"Not realistic in the least. That's not a bad thing."

Counter-Strike is fun. Let me repeat that: Counter-Strike is fun. It seems that everyone in the gaming industry want an award winning story that involves something besides an ambigious bombing location that doesn't seem to have any tactical value whatsoever, and hostages that don't ever seem to shut the hell up. Fortunately, Counter-Strike has both of these things, and they are proud of it.

Everybody always describes Counter-Strike as a realistic shooter. I agree, to an extent. If you're playing a bot-match or something, it's pretty realistic, with headshots killing in one hit and all. However, once you get online, to all the gungame/surfing/digging mods, everything suddenly becomes less realistic and more fun. For example, Gungame takes the buying scheme of weapons in CS and throws it out the window, making you actually use terrible weapons such as the Five-Seven to "level up". Unfortunately, after you get one kill, the game takes away your horrible weapon and leaves you with your knife. This can lead to hilariously un-epic knife fights with one CT (Counter-Terrorist) and T (Terrorist) left, usually climaxing with one of the pair running around until he finds someone who dropped a weapon, picking it up, and firing it wildly at the angry opponent until he stops moving or gets a knife in his face. The final level on the level-up scheme is either the grenade level or only the knife level. The grenade one usually takes at least seven tries for the skilled Counter-Strike player to perform, because the grenades are so underpowered.

I have to say that I have spent very little time playing actual Counter-Strike, where you buy the weapons and fight on teams. In fact, I've probably spent twice the time in Gungame than I have in actual CS. What I can say, though, is that both modes are incredibly fun to both play and watch, which is a plus when about half the time you will be watching, an artifact of the team-based combat. The hitboxes in this game have been accused of being a little wonky, and I don't dispute that. However, I think that the fun that you get in winning a round of Gungame by pretty much shoving a grenade down a terrorist's throat pretty much makes all of these flaws irrelevant.

This game reminds me a lot of Soldier of Fortune 2. Sure, it has plenty of flaws. Sure, it has a really bad community that's between a waffle and a tadpole on the intelligence scale. Sure, every weapon kills in basically four shots anywhere. What SOF2 had in graphic violence, this game has in mods, and in essence, is just plain awesome to play.

Awards:
F Award (Receiving this award is actually a good thing, rather than the F in school. It means while that this game may not have been the best designed, it was one of the most fun I've played in ages. And that's what games are for, right?)

8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/18/08

Game Release: Counter-Strike: Source (US, 11/16/04)