Games these days are becoming increasingly bland. It’s always the same old point-at-your-enemy-and-shoot. The skill cap is very low because you don’t need to factor in things like the guns’ recoil or your movement. Games like Call of Duty or Battlefield are more about running around blindly firing your gun rather than teamwork and skill. Counter-Strike is the opposite of these things. Everyone gets the same guns, but you have to account for things such as recoil and movement. It makes the game more challenging and you have to work with your team to win matches. It brings about an old-school feel because of the quirky physics and makes it unique amongst its competitors.

The Counter-Strike series started off as a mod for   popular game, Half-Life. Valve officially released the game Counter-Strike in 2000 and started a series that is still going strong to this day. Source is considered by many to be the best in the series. It introduced Valve’s new Source Engine and became a great competitive game. It was an innovative game and became a big hit in the first person shooter world. Although many long-time players of the series view Global Offensive to be a disappointment, it is gaining in popularity thanks in part to the many Steam Sales.

Counter-Strike Global Offensive can appeal to a large crowd of people because the graphics settings are flexible. If you have a great gaming computer with amazing specs, you can run the game at maximum settings and enjoy the glorious graphics. The game is still playable even with a half-decent computer. I don’t have very good specs, but I can still run the game smoothly. There are also a ton of different game modes to try out. There are the classic bomb defuse maps which you can play casually or competitively. There are hostage rescue maps which can also be played casually or competitively. There is death-match, surfing, deathrun, and even bunny-hopping. All these are fun to try out and, who knows, you might just have a particular knack for one of them.

I mainly play competitively. When I came in from playing Team Fortress 2, I was worried that the competitive games would be a poor experience. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Valve had incorporated a competitive matchmaking system which pits you against other players of the same skill. There is a series of ranks leading up to the highest which is Global Elite. As you win games and get better kill-death ratios, you rank up. This is a great motivation to improve your game and find a group of people you are comfortable playing with. Playing with friends always increases the level of fun you have.

Although the matchmaking system helps find good competitive games, there are some downsides. If a player leaves in the middle of the game, you can only get a bot to replace him/her. The bot is inferior to the human players which makes it extremely difficult to win when you have one. There is also some “griefing,” which is when players purposefully hamper your team’s ability to win. The biggest issue however, is hacking. After you reach a certain rank, you are bound to have hackers in most of your games. There are things you can do to counter that such as using ESEA’s matchmaking system which has a much better anti-cheat system.

I have only been playing Counter-Strike Global Offensive a little more than two months, but I have loved the experience so far. The community for Counter-Strike may not match up to the Team Fortress 2 standards, but it’s increasing in size and getting better. Global Offensive brings about that old-school type of gameplay and provides a vastly different experience from modern shooters.