Review : Half Life Alyx

And now for something completely different.

I recently went on a spending spree for an assortment of VR games (thank you Steam's Black Friday sale !). Amongst those was the notorious Half Life : Alyx, widely acclaimed as the finest VR game produced thus far.

Don't get me wrong : it is a very good game, worthy of its illustrious predecessors. But it must be said that it is also, at times, as frustrating as whittling matchsticks with a pair of sharpened tweezers.

There's some mysterious, ineffable X-factor to VR games that makes them either fantastically immersive or just a clever gimmick. Alyx definitely has it. The opening scenes are probably the most beautiful of the whole game (to the extent that the ending, though good, felt just a tad graphically lacklustre). City 17 stretches before you into the distance, rendered with immense detail. You can pick up marker pens and use them to draw on things, if you want. You can tune the radio to a different station, startle pigeons, throw stuff around, smash windows, gaze wistfully into the distance, etc. The sound is spot on. The exceptionally high level of interactivity persists until the very end.

(I should also mention that I'm using Virtual Desktop to play wirelessly - settings are given at the end.)

You also get the usual high level of variety - a pleasing mixture of horror and action, creepy tunnels mixed with sunlight open cityscapes. I'd have preferred slightly more of the latter, but that's just a personal preference. All of them are beautifully rendered. The touches of humour here and there are well done. When you're in a scary environment and your guide talks to comfort you, it actually goddamn works.

The Half Life franchise is the best example of linear gameplay I've ever experienced. People criticise VR games for being labelled as "experiences", as an excuse for developing mediocre gameplay. But when it's done well, a VR... umm.... thing really is better described as an experience. The enjoyment is in being there, as much or more than actually interacting. It's a bit like visiting the Grand Canyon : the fun is experiencing the environment, not starting an anti-mining protest group or a Canyon Coffee Appreciation Society. You can do those things if you want to, but it's not necessary.

I read a negative review that criticised Alyx's linearity, but I can only imagine the poor sod had never played a Half Life game before because they're all like this. The clever thing about the franchise is that the actions are so well-scripted, and the route you have to take so naturally defined, that you don't notice it. Of course you go across that plank, of course you have to stack the crates to access the upper level... it's an utterly natural to do so, and doesn't break the immersion in the slightest. When it works well, as it does 95% of the time, it's genius.

The other 5% of the time it's utter crap.

Most of the time the scripting in Alyx is flawless. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares, for instance - you don't have to worry about opening every single door in case there's a zombie behind it. This makes the few such examples that are present absolutely terrifying. And when you have to do something unusual, there are generally enough hints to make it reasonably obvious, but still requiring a bit of thought. Events that happen feel random even though they're obviously not.

But there's one level that kicks all that in the teeth, which, oddly, seems to be among the most popular. Basically you're trapped in this floor with a particular weird and scary blind zombie who relies on hearing. He's immune to conventional weapons and you have only a flashlight to see with. So you have to figure out a bizarre, convoluted series of processes to kill him. In the dark. With creepy noises all around you. And instant death if he hears you.

Sounds good ? It isn't. I hated that level with a passion. It wasn't fun in the slightest - a difficult battle where I stand a chance of winning, that's fun. The instant death, with no chance of survival if he catches you, was scary at first but very quickly gave way to irritation : there's no real fear when you have no hope. It soon became an ordeal not in working out a plausible way to tackle the problem, but exposing the naked script for what it was. And that just sucked donkeys. In about 15 minutes I became sick to the teeth of dying every five seconds and looked up the answer online, which turned out to be a catastrophic mess I would never, ever have figured out by myself because it just didn't make any sense. Literally, it wasn't coherent enough for me to have any chance of guessing it, much less figuring it out through logic. I don't know what the designers were thinking here, but it made me want to kick them in the gonads or something. It was awful : one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever experienced. It's not immersive, it's not an experience, it's just bad.

The other main frustrating aspect is the first gun you get. Loading this thing is a truly ludicrous process. You have to manually eject the empty cartridge (which at first holds a meagre eight bullets, with enemies typically taking three shots to kill), reach behind you to get fresh ammo from your backpack, insert it into the weapon, and then - for some reason - engage the ammo so it's ready for use. Okay, this is very realistic. It's also effin' boring and tiresome. Middle of a battle and you have to do all that ? Most of the time I just gave up. Being right handed but left-eye dominant, it took me a long time to get any sort of proficiency with the weapon, so the chances of me being able to both reload and fire successfully were so low I found it better to get eaten and start again from a previous save. It's just too damn easy (when you're learning) to get the buttons wrong and eject a full cartridge - and then you have to do the whole stupid thing again. Why on earth empties don't eject themselves automatically, and new ones don't automatically engage when loaded, is quite beyond me. 

What doesn't help is that you have no melee weapon - another bizarre oversight. When you run out of ammo, that's it, you're doomed. That just plain sucks. It means the game becomes hopelessly obsessed with scavenging ammo and conserving bullets. This got so tedious after a whole that I gave up and lowered the difficulty setting to the minimum, which, being a keen Half Life fan, made me feel like I'd soiled myself.

This, though, made the whole experience about a thousand times better. I overcame my shame and started enjoying it : on minimum, the game is still sufficiently challenging for me. Indeed, it's almost more of a simulation than a game.

Things do improve : you get better weaponry, with various upgrade options, that makes things a good deal easier. It also takes time to get used to moving around. This being my first big FPS in VR, I certainly didn't do myself any favours by forgetting that it's possible to move, and the more floor space you have, the more you'll enjoy this. Knowing all this, and being able to actually fire the gun with some accuracy now, I have no doubt I'll replay it on a higher difficulty setting in the not-too-distant future.

I spend just under 20 hours completing Alyx. It's a satisfying story, a true experience/game hybrid. The ending's a bit on the scripted and surreal side but it's still very good. Unfortunately here too the final level, while featuring some nice exotic weaponry, is slightly spoiled by the unfathomable aiming system. Too often I ended up blasting the wall with plasma when (to my mind) I was quite definitely aiming at the enemy soldiers. It's good, but certainly doesn't compete with the enormous payoff that is the ending to Half Life 2.

This problem, like the others, is probably not so much in the system itself so much as in the time needed to figure it out. That to me is Alyx's major flaw : it's too immersive. It assumes you actually are Alyx Vance, already a part of this dystopian world and fluent in its somewhat esoteric weaponry. So most of these criticisms are not necessarily the game designer's fault, but mine. At least, that's the impression I've come away with. I might have to post a second review after trying it again.

All in all, I give this a solid 7/10. It's an epic rendering of the Half Life world, occasionally let down by some highly questionable gameplay choices; a truly blisteringly good game obfuscated by some weird trappings. It's also on the pricey side*. I can see why the hardcore are so enthusiastic for this, but for a more casual gamer like me, it's all a bit much. Even so, it left me hungry for more... and a crowbar.

* Arguably. Most experiences that last this long cost a hell of a lot more than what I paid for this in the Steam sale, but on the other hand, it's fundamentally imaginary and limited. I remember when £40 was considered a sensible upper limit for a brand new top-of-the-range game, and I hold to that as a reasonable standard.

Virtual Desktop wireless settings

Initially I tried playing this using Oculus Link, which renders beautifully but makes it very easy to get tangled up in the cable. This became frustrating so I switched to Virtual Desktop. Initially I struggled with this - the rendering was visually perfect but with so many momentary freezes (frame dropping, I think) that it made me feel quite ill after 30-40 minutes or so. Eventually, with a lot of trial and error and Google searching, I found a combination of settings that worked. The final experience for me was almost indistinguishable from using Link - not quite, but still more than sufficient to appreciate the full graphical quality of the game and not have to go for a lie down every half an hour. Here are the settings that worked for me.

The only thing I did inside Alyx was to keep the quality settings on medium - although the frame rate seems fine on high on my system, frames are dropped often enough to become jarring. On medium, with the settings below, it's very nearly as good as running it through a cable. From what I saw, this didn't look vastly different to the high setting options.

Main Virtual Desktop settings :

The key thing here seem to be use use the H.264 codec, not the HEVC option. Not sure if "automatically adjust bitrate" does anything or not.

Virtual Desktop VR settings (captured from the Quest, can't be screenshot from the PC, hence the weird distortion) :

Lowering the "VR graphics quality" doesn't seem to degrade the graphics in the slightest, at least for Alyx. Everyone seems to bang on about the 90 Hz screen of the Quest 2, but I can't say I notice any difference even between 60 and 72 fps. Not sure if "sliced encoding" should be on here - I read somewhere that this isn't supported for Alyx., so you might want to try turning that off.  "Extra latency mode" can probably be turned off too - I turned it on to see if this would affect the frame dropping.

Virtual Desktop streaming settings :

Not sure what any of these do but they worked for me.

The most important settings seem to be the quality settings inside Alyx, the codec, and the VR quality in Virtual Desktop. Note that these do not work well for other games : Skyrim, with these settings, looks like pixelated vomit. Alyx, however, looks fantastic - very nearly indistinguishable from playing it via cable.

Also, since I have a 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz network available, I disabled the Quest's access to the 2.4 GHz network since it's basically unusable for streaming. My PC has an ethernet connection, and even though Virtual Desktop insists on warning me that it's on a different network, wireless gaming works just fine. 

Anyway, all this is what worked for me. Virtual Desktop is great, but it does take a bit of tweaking to really optimise it.