It's a great game, probably the best looking VR game (if you think screenshots look good, just wait until you have the headset on o_o). The story is good as a stand-alone and you don't need to have played previous Half-Life games to enjoy or understand it, though you will probably enjoy the suspense a lot more if you are.

There is somewhat of a modding community but you'll mostly be getting custom maps, which get quite old and boring fast considering there are only three weapons in the game.

Now for negatives...

Gameplay is lacking, especially after the first couple hours. In fact, after running three magazines through the pistol you feel ready to get a new toy but it won't come for at least a couple hours, and when it does there's almost never ammo for it so you never really get to use it - and when you do, it feels like you're "wasting" ammo. Then you get the next and final weapon another couple hours or so in, and for some reason they decided to make it worse than either of the previous weapons because the scarcity of ammo means you can't really utilize its only selling point, being a large magazine (note: you need to upgrade it to get the large magazine). It has less damage and accuracy than the pistol and no iron sights so you have to get the laser sight ASAP.

There is no melee in this game, and no weapon with infinite ammo. This means you can very possibly run out of ammo in a firefight and have no option aside from reloading an earlier save, though I have never personally run out of ammo as the limited ammo forces you to play very slowly, conservatively and cautiously. This is good for a few encounters but at some point you just feel like letting loose and the game never gives you this opportunity - they attempt to do this at the end of the game but ultimately fail by trying to force VR gimmicks on you so you actually feel WORSE off than through the rest of the game. Your character is also very very slow... walking pace. I use continuous movement but always end up spamming the teleport anyway because it's so much more efficient and feels like cheating in combat.

The physics system is shockingly sad for a Valve game, the company which many consider to be the pioneers of video game physics. Yes, you can pick up random junk in the environment and throw it around but that is it. There are whiteboard markers at the very start of the game, and later you can find more but with the caps on - you cannot take off the caps like you would expect. Your hands grab specific 'points' on objects meaning you cannot always hold it a certain way to get a better look. You can wear construction hats, buckets and traffic cones on your head to protect against barnacles, but this is the extent of environment/prop interactivity in the game. You cannot use objects as melee weapons, you cannot even trap a headcrab in a bucket :(

For some strange reason, corpses are pinned to the ground as if a giant stake has been driven through their abdomen. You can shift them a bit but they are essentially stuck in place. This also applied to head crabs on launch but this was thankfully patched out. It's not really a gameplay concern but it's so off-putting when you want to get close to a Combine soldier to inspect his armor but he's just frustratingly frozen to the ground - it's like those dreams where you know you have the force but try as you might you can't do the simplest telekinetic trick.

I know others have said this but it's so true, Boneworks is far better as a Half Life game than this one is. Half Life: Alyx is a generic VR shooter with good graphics and a Half Life skin, it introduces no new concepts and has comparatively worse gameplay than its competitors. It succeeds in combining various elements and delivering a very polished product, but ultimately it's only really worth one play through and perhaps a handful of modded levels - the Golden Eye 007 remakes are particularly nice, but again they are just filled with standard Combine enemies and the same boring three guns you get in the campaign. The closest we get to custom weapons, as far as I'm aware, are weapon reskins and overpowered one-shot melee weapons.

I sincerely hope Valve continues making high quality VR games like this one, but I want them to scale up the content to provide more variation in gameplay and incentive for repeat playthroughs, or perhaps some sort of horde mode.

If you want a true Half Life experience, get Boneworks or Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades - the latter has a Gordon Freeman character in the Take and Hold mode with Half Life themed enemies and weapons, it's great fun.