Half Life: Alyx is one of the most amazing games I've ever played. And yet... I haven't finished it. When I have free time to play games I'd rather play my Switch. It's a lot more hassle setting up HL: Alyx, and the heavy headgear bugs my nose and causes eye strain headaches eventually if I play too much. So instead I play Tetris 99.
I have a Quest 2. After 6 months the non-replaceable battery lost 70% of its capacity and the controllers developed unfixable drift. Never making the Meta mistake again.
It's definitely fixable, by both Meta and yourself [1]. I've done it twice. A replacement kit is $14 on Amazon.
You would think joysticks would be a solved problem by now, but no. Meta chose garbage, with the same garbage installed in the quest pro controllers that are not really serviceable, from being glued together and jam packed with electronics (3 camera inside out tracking in each controller).
Battery can also be replaced, but with somewhat ridiculous effort [2].
Alyx is really a bad game. People don’t recognize this because they play it for a very short time and then that’s it.
The gun and grabbing UX is fantastic. It’s really good. But the enemies and movement are awful. The enemies are simply not designed to handle your movement. The game is secretly an on rails arcade shooter except you can control the rails.
This is a fundamental problem with VR. You cannot expect humans to move to the degree required for game movement irl, so most of your movement HAS to come from control stick movement. But if most of your movement is coming from control stick movement then your irl movement is largely pointless.
But people WANT the irl movement to be the thing that matters. Because it is fun to duck in and out of cover. So that’s what Alyx largely is. You see enemies. You play the duck and peeking game, and if the enemies come too close or are melee you yeet yourself back to a safer spot.
The basic enemies with guns and melee and drones are pretty good with this gameplay. When they start trying to do something a little bit more interesting in the game later, it really falls apart. Why? Because the enemies are incredibly dumb. Much dumber than a typical game. And the basic concept you get to is that any enemy that does not respect peeking is just asking you to do this clumsy movement scheme rather the fun arcade on rail gun shooter gameplay and it feels dumb.
Imo the Valve team did a very good job trying to accommodate what they found were enormous limitations. But the end result is really underwhelming. You can’t play many games like that for the novelty of on rails shooter gameplay to still work.
can't wait to be back in Bangkok so I can go to a VR cafe and play HL: Alex. Huge fan of the series and haven't been able to justify buying a headset myself.
Half Life: Alyx is one of the most amazing games I've ever played. And yet... I haven't finished it. When I have free time to play games I'd rather play my Switch. It's a lot more hassle setting up HL: Alyx, and the heavy headgear bugs my nose and causes eye strain headaches eventually if I play too much. So instead I play Tetris 99.