Half-Life: Alyxwas a no-show at the Game Awards earlier this month, but new footage of Valve’s newest VR foray into its first, and perhaps most beloved, franchise has arrived. The first-person shooter was showcased in a video on Adam Savage’s Tested channel on YouTube, where developers at Valve showcased a pre-release demo build of the game on headsets like the Oculus Quest, the HTC Vive Cosmos, andValve’s own Index headsetalongside a set of developer interviews.
Alyxis the first direct entry in theHalf-Lifeseries in 12 years, taking players into a story that chronologically takes place beforeHalf-Life 2.The game’s announcement in November came as a surprise, choosing a different direction for the franchise than theHalf-Life 3that most fans were expecting, but anticipation for the title has already begun to develop with the Valve faithful.
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YouTube user zck2020 assembled a stabilized supercut of the game footage included in the Tested video, and while the quality isn’t the best due to being a camera recording of test players exploring through some ofHalf-Life: Alyx’s completed content, fans can easily get a solid idea of how development is coming along by taking a look.
The video shows parts of the adventure that players will dive into as protagonist Alyx Vance travels through the underbelly of City 17, with one level set on and around an abandoned subway car and another appearing to be on a catwalk inside a sprawling warehouse. While light on story material, the footage shows that players will be tasked with fightingheadcrabs, zombies and barnacles once again inHalf-Life: Alyx, and will be able to use the advanced finger-tracking capabilities of the Index controllers to manipulate items within the environment.
The aesthetic ofHalf-Life: Alyx’s levels is a familiar one, retaining the desolate urban look and feel ofHalf-Life 2and its episodic DLCsbut updating it to immerse players into the world on modern hardware. The level of graphical detail the game currently has is hard to tell from the demo footage, but if it’s anywhere near what was shown in the debut trailer forAlyx, fans are in for a treat.
Half-Life: Alyxwill release on SteamVR for PC in March 2020. The game is confirmed to run on the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and is included with current and future purchases of the Valve Index headset.
