Wednesday 22 August 2012

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive First Impressions

Before I start talking about this game lets have a BIG FUCKING DISCLAIMER!  I was never really all that good at Counter-Strike: Source and even less skilled at 1.6, so if your looking for someone to give you the ins and outs of this game from a competitive standpoint, I'm not your man!  Also, there are going to be pretty much no pictures in this post because I was having so much fun I forgot to take some, and I'm too lazy to load it back up.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I can finally start talking about CS:GO.  If you're not sure what it is, then you're either too young or you have been living under the rock your whole life.  CS:GO is the newest game in the long standing Counter-Strike series of games, basically the big grand daddy of team based online shooting.

It's actually refreshing to play a realistic style shooting game where my decisions actually fucking matter for once.  Health doesn't regenerate, at all, so if you go and make a stupid move in a fire fight, you're going to be punished for it, HARD.  Also you're limited to what you can take into each round by how much money you have, so in the early rounds or when you are losing, you really have to make careful, planned, intelligent decisions for what guns and gear you are going to buy.  So take all your Call of Duty pre-set load outs and regenerating health and fuck off, this is a real mans game.  I don't hate Call of Duty but the difference in skill required to play this, and to play CoD is astounding, so you best be willing to put in some practice hours in order to get good here.

Before CS:GO came out, I found that I was actually rather bored of CS: Source, I just didn't have the urge to find a mix or play in a public or anything like that, but when I fired up Global Offensive, holy shit was I pumped.  The menus are so sleek looking, the reticule is cool as fuck and best of all, the sound design is top notch.  Seriously, I have never heard guns sound this good in games before, it was giving me a fucking rush just hearing the effects.

The best feature I thought after playing it for about an hour was the match making.  You can very quickly find a casual or competitive game, and on top of that you can even play the much loved Gun Game mode through the matchmaking.  It just speeds everything up and makes the whole thing more accessible to those who don't want to trawl through server lists.  But I'm from a generation where server lists were the only thing around, and Valve made the correct decision not to remove the feature.  Custom games, custom maps and everything else are all still available through the games server list feature, so this game really does feel like a complete package.

Basically, the game is fucking awesome and you should play it.   Sure, there might be debates around the competitive nature of this game that I'm not aware of, but if you're looking for a fresh change of pace from all the Call of Duty and Battlefield type games, then this is for you.

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