![]() The alien Combine conquered Earth years ago, in a short, brutal conflict called the Seven-Hour War, and most of the human survivors live in a handful of occupied cities. When Valve suddenly announced Alyx last November, it was a shock to the system on par with finding out George Lucas had made another Star Wars while no one was looking.Īlyx is set five years before the events of Half-Life 2. While Valve insiders have always said that development on a theoretical Half-Life 3 never exactly stopped, the departure of the series’s three main writers over the course of the intervening 13 years (as well as Valve’s seeming inability to let any of its first-party projects ever release a third installment) seemed to indicate that Half-Life was more or less officially done. ![]() Since then, the series has gone silent, aside from fan projects like Black Mesa. This is the first canon Half-Life game in 13 years, since Episode Two ended on a notorious cliffhanger in 2007. Every individual element of Alyx feels like someone carefully designed it pixel by pixel, unbothered by market forces and in no particular hurry. The word I keep coming back to is “craftsmanship.” A large team at Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software built Alyx over the course of four years, and the final product is a lot like what I imagine you’d get if Stanley Kubrick made a video game. It feels like a sneak preview of how VR will develop for the next generation or so. It’s aiming to be as foundational for VR as the original Half-Life was for the first-person shooter, or Half-Life 2 was for realistic game physics. If you own a virtual reality headset, you’re going to want to play Half-Life: Alyx at some point. Half-Life: Alyx, like Half-Life before it, feels like it’s going to end up as a necessary purchase for anyone who’s into virtual reality.
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