10/10 would wait 15 years again.


EDIT: Well, this is getting more eyes than expected and that sounded bad.

In a nut-shell, I really love this game, here's my experience, spoiler free so far:

The first 10 seconds were breathtaking, literally. I've been playing VR since 2018, a lot of games, and while the first moments of it were amazing, the feeling of presence went down a bit as I went along, playing more games. But this, this is something else. The attention to detail is amazing.

Performance is fantastic, I don't really know how they manage to pull that quality and achieve steady 90 fps. That's a technical achievement for sure.

As for world interaction / controls, they are the best they can possible be. I've played Boneworks and having physics everywhere is kinda interesting, but just as a concept. Going up a ladder in Boneworks or climbing was awful. The rest was good.
HL:A merges the best of two worlds. There's physical interactions for moments where they are needed, but they won't get in your way at all. And I really love that, because is just a frigging game, not a simulation. For example, going up a ladder here, is simple. Opening a door too. It won't get smashed in your face, only features necessary collisions. Also I really love how they went all in and gave physic properties to some enemies. That increases immersion by tons!

The hacking puzzles, I had my expectations low, but oh boy, I was really wrong. They are quite fun to do, they are challenging but not tiresome. They provide random patterns so the challenge always stay fresh.

The sounds are amazing, I had to take my helmet because I thought a rat came into my room. Then I thought it was a faulty hard disk. Nope. It was the game. I believe the sound experiments they did with CS:GO carried over here and it really shows. Character voices were a bit loud tho.

The Half-Life winks are amazing. And for someone who played them all, spent 10 years making a HL mod and basically kickstart a game dev career, it was tear inducing.

My only complain is the ammo system. While I love the Tresspasser reference ("Two mags left!") I really wish I could store back some pistol ammo. I thought that was going to bit a bit more arcade-y, but it's okay, it really helps to build up some tension.

I was going to try the game for a bit, ended up playing like 5 hours straight. Couldn't really put it down.

The upgrade system is a nice addition. Also for the different enemy types.

It's an evolved Half-Life in every way, and is what I expected and much much more.

Now, I will get a bit sad for other companies, because they set the bar incredibly high.

AAA VR games will be like this, or better, and can't say how really happy that makes me.

Go and play it right now and be part of history as this is the VR break trough everybody expected.