➤ Counter-Strike 2, the review of the shooter that inaugurates a new era for competitive FPS 🕹

The review of Counter-Strike 2, the successor to the best FPS of all time, is born from the update of the Source 2 engine of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Arriving suddenly on Steam on a cool September night, accompanied by a series of trailers that left very little room for the imagination, Counter-Strike 2 made its official debut on the platform. Valve last week, steadily racking up nearly a million concurrent players throughout the entire weekend, an impressive number, but one that shouldn't be surprising considering who we're talking about. The game is the heir to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the free-to-play shooter that in the last ten years has not allowed any type of competition at the top of the Steam charts, and whose popularity shows no signs of declining. . despite the passage of time.

Its success is something that transcends traditional market dynamics because, while other historical shooter series found themselves writhing under the need to revise their formulas to keep up with the tastes of a constantly evolving audience, Counter-Strike has always remained faithful to himself, even falling into anachronism, but finally reaching the nirvana of absolute perfection.

But can what defines excellence be sublimated? Are there any other milestones to reach, just on the horizon?

Valve must be sure of this, because it has once again put into play much of the achievements made by its legendary shooter, with the sole intention of projecting its fortunes into the future. Intrigued by this great bet, we immersed ourselves for several hours in the maps and game modes, and we are ready to tell you all our impressions about it. Counter-Strike 2 Review.

A restoration of the contents of Global Offensive

Counter-Strike 2, the review of the shooter that inaugurates a new era for competitive FPS — The switch to Source 2 made Counter-Strike 2 almost unrecognizable

We're assuming this is well-known information (after all, the game has been in beta for enough weeks to give the community a chance to get a substantial taste of it), but we think there might be value in focusing on it for a while. a time. moment about what, in fact, this Counter-Strike 2 is, also because the name chosen by Valve could be misleading. We are not facing an unreleased shooter, a true successor to Global Offensive, but rather a big free update of that same experience, simply aimed at updating it to the Source 2 engine, the engine that the company has used for its latest projects, including Half-Life: Alyx.

This transition brings with it an endless series of challenges, which is why, at least on the content front Valve has chosen to respect the original material without proposing new features of any kind.. Every map, mode or weapon present in Counter-Strike 2 comes from Global Offensive, but there is not a single element of the game that has not undergone a thorough restoration, a process of meticulous refinement that has taken Valve's shooter to art status. , as if it wasn't perfect enough to begin with.

Le maps Obviously, they present exactly the same design that players have memorized during thousands of hours of play, but the visual impact is impressive, thanks to textures finally in line with the times and lighting in line with the context of the environment, which is now capable of to cast dynamic shadows from character models. From a chromatic point of view, the maps are a little more saturated than before and tend to offer a much more arcade look, but this directly affects visibility, which has never been so clear. Textures are more precise, edges and corners do not lend themselves to any ambiguity, and all the imperfections that users had learned to exploit have been smoothed out, so that each shot is as balanced as possible.

Interestingly, not everything was preserved in the transition to Counter-Strike 2, since several maps are missing available, as well as all the most accessible game modes, such as Arms Race, a community favorite. The current pack includes 10 environments, the competitive playlist, the Wingman (Right Arm, 2 vs 2) playlist, the unranked and the deathmatch mode, a bit too little for what should have been a direct evolution of Global Offensive. However, the game has just arrived on Steam, so we don't feel like being too strict in this regard. If we know Valve, from the next few months everything will be back in place, for the happiness of the players.

Several steps back on the gaming front

If it is undeniable that the work done on the game's maps and sound design is impressive, it only took a few hours for the community to realize how the feeling conveyed by the game of Counter-Strike 2 is light years away from the perfection achieved with Global Offensive, mainly due to some inconsistencies that materialize during firefights. First of all, the elimination of the "tick rate" (that is, the dynamic by which a server updates itself at regular intervals registering a delayed entry) does not seem to have translated into more precise matchups, quite the opposite: the clips are Real netcode incidents are multiplying on Reddit and, although we for our part have never doubted the result of a comparison, it is clear that in its current state the game no longer offers the unwavering precision that players were accustomed to.

even the weapons behavior has raised some doubts, with the phenomenon of "spraying" (prolonged burst of fire) appearing even less effective than in the past. In Global Offensive it was never a good idea to stop on the trigger, but surprising an enemy at close range by quickly emptying the magazine on them almost always equaled winning the kill. Now, even up close, prolonged fire doesn't seem to produce any impact, although this could depend on muscle memory accustomed to completely different software than today. Leaving aside these two uncertainties, what remains is an extraordinarily satisfactory gameplay as in the past, in which only those who best manage the confrontation and those who have the best aim prevail.

Utilities, never as useful as in Counter-Strike 2

One of the substantial innovations introduced by Counter-Strike 2 concerns the utility, that is, that group of secondary accessories that can be acquired at the beginning of a round and that are often decisive in the progress of a game. The successor to CS:GO proposes a profound rethinking of some of these grenades, such as the smoke grenade, the main protagonist of the updates released in recent months by Valve.

If previously the smoke of a smoke grenade was managed "on the client side" and therefore the players found themselves facing situations of imbalance ignoring what the opponent could really see, now the curtain is volumetric and the same for all observers, it interacts with the environment in a more natural way, and occupies all the available space without crossing walls and other obstacles. Shooting the smoke will leave small gaps to look at, while using a frag grenade will clear it up for a few seconds.

also the Molotov They seemed much better and essentially more useful than in CS:GO. Fire has amazing new effects and is simply beautiful, but it's its strategic use that has impressed us: the flames spread more consistently and cover a larger area, reshaping the map to create bottlenecks that can be fatal for the opposite team. The changes in utilities may seem like marginal innovations, but in the international competitive landscape the new strategic depth guaranteed by accessories could revolutionize the way Counter-Strike is played, affecting a meta that had remained almost unchanged in recent years. years. 10 years.

Conclusions

Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Holygamerz.com 8.5 Readers (14) 8.6 your vote

A bit like the great explorers of the past, Valve decided to embark on a great bet, that of further improving the most popular FPS in the world, with curiosity to discover what lay beyond the horizon of perfection. It did so knowing that the switch to Source 2 would likely have affected the superb competitive gameplay CS:GO had painstakingly built after years of small advancements, but after spending several hours in Counter-Strike 2 lobbies, we can say it was worth it. It's really worth it. Sure, the game's release was a bit rushed and several things were missing, but Valve has all the time and will in the world to make its shooter perfect again. After all, Counter-Strike wasn't built in a day.