I want you all to think back to a time before Call of Duty 4 came along and revolutionised the online shooting game. Back when games like Goldeneye and Timesplitters were the big names in multiplayer shooting. Valve is attempting to recapture those days of yore with their new game, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, available on Xbox Live Arcade and PC. Before getting into the review proper I should state that this review is of the Xbox version of the game, not the PC version.
That’s right, Counter Strike aims to be a gimmick free online shooter. Everything newer players to online shooting games have come to expect has been stripped bare. That means no killstreaks, no perks, no create-a-class, no interactive maps… hell, you don’t even get a sprint button or the ability to aim down your sights. It’s just you, your gun and your team, against another team and their guns. And therein lays the beauty of the game. You don’t have to worry about an unbalanced roster of weapons, unfair killstreaks dominating the sky or the fact that some was a higher rank than you so they had better equipment. If you get killed, it is because the other person was better than you, making it a much fairer game than the majority of today’s top online shooters.
Due to the fact that this is an Xbox Live Arcade game, the graphics are not amazing, but they are functional. All the guns look as they should and the maps all have a unique visual style, which means that playing the game feels much less repetitive than if all the levels were say, desert based. It all sounds fine as well, with the guns each having a unique sound and your team giving accurate information during matches. My only slight niggle is that although the menu music is good and fitting for the style of the game, it does get repetitive quite quickly.
The decision to eliminate a single player campaign entirely is a controversial one but it allowed the developer to focus purely on the multiplayer, and in this regard I think it is a risk that has paid off. The game boasts four different modes each of which play significantly differently and have unique maps available to those game types. The mode which appears to be the most popular online is classic casual mode. This is a round based mode where players only get one life per round and each round is won by each eliminating the other team or completing the objective, either planting bombs or rescuing hostages. You earn or lose money for various actions and you use accumulated money to buy guns at the start of each round. This is a key mechanic as it means everyone starts on a level playing field and it brings in a risk reward factor as to whether you save up for the big weapons or buy frequent, mid tier weapons. Classic competitive is like a ‘hardcore’ version of casual and plays the same way except that friendly fire and team collisions are on and it is the best of 30 rounds instead of 10. These two modes can be played on eight unique maps, which initially does not sound like a lot but each map is so well designed you will not get bored quickly. Each map has multiple flanking routes and choke points, and the bomb/hostage sites are so well positioned on each map that it creates some truly tense standoffs.
Each map really has a unique style.
The other two modes are arms race and demolition. Arms race is the only game mode with respawns which gives it a unique feel. You start with a weapon and with every kill you move onto a new weapon until you reach the final weapon; the knife. The player who gets a kill with the final weapon first wins the game for their team. This creates an interesting dynamic as technically you are part of a team but you are playing to increase your individual score and provides an interesting ultimatum as to whether you stay and help your team but risk having kills stolen or you go lone wolf, putting yourself at greater risk but potentially for better reward. Demolition plays like a cross between classic casual and arms race, whereby it is a round based game, but instead of buying new weapons at the start of each round, you get given new weapons each round based on you kills in the previous one. These two games are fun in short bursts but not as addictive as the ‘classic’ modes. Arms race only has two maps in can be played on and demolition has six. However the maps are not as well designed as the maps on classic mode and can be a bit repetitive.
The game does a few other things to help set it apart. Any unfilled spaces in games get used up by bots, but when you die you can immediately take control of the bots on your team, meaning you are never out of the action for too long. Also if you thought that 10 and 30 round games sounded like a slog, the spawns on each map are only a maximum of 30 seconds apart which mean the game plays at a very high pace and rounds fly by. Lastly the game offers full button mapping, which is something I have been wanting to see in shooting games for ages, meaning you can assign any action to any button alongside individual vertical and horizontal sensitivity settings which really allow you to customise the game to your play style.
Hmm.. which instrument of death will it be this time…?
As much as I have been singing the praises of this game, and rightly so, it does have a few issues. When the game was first released it was full of lag and it was difficult to get into a game at all. Thankfully, touch wood, this problem appears to be resolved now and the connection is much more stable. Also the aforementioned button mapping, although a great feature, has an error currently in which if you assign anything to ‘X’ it means you can’t buy or pick up weapons or open doors which is a fairly big, but hopefully easily fixed issue. Lastly, although the AI of the bots is okay, it is still nowhere near that of a real player meaning it can be highly frustrating at times if you get caught on a team full of bots against a team of humans.
Ultimately, this games continued success is solely independent on the strength of its community. Thankfully, due to the well designed maps and balanced gameplay I can see people coming back to this game for months to come. It is a refreshingly old school approach to the online shooting game and one that any FPS fan should buy. So go on… what are you waiting for?
