It was only natural that after the astonishing popularity of online Counter-Strike a single-player version would soon follow. After all who couldn’t help but get excited about the prospect of playing through classic Counter-Strike style maps with a team of highly sophisticated and lifelike AI bots?
Unfortunately along the way things went a bit pear-shaped and the final version of the game we’re looking at today is it’s third incarnation after first Gearbox and then Ritual had doomed attempts at bringing the game to our screens. After damning reviews of the Ritual version Valve took the game back into development and handed the reigns over to Turtle Rock Studios who finally delivered something like the game we’d been expecting to play all along.
For those of you intrigued as to just what went wrong with Ritual’s attempt 12 of the 18 levels they’d originally developed are included in the package as a ‘deleted scenes’ section allowing you to compare and contrast.
The bulk of the new content however is in the form of 18 missions, which get progressively more challenging and need to be completed by you and your team of AI bots. A points system has been implemented to allow you to buy different bots of varying abilities for the task at hand and gameplay as you’d expect sees your team having to complete a pre-set objective. As well as the over-riding objective though there are secondary ones which vary depending on which difficulty level you’re playing on from simply managing to stay alive through to having to complete missions in under a minute on harder levels.
A game of this type was always going to live and die on its bots though and thankfully Turtle Rock have done an absolutely top-class job of implementing them into the game. Your teammates are supremely intelligent beings and it gives the game a reminiscent feel of how it used to play online before being dominated by cheeseburger swilling obese American kids called Chad.
So the game itself is undoubtedly worthy of the Counter-Strike name it’s just a shame its taken so long to appear as the game’s engine is beginning to look a tad dated whilst the actual gameplay itself is pretty much identical to the online version. On the plus side the bots are perhaps the best we’ve ever seen and there’s no doubting that in this day and age of release now patch later Valve should be congratulated on making the decision to actually pull the game back and release a title worthy of the company’s stature. Maybe if some notable other publishers took the same attitude we might be able to spend less time patching games and more time actually playing them.
Ultimately, whether you buy it or not depends on what you want from the game. If you’ve never played Counter-Strike then you really don’t have an excuse not to own this title whilst die-hard fans will find more than enough here to keep them occupied. On the flip side players who are tiring of the online version and are looking for pastures a new won’t really find enough here to keep them interested.
Worth the Wait
Sign up here for The Discworld Newsletter! Your weekly guide to everything that's happening on the site and in the PC gaming world in general.
Packed full of competitions, special offers, and links to all the best stuff on the site it's an essential read.
Email address