Half-Life: Alyx will be here before the month is out and Valve are kicking off March with three new gameplay videos. There’s the usual headcrabs, of course, but we also get a look at exploding, healing, shooting, and plenty of other important VR action verbs. Valve have separated these into three videos to show off three types of VR locomotion: teleporting, shift, and continuous. Step lightly around the headcrabs though, right?
There’s plenty to check out in each of Valve’s new videos so here’s the first to get you started. Here Alyx inserts her gun into a terminal that swaps out components on her gun. You can also use your gun for poking the headcrabs. Make sure they’re dead. She also picks up and dumps out a bucket full of random objects, some useful, some maybe less so. If you want realism, there ya have it. There shall be no looking at a container’s contents and clicking to add to your inventory. Gotta go rifling around in junk by hand.
Video number 2 has Alyx hacking a locked door with a spherical interface. There’s a lot of gravity glove use to pull objects over as well. Then there’s actual gravity, helpfully demonstrated by a bunch of holes in the dilapidated floor. Good for dropping explosives into, apparently.
Last up is an outdoor fight scene that makes me think a bit of an old arcade cabinet shooter, though Alyx certainly has more direct control over where in the area she’s headed. In this one you can see Alyx duck behind a car door as an enemy breaks the window then pop up to shoot them through the new hole. There’s plenty of ducking behind cover and around corners to be had. She also climbs a ladder which I gather is a whole thing? Ladders, whoda thunk. I don’t recommend following her example here and injecting something into your veins that you found in a portable toilet though.
If all this Alyx-ing is giving you the itch, you can still play the Half-Life collection free on Steam until later this month when Alyx is out. It’s planned for release on March 23rd, and you can find it, naturally, on Steam. Here’s everything else you need to know about Half-Life: Alyx.