Counter Strike: Global Offensive is the latest addition in Valve’s first person shooter series. You’ll be buying weapons, buying skins for those weapons, and screaming at russians in matches as you attempt to climb up the competitive ladder and get out of Silver Rank so people stop shit talking you.

CSGO is a first person shooter first and foremost, but one may find it a bit different than a lot of big name competitors like Battlefield or Call of Duty. Guns have a lot more recoil, and most of what you’ll be playing is an attack - defend bombing mode which involves no respawns until the end of the round.

The formula of a CSGO game is simple. You can join one of two sides, the terrorists who seek to plant the bomb and detonate it, and the counter terrorists who wish to defuse or prevent the bomb from being planted.

There are a few ways to win the game: you can either complete your team’s main objective involving detonating or defusing the bomb. Or, you can kill all of the enemy team and win. In addition, if you’re on the Counter Terrorist’s side, you can win through a clock (which stops once the terrorists plant the bomb).

This is actually a very interesting dynamic, and for the most part serves to make matches pretty high stakes and intense. You can’t just hit a button and respawn: instead, you’re forced to make every move count.

Once you’ve joined your team, you’ll need to buy weapons with the round money. There are two ways to obtain this: an end-of-round bonus which differs on your status of winning or losing, and of course killing enemies. Each gun has a different kill reward, so sometimes you might want to use “weaker” guns in order to rack up money to buy the good ones.

This in turn proves to make the game quite strategically deep, as it means that one may have rounds they are forced to throw to save their weapons they paid so much for, or rounds where the team ends up having to buy low in order to save money for their next round.


Now, as far as shooting goes, it’s alright. The game takes a lot more aim and mastery than a lot of others on the market, and rewards knowing recoil patterns of guns. But, there is one major problem.

The developers seem to be very inconsistent with balancing. Valve often tries to make new guns or buff old guns so that they are viable, but overall just makes them feel overpowered. Often, it’s not even on a subtle note, but just ends up silly. Making a 900 dollar pistol as strong as a sniper rifle did not help the meta at all, and while Valve quickly nerfed it, changes like that happen on such sudden whims and effect the game horribly, even if their stay is short.

The game also has a bit of a hacking problem, more so with Valve’s handle on bans which seems to be poorly enforced in a lot of games. The ranking system in the game is often hurt by these hackers, which seem to not be hit enough with bans.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they pass. The music barely exists, and the sounds in the game are as if somebody was in a paintball field, heard the sound and decided to stick it on all the guns in the game.


Overall, CSGO is alright. Honestly, it’s a good fair bit of fun, and you’ll get some laughs and triumphant moments. Just don’t expect to be playing it too seriously, as honestly the developers don’t know what they want half the time. But if you’re just picking it up for something to do on the weekend while munching on chips and drinking soda, it’s pretty good for its price point of 20 dollars.


65/100

Very accurate! Well done, nerd!