AT A GLANCE: Ugh. Yet another Halloween ruined by exploding crates and shitty colored lighting. Next year I'll have to remember not to play bad Half-Life maps all night, or at least not eat a whole bag of Halloween candy before playing them. Those damn razor blade brownies hurt even more when you're puking them up.

This may look like an ordinary prefab crate...

DESCRIPTION: There's no text file included but I was lucky enough to find roughly 10 pages of this guy's incoherent ramblings over at Mapfinger. Here's what SilverPhoenix has to say about his latest work:

"The love of my life will playing Tennis Matches against some other schools, And I want to watch her play.(Just incase she reads this, I want to say that I LOVE HER WITH ALL MY HEART and MORE)"

Actually, I guess that quote doesn't tell us much about the map, other than that the guy who made it is in all probability some sort of deranged stalker. Let's try this again:

"This Map was named co-op, because I wasn't sure what to name it. Co-op prob. stands for Covert Ops, but this map strayed greatly from that. It is more like a TFC map, many of you are familiar with it, it's called 2Fort."

Yes, this map is EXACTLY LIKE 2FORT... except with fewer rooms, more red lighting, more vague brown objects, and a remarkable amount of contempt for the entire human race.

THE MAP: Lets see, we've got two shitty "forts" occupying what appears to be a flooded YMCA gym with some sort of crappy monument to bad mapmaking and general stupidity located in the center. It also looks as though SilverPhoenix wasn't sure which style of awful, garish lighting he wanted to use in the forts so he decided to use them all. Whee!

...but, SURPRISE!!! It's actually made out of EXPLOSIVE GLASS!!!

Your arsenal in "Co-op" is pretty much limited to the crossbow, which is definitely the weapon of choice for gunning down your opponents while they stand stationary in the middle of the map, mesmerized by the mysterious shrine of spike-induced blindness. In the unlikely event that you ever get tired of repeatedly using the same lame-ass weapon weapon, you can always venture into the secret underwater room and pick up some laser tripmines. The downside is that the vile red lighting in said room will probably give you nightmares and more or less destroy your will to live but hey, that's why they're called "tradeoffs", right?

GAMEPLAY: Hmmm. Now this may just be the large amount of painkillers I administered myself immediately after playing this map talking, but shouldn't Team Fortress style maps be made for... oh, I don't know.... TEAM FORTRESS MODE!?!?!?! Not that making this monstrosity a TFC map would've improved the gameplay much but at least it would've reduced the chances of me ever conceivably running into it since I rarely play the aforementioned mod. It just seems like a pointless waste of valuable time that I could otherwise spend experiencing new and exciting forms of pain like "Co-op"!

FUN FACTOR: Nothing says "fun" like a large crate that, when shot, explodes and kills everyone in the map. Granted, instant death via Exploding Prefab Crate of Doom is a pretty lousy way to go, but it's much better than having to wait for the map's lighting to give you a fatal brain hemorrhage. Hell, that could take a good 30 seconds!

THE BOTTOM LINE: Well, I could end this review with some sort of sarcastic comment / fairly obvious observation, but I think I'll just die and leave a deformed, glowing red corpse instead. Goodnight folks!

Individual ratings go from 0 (bearable) to -10 (painfully terrible). Total score goes from 0 (ok) to -50 (the worst piece of shit you'll ever play).