Valve’s upcoming VR title, Half-Life: Alyx, launches in March this year. The company made the announcement back in November, which led to the Index VR headset selling out a week later. Now, the company announced that older Half-Life games are free to play until Alyx launches.
So what exactly do you get for free? Listed on the Steam announcement page are Half-Life and Half-Life 2, as well as the latter’s Episode 1 and Episode 2. Two expansions for the first Half-Life, Opposing Force and Blue Shift also appear to be free to play for two months, even if not listed as part of the announcement.
There’s an important caveat here that must be mentioned. While you have two months with these games, it looks like you will have to buy them to play them again once the new VR title is out. That said, you’ll still have slightly over a month to go through them at the very least.
You may be wondering why Valve is being so generous, even if only for a limited amount of time. According to the announcement post, the dev team behind Half-Life: Alyx believes that the best way to experience the VR game is to have experienced all other entries in the series before it. Fair enough, but still a little strange, considering the Alyx’s timeline sits in between the two main titles.
At any rate, if by some miracle you’ve not experienced any of these, now’s your chance to do so. If you already have Steam installed, then all you need to do is to click on their respective links. You can find the Steam announcement page, as well as the entire Half-Life series, in the links below.
