails the trifecta of combat, puzzles, and exploration to create great pacing and level design.
Combat in Half-Life Alyx is a lot slower paced, which is usually a bad thing, but I think it works well here. Half-Life 1 and 2 have a mix of corridor combat and open ended combat, and the open ended combat was hit or miss. Sometimes you got the Hunters and sometimes you got a bunch of grenade launcher snipers. Corridor and small-scale combat has always had much better setpiece design, from forced circumstances like Ravenheim forcing you to buzzsaw zombies due to no ammo, to little tweaks like shooting a bridge and having the enemies on it drop forcefully.
In HLA, most combat encounters feel well crafted. Some are more obvious than others, like getting a new weapon then immediately being faced with a medium stake situation that best utilizes the weapon. Some are a bit more subtle, like placing an open room with headcrab zombies next to a large hallway to funnel them into. And some are baked into the entire level, like placing these enemies in a catacombs filled with explosives so one wrong shot won't be tolerated.
The difficulty did benefit from me having beaten Half-Life 1 previously, which framed each encounter as something that may need to be repeated to maintain certain levels of ammo/health usage. I did have points where I was fairly low on ammo, which added tension to approaching even head crabs, but never reached a point where I needed to backtrack a bunch in saves to redo major sections. This added another great layer to the flow of combat and traversal.
Approaching each combat scenario as something that's okay to reapproach helped my chicken-shitness. Literally any enemy appearing can be startling to me in VR. I don't do horror. Head crabs even thinking of jumping on me is a personal space violation. But I never feel aggravated or disheartened for not having my wits about me to get my gunplay or movement sharp enough for this encounter. If I fuck up the first time, or back off to regroup, I can reapproach it a second time with more confidence and a gameplan.
The next puzzle piece is puzzles. An issue in HL2 main puzzles was the unsatisfying amount of time between knowing how to solve it and putting the final piece in place to solve it. Its over reliance on physics based puzzles often meant setpiece puzzles were more about monotonously finding the objects needed to complete the physics modification or trying to get it in place.
Puzzles in HLA are much snappier, taking advantage of the constrained map size. If it's a find the object puzzle, there's almost always an interesting obstacle, pathway, or mini-puzzle to focus on while getting the object. Some utilize physics and assessing the environment to solve puzzles to scratch the big brain itch, and some are reoccurring puzzle types to scratch that small brain itch. And some setpiece puzzles were really fucking cool.
Finally, the exploration is greatly improved in HLA. HL2 had a lot of issues with pacing, backtracking, and unsatisfying secrets. The exploration was only satisfying if you were a sandbox gamer whose first thought was to push mechanics to their limits. Some sections were infamous like the start and stop of the waterboat section, backtracking was fixed in future installments like Episode 2, and lambda caches felt like a hassle once you spotted the symbol.
HLA doesn't have any big secrets, instead scattering resin (used for weapon upgrades) and ammo in nooks and crannies throughout the level. It's satisfying to notice something on the existing path or a deviation, check it real quick, see if something is there, and fling it towards you. It never takes away from traversing the level, and sometimes they're positioned to add incentive to the combat or puzzle scenarios.
Resource management is part of the puzzle here, and asks additional questions with traversing combat scenarios. Are the resources here enough to justify engaging in this combat scenario, can I move around the enemies to get the ammo needed to defeat them, and can I use other parts of this environment to balance my health and ammo utilization? This mindset might make you find a barrel that you can try to throw where the enemies will move to, or pick a path that maximizes ammo gained to ammo lost, or take a few bullets to use less since a health station is nearby.
This synergy of traversal is designed very well, and retains my interest, enjoyment, and curiosity much better. Besides the first hour, which is slow in every Half-Life (although VR walking and soaking in the atmosphere is inherently more interesting), it's been keeping this great pacing without notable hitches. If this pacing continues in Chapter 4 and onwards, this could definitely bump up to a 10/10, I was super impressed and want to see this game through.
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