Valve revealed its monthly Top Releases list for March today, and Half-Life: Alyx made the cut as one of the top 20 titles.
Steam’s Top Releases list doesn’t rank games in order, so all we know is that it’s in the top 20, not where it landed specifically. After a long wait and a huge amount of hype, Valve’s flagship VR title, Half-Life: Alyx, released on March 23. The game is now one of the highest-rated PC games of the year so far on Metacritic, with reviewers’ responses to the game being overwhelmingly positive. If you caught our review, you’ll know that we loved the game too. Here’s a snippet from Jamie’s write-up:
“Alyx is a triumphant return; a stunningly produced, meticulously refined capping off of the past four years of VR learnings. Its 10+ hours of best-in-class combat, evolving level design and, every so often, moments of truly inventive ideas swiftly establishes it as a new benchmark for the platform.
And yet, Alyx leaves you with the lingering suspicion that there is yet more ground to cover, that there’s far more this series and this developer can do with this new set of tools and that this is only the first part of that story.”
Now, almost a month post-launch, Valve announced that Half-Life: Alyx made the list of Top Releases on Steam for March. These games are “measured by the revenue generated during the first two weeks after release” to form a top 20. This means that all games have an equal chance, regardless of whether they release at the beginning or the end of the month. In Alyx’s case, Valve would have counted the game’s revenue from the last week of March and the first week of April.
Given that Alyx released exclusively on PC VR hardware, its inclusion in this list wasn’t guaranteed. That said, another VR exclusive, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, made the list earlier in the year.
Interestingly, the full list also features Black Mesa, a fan-made reimagining of the original Half-Life, available for PC.
Have you played Half-Life: Alyx yet? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
