Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the most popular games on Steam if not the most popular. If this game currently isn’t in your Steam library you should head over to the Steam store right now and download it. I’ll give you a few minutes to take care of that and you can resume reading this article after you’ve made your purchase. Welcome back. What’s this, you didn’t get Counter-Strike: Global Offensive? Oh, you say it’s because it’s not listed in the store anymore but there are a number of other Counter-Strike titles like Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. My bad, I probably should mentioned that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was taken out via tactical air strike a couple days ago and replaced with Counter-Strike 2. Apologies for the misleading opening paragraph.
What Valve actually did was give a massive overhaul to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and rebranded it as Counter-Strike 2. It’s touted as being an improved version of the same game with numerous upgrades and changes. Some of the changes that have occurred include enhanced smoke of all things. Smoke will seep out of doorways and behave in more realistic manners while responding to light. The smoke will also react to other gameplay elements, allowing players to shoot visibility holes through smoke with their guns or temporarily clear it to get a visual with a grenade. The purchase menu has been revamped to abandon the antiquated weapon wheel and players are now able to sell weapons and items if they need some fast cash for new gear. Players can still keep all the gear they’ve accumulated throughout the years, but they’ve all been outfitted with new HD textures. The visuals in general have been given a major overall, including bullet holes and blood splatter that can help observant players see where the fatal shots came from. There have also been overhauls to the UI and various lighting effects to enhance the improved environments. Maps have been overhauled with a new look, but apparently there are no new maps.
The release of Counter-Strike 2 has been divisive among fans. At the time of this article it is currently the most popular game on Steam with 792,424 concurrent players, which is more than the combined 685,286 players on the three next popular games which are Dota 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. Despite this, Counter-Strike 2 appears to be suffering from a massive user review bombing over on Metacritic as some people aren’t happy that Counter-Strike 2 replaced Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Will players eventually accept the new version of their beloved game? Only time will tell, but Hardcore Gamer plans to spend some time with the new Counter-Strike and will report our impressions in the near future.
