You wake up in a dark alley, not knowing anything. What has happened anyway? You struggle after the truth and answers. Answers you want to know in the darkness and fear, which makes your heartbeat race like violent blows against your head. Where do "they" come from? What has happened? Are you just turning insane? The time is up; you can't stay there reading your smses forever. It's time to head out and find the answers. Cry of Fear is a singleplayer modification of Half-Life 1 which brings you the horror you've always been afraid of. It's a total conversion of Half-Life 1, which means it uses NO Half-Life 1 content or other peoples' files. It's all made exclusively by the developers. It also uses new gaming styles that you will rarely find in Half-Life mods, such as advanced cutscenes and other stuff that will be revealed at a later date.
5/10 - Agree (15) Disagree (17)
One-line-summary: Sadly doesn't live up to the hype.
CoF is a great example of how a game can be hyped into oblivion. The good parts of this mod aren't original and the original parts aren't good. Put differently: The parts that are fun feel highly derivative and the elements you haven't seen in another shooter (of which there are few) are executed badly, sometimes frustratingly bad. I won't write a two-page review here, as this really wouldn't make much sense in this case. Instead, I'll resort to the good old good-and-bad-points system of reviews:
+ Pushing the HL engine to its limits
+ Mostly detailed maps
+ Some great music
+ Excellent ambience effects
+ Good weapon animations
+ Storyline shows promise in the beginning
+ Fun co-op mode
- Tries hard but fails to be original
- Laughably bad looking monsters
- Few effective scares
- Lot of annoying backtracking required
- Some needlessly frustrating scenes
- Simplistic storyline with pathetic ending(s)
- Lackluster protagonist voice-acting (and artificial... pauses... are... annoying...)
- Unstable, game crashes often
- Very few servers
- Devs hunting for cash ("donations", expensive soundtrack)
Keep in mind that this mod has been in development for several years, has been hyped by the developers themselves and that they even take money ("donations") for extra content. The soundtrack goes for 15 bucks, available as low-quality MP3s only.
Some last advice: No matter what you think about my review, be highly suspicious about the 9 and 10 point ratings here. Don't fall for the hype by incompetent fanboys who just have no clue as to how to review anything. Also pay attention to all the 10* ratings right after this mod was released. You should've played through it at least once before rating.
Update: More like a 5.5* due to fun multiplayer, revised certain aspects.