Half-Life: Alyx
Fair · Shooter · 2020
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
WAIT.
A BANGER at $18.27, only fair at $59.99.
- Length
- 12.2h
- Value
- $4.92/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 12 GB of memory, GTX 1060 / RX 580 - 6GB VRAM. Windows only.
Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. It’s the story of an impossible fight against a vicious alien race known as the Combine, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Playing as Alyx Vance, you are humanity’s only chance for survival.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
April 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $14.99. 36 discounts in the 7 years on record. They run about 66 percent off, roughly 9 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was this month, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 9 weeks. It becomes a BANGER at $18.27, a level the record has reached 9 times.
Value puts it in the top 22 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard ($19.99, scores 72) beats it on value, while it beats Half-Life: Source ($9.99, scores 25).
39 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2024 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 93 percent of the 6,700 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
The rating rests on 105,206 reviews, so it is not going to move much from here.
The drop-off
88% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
202 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I don't get the negative reviews on this game. "The combats too boring! Every enemy is just a bullet sponge!" It was designed for dramatic, theatrical gameplay, not for boss fights that take multiple deaths to beat. If you look at the game at a pure difficulty stand point, then it's basically just a walking simulator with occasional puzzles, and I think thats fine. I wouldn't want to spend my time stuck on an...
Great VR game. The best I'd say. And the immersion in the Half-Life universe in unreal. That being said, the bar for entry is pretty high. You need a beefy system and an expensive VR headset. For me, it raised the bar of what I expected from VR gaming, and subsequently ruined VR gaming for me. If you have a headset, play it! if you don't, don't bother getting one specifically for this. It is playable in pancake mode...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Half-Life: Alyx scores 62/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/546560/half-life-alyxThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.