It’s CS:GO Jim, but not as we know it, says Rich Stanton, as he takes the long-standing esport stalwart’s successor for a spin.
SPECS
CPU: 64-bit, four-threads
Mem : 8GB
Storage: 85GB
GPU: AMD GCN+, Nvidia Kepler+, Vulkan driver
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit
Valve announced CounterStrike 2 at the start of 2023 and has been running it in a limited beta ever since, swapping one or two maps at a time, adding isolated features, and generally withholding the full package that it unveiled at the end of September. That limited rollout made it hard to get a handle on just how different it feels from CS:GO, but now we have no option. When CS2 went live, CS:GO became a beta branch on Steam. Despite some mixed messages from Valve, CS:GO has not been disappeared, Stalin-style, and remains accessible, albeit only with community servers.
All change, no change
Perhaps Counter-Strike 2’s biggest problem is that number. In a series that has always been iterative, new Counter-Strikes have been pitched as variants on the existing game: vanilla Counter-Strike is better known as Counter-Strike 1.6 (after a particular patch version), then there’s CS: Condition Zero, CS: Source and CS:GO. Whatever changes these versions made, they weren’t positioned as replacements in the way CS2 has been.
That leads to CS2 initially feeling underwhelming. As one wag joked, “CS2 has only been out a day but feels like it’s been here 10 years.” Apart from the quality jump in maps, weapons and all visual assets, many of the improvements over CS:GO are back-end, under-thehood things that aren’t obvious to players, yet the game itself comes branded as the first true sequel in 24 years.
Our first games in CS2 proper, having played it a fair amount in beta, were nothing like moving from Halo 2 to Halo 3, fundamentally different multiplayer experiences. Instead it almost feels more like a director’s cut or a definitive version of something you’ve been playing for years (because you have). We’ve seen a bunch of community grousing about the movement feeling lighter, and even complaints about the feel of the gunplay, but debating these very fine details is a long-standing tradition for competitive FPS players. That’s not to say anyone’s wrong, but having played the game for two decades, we don’t detect huge differences.
Holy smokes!
The overall coat of gloss CS2 receives is, of course, very welcome. But the familiarity dulls some of that upgrade, and unless you put the two games side by side, the faithfulness means a lot of the changes aren’t immediately obvious. On Valve’s CS2 landing page, there are some shots of the same areas in both games that let you slide back and forth, and give some idea of wh
