[Darth Marsden]

Does playing a mod but failing to be able to defeat the final boss due to the thing not letting me have enough ammo and therefore forcing me to watch the ending on Youtube count?

'cause if so, Cry of Fear for Half-Life - 6/10.

It's an extremely well made mod, and it's certainly effective at what it does, with several moments making me jump out of my seat, but it goes on for FAR too long, to the point where I just wanted it to end about three chapters (about an hour) before it actually did. And even then I couldn't actually finish it because of a bad design choice!

The plot also doesn't make that much sense when you think about it. Spoilers! You basically play as a guy who's in a car 'accident' and, in flashbacks told throughout the game, end up in a wheelchair and thoroughly depressed. Which is all fair and good, except that during the actual game, you play as a perfectly fit person who has to run through a demon infested town. It doesn't quite sync up. The previous mod by the same people, Afraid of Monsters, had the excuse that the main character was addicted to pills, but this one doesn't really have any justification as to why he's going through this mental hell.

There's also four (single-player) endings, and in three of them you commit suicide at the end, with changes depending on which of the two main NPCs you take you with. The only ending where you live has you kill two cops for no real reason, which is just bollocks. There's also other endings for other playthroughs, including the co-op ending which is the only real happy one because it stops the car 'accident' from happening at all. Somehow I feel cheated out of my happy ending because I happen to be a single player. Never like that feeling.

The gameplay itself works with limited inventory spaces forcing you to be conservative with your weapon selections and such (although the justification for losing half of that as well as your inventory around the two-third mark is VERY weak), and the horror atmosphere is well done. The main issues I have with gameplay is that there's a LOT of backtracking, the levels ironically feel TOO large, several enemies being really frustrating (the flying ones and the dudes you encounter on the train being my primary examples) and the save points being somewhat interestingly placed (no saving before a bossfight? Bulls**t!). Also, unskippable cutscenes. Unsurprising given it's using the Half-Life engine, but still annoying.

Overall it's a good mod, but like the Director's Cut of Afraid of Monsters, it suffers from being too long and having too much backtracking to pad the game out. It's good, just not amazing.