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It’s the simple actions that make Half-Life 1 in VR so convincingRoll on Half-Life: Alyx

Roll on Half-Life: Alyx

A newHalf-Lifegame is only a few weeks away, but it occurred to me that there was no reason to wait forHalf-Life: Alyxif I wanted to experience Vortigaunts in VR. I thus spent some time this weekend fussing aroundBlack Mesain the Valve Index, using a Half-Life 1 VR mod. It’s impressively feature packed and easy to set up, but it was a simple ladder that sold me.

The Half-Life 1 VR mod has been in development for years, with the most recent update at the end of last year. There are a lot of games that users have hacked VR support into, but HLVR is better than most because it goes the whole hog. You can see your hands in-game; you can pick up objects using the grips of your motion controllers; you can use every weapon, including guns, as melee objects. It also has a bunch of comfort controls, like the ability to teleport and turn in fixed increments if first-person free movement makes you feel woozy.

It’s also in combat where I experienced moments of major slow down. My computer was built for VR 4 or 5 years ago - it’s an i5-6400 with 16GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 970, if that means anything to you. Half-Life 1 was not built for VR at all, obviously. It was still fine most of the time and playable around the occasional framerate dips, but I want to make clear that there are limits to this mod’s powers.

Then I walked up to it and thought, well, it would be cool if I could climb it with my actual hands. So I tried it and:

It actually works! It works in the way that VR does at its very best, where intention and action perfectly align in ways that feel natural and obvious.

Half-Life 1 works well enough in VR that I’m excited to return in Half-Life: Alyx, an experience built from the ground-up with VR in mind. My ladder experience has extra relevance too, since Alyx’s special ability inHalf-Life 2and the episodes was her proficiency at climbing. Valvewrote in a recent Q&A on Redditthat there was no jumping in the game, and that “because the game includes the ability to mantle in continuous motion, you don’t need often need to jump. For instance, if you need to get past an obstacle like a crate, you mantle up rather than jump up.” I am hoping I can go Jason Bourning up some buildings, but even climbing over crates sounds just great. Half-Life loves some crates.

If you want to play Half-Life 1 in VR yourself, it’s pretty straightforward.

How to play Half-Life 1 in VR

After that, you can launch the mod. You’ll probably want to use your mouse to hit ‘New Game’, but from then on you can do everything else in-game via motion controllers.

Half-Life: Alyx is due out on March 23 and I can’t wait. Yes, I’m also playing Half-Life 2 in VR as well - but that’s for another post. If you’re looking for something tailor made for your headset, check out our list of thebest VR games.