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My ladder experience has extra relevance too, since Alyx's special ability in Half-Life 2 and the episodes was her proficiency at climbing. 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. 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. Then I walked up to it and thought, well, it would be cool if I could climb it with my actual hands. They were sticky, hard-to-dismount death traps in the base game, and climbing and falling from them VR seemed like a recipe for losing my lunch as well as my HP.

How to play half life mods mod#

The worst thing about the VR mod is the jumping puzzles, because that's where your in-game vision and real world body are most in conflict. Inside the test chamberrrr, before the sample arrives, you have to climb up a ladder and push a button. I was sold by Half-Life in VR from one of the game's earliest interactions, however. 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. Half-Life 1 was not built for VR at all, obviously.

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. It's also in combat where I experienced moments of major slow down. (It also made me hope that Half-Life: Alyx is less of a horror game, because I could not stand a whole experience like this with modern visual fidelity.)

It suddenly made me remember that this is how I felt when I first played the game aged 13: that Black Mesa was a real, dangerous place, and I was trapped there. I was getting genuine heebie-jeebies from being closed-in by zombies, and from hearing the grumbling of Vortigaunts from around corners. I was fine with headcrabs leaping at my face, but Half-Life 1 is much more of a horror game than its sequels. What was more unexpected was how frightening I found it. It is hard to aim the crossbow without crosshairs and the hornet-firing alien arm is massive. Combat works quite well, though its clear that this is not what these weapons were intended for. Soon enough, you cause the resonance cascade, and begin the fight against the invaders from Xen. It's a little strange - but 22 years later, so is all the original audio. Their spoken dialogue was made by taking the audio files from the original game and running them through an automatic processor to make them sound like women. The mod comes with some other non-VR related changes, such as female scientist models. Plus, now I can show the scientists how I groove everytime I put the HEV suit on. I've walked into the lobby to hear Barney talk about how his system crashed dozens of times, but pressing the alarm under his desk by reaching out why my real hand is all new.

If you're as big a fan of Half-Life as I am, then it's delightful just to inhabit familiar spaces in virtual reality.

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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. 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. 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.

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The Half-Life 1 VR mod has been in development for years, with the most recent update at the end of last year. It's impressively feature packed and easy to set up, but it was a simple ladder that sold me. I thus spent some time this weekend fussing around Black Mesa in the Valve Index, using a Half-Life 1 VR mod. A new Half-Life game is only a few weeks away, but it occurred to me that there was no reason to wait for Half-Life: Alyx if I wanted to experience Vortigaunts in VR.