Let’s pause to understand Half-Life: Alyx’s shotgun reload animation

There’s loads of Half-Life: Alyx to coo over in those three gameplay videos Valve released yesterday. Googheads is perhaps smitten with catching grenades in mid-air, opening a automobile door to take cowl behind, or lifting the lid on a portaloo then reaching in deep together with your digiarm. Me, I’ve easy pleasures: I’m properly into the needlessly extravagant reload animation on what I imagine to be a sci-fi shotgun. Who desires the fiddly job of manually loading shells when you may have a little bit mechanical arm do it at terrifying pace? Not me.

You get a superb take a look at the shotgun within the video the place Alyx fights a load of Combine:

Now let’s zoom in a little bit:

That’s nice, that. What a cracking little arm that gun has. How bizarre the entire design is. I additionally like that the arm is simply too lazy to drag the bolt itself; that’s on Alyx.

One clear benefit of VR is that you possibly can, when you wished, increase that shotgun proper as much as your face to look at the mechanism at work. Press it to your virtuaear and take heed to the click-clacking. Lovely.

Half-Life: Alyx is because of launch March 23rd on Steam. Valve’s personal Index VR gear is perhaps sold out with Covid-19 disrupting the supply however it’ll additionally work on Vive, Oculus, and different cybergoggles.