Half-Life: Alyx does not advance Gordon's story and doesn't really provide all that much new to the Half-Life universe. Yeah, we now have some more backstory on some characters and a few bits here and there but it is nowhere near what Half-Life 2 brought over Half-Life 1.
This goes for the gameplay and physics too - yeah, VR makes more things possibly but there really isn't anything revolutionary in in HL:A compared to other VR games.
Meanwhile player-initiated exploration has been replaced with an in-game currency that you need to collect to upgrade your weapons which makes it a chore rather the excitement of coming across a lambda cache. Speaking of weapons, there are far fewer than in previous HL games and the ones that are there are hardly anything new. Even the gravity gloves are not much more than a VR-adaption of the gravity gun - going as far as bringing back the supercharged version from EP1 for the final part of the game which is really fun but nothing revolutionary or creative.
Instead of level-specific puzzles, the game is filled with same-ish hacking minigames that while cool at first are overused and as a result are just an annoyance towards the end.
The choice of making the player character voiced in a medium that is all about immersion when previous games already had established the trope of silent player characters was also puzzling - it doesn't help that the Alyx's lines are pretty meh in this game and often directly contradict what the player might feel/want.
Graphics are impressive, but they are also cheating here by having many dark corners that you can't inspect because your flashlight only magically turns on where the game wants it to.
HL:A is a decently polished experience, a good game and certainly better than no Half-Life game, but hardly anything worthy of being called Half-Life 3, which is why it isn't called that. I won't go as far as calling it a soulless sequel that you might expect from a big publisher trying to milk a franchise, but I am also not calling it the opposite of that.
Finally, HL:A is also a VR exclusive requiring an expensive PC, additionall HW and physical space to play it in, which means for most people it might as well not exist.
