I just finished it, and wow what an experience. Some personal thoughts (No spoilers):
I don't know what future has VR, but this is finally the game that one can point to show the merits of the medium, an absolute must buy: a best hits collage of what all those year of experimentation built up to, without any of the drawbacks the usual detractors of VR can appeal to: it's long, it's great, it's polished, it's robust, it's not gimmicky, it's from a flagship brand, it's proper AAA, it's even sold on a storefront I trust. Starting another VR game right after it felt like coming crashing down from a massive high, and not because the other game was bad in any way, but because Alyx feels so perfect and confident in comparison: I think those virtual hands did to VR what the analog stick did for 3D navigation, it's setting a sort of new standard of direct interaction in a 3D environment. I was completely puzzled as to why i could clip with scenery like a VR ghost in the other game.
As i said before, this is the quintessential 10/10 game: it shows what the future of this type of gaming should be about: high detailed thigh experiences pushed forward by innovative, and not just iterative, tech. And this is a discussion that goes beyond VR itself, I'd love to see more hardware innovation: I'm not into videogames because I want to see more and more realistic pores being rendered on skin, though I do enjoy great graphics too, it can't be the only force driving things forward.
I love that this game exists, and I would not change a thing about it.
That said, I also realize the game was not targeted at ME, and that's fine. There is a huge 99% of the audience that has not experienced VR, and games cannot cater to me, the small slice of the 1% who has both a headset and complete motion sickness immunity. So, while i didn't enjoy some aspects of Alyx, I'm still glad the game was designed the way it is: I want that 1% to grow, so that my tiny tiny slice of market gets more and more viable.
So what I didn't like boils down essentially to forced teleport and Boneworks.
Let's kill the Boneworks problem first. Alyx to me felt like watered down Boneworks. I was expecting Valve could pull the magic wand, take all the genius of Boneworks and make it so that nobody pukes and I don't glitch into space every 10 minutes: turns out it couldn't. And while a lot of what makes Boneworks interesting is in Alyx, I missed what wasn't there. I think the Digital Foundry video really captures that feeling.
Forced Teleport: I can understand the reasoning of making Alys walk so slow, a lot of VR newcomers will switch off teleport the instant they try any VR game for the first time (that's my experience making gamers try VR at least, emphasis on GAMERS, the first question is always "Can I walk?"), they would feel sick and then write down that Alyx is a barf-y game and VR is a barf-y medium. Also a lot of those players may enjoy teleport while not giving it a chance too, so I can understand teleport-jumping as a way to shove teleport down everybody's throat (see it's not so bad? Come on, you want it! You want it!). That said the extreme slowness makes backtracking a PAIN, and the last parts of the game virtually unplayable and narrative dissonant (Alyx can you please not walk at a leisure stroll while EFFING COMBINE SOLDIERS ARE SHOOTING AT YOU?), so I had to use teleport to traverse the environment and go cover to cover, which completely killed immersion and spoiled the last climatic battles into a point and click adventure. I hope some external game config, some INI edit, turns out to be able to raise speed so I can properly replay the game, while new players are protected from self-ruining their introduction to free motion in VR. Though I'm not sure how it would work with other parts of the game, where the slow speed is actually a good tool to create tension.
