"An old masterpiece recreated!"

As many of you PC gamers well know, Half-Life: Counterstrike, a game that has raised the bar for online first person shooters, is a modification for the ground breaking first person shooter, Half-Life.

Now, Counter-Strike has been rebuilt with the recently released Half-Life 2's engine. This engine includes jaw-dropping physics, greatly improved graphics, and enables the use of massive outdoor environments (sorry though, only in Half-Life 2 and not Counter-Strike: Source).

From now on, Half-Life 2 will be referred to as HL2, and Counter-Strike: Source will be referred to as CS:S. Each category will be out of 10 points.
Anyways, ill get to the review.

Graphics: 9/10

It's plain and simple. This games graphics are just simply... great. Every inch of terrain is textured perfectly. Bullet holes are very realistic looking. Guns look like they are real. And, the water. Oh.... the water. Its simply to stunning to behold The water has reflections that look amazing. In fact, its so amazing I'm not even going to tell you how beautiful it is in this review, and I suggest you go buy HL2 and look at it yourself! The graphics are also VERY WELL optimized. An old computer barely touching the minimum requirements are more than enough to run the game on low settings and still get considerable frames per second (30+), though however if the video card does not support directX 8.1 or above, not everything will look great. The -1 point on the score is that sometimes you get to see texture misalignments on terrain in some areas, thus making it looked like someone got a chainsaw and cut a line in the ground.

Sound: 9/10

Sounds from the original CS, but made crystal clear. There's nothing really here to say other than its perfect, but the Galil a.k.a. "IDF defender" sounds extremely similar to the M4A1 at long ranges, thus making it hard to tell the difference. And the footsteps sound muffled, which is another thing that brings a -1 to the score.

Gameplay: 9.5/10

Now, the real juice of the game. The gameplay of this game is simply one of the best online first person shooter experiences. You start of as either a Counter-Terrorist or a Terrorist (you get to choose which team you are on), and each side has a VERY wide variety of weapons. Some weapons are exclusive to each team. For e.g., the M4A1 is exclusive to the Counter-Terrorists, and the AK47 is exclusive for the Terrorists. So you bought your armor vest and some rounds for your pistol. You follow your team around a highly eye-appealing road and into a market place selling fruits and vegetables. Suddenly enemies start approaching in front of your team. A firefight follows. You listen to the bullets ricochet off walls and heads being pierced by 7.62 ammunition. You watch your teammates dead body slouch down on a wall while other teammates run and take cover. You get shot in the face and your teammates who just ran for cover fly into the air from the explosion of a high-explosive grenade. The round ends. In other words, the almost exact same experience as Counter-Strike.

The only differences in these two games gameplay wise, is the fact that in CS:S, new players can spray like a madman and kill professional veterans of Counter-Strike. This is because of the new recoil system- guns have much less recoil, and are easier to control. There's also another grudge I have- hit box latency. You'll often find yourself spraying 100 bullets from a m249 Para machine gun and find you target still has 100% hp and 100% armor (this was an exaggeration, by the way ^_^). Valve should be able to fix this in future updates (I hope). Oh and one more thing: the auto-snipers are now much stronger than before, so watch out for them.

Replay Value: 10/10

Play till you die. Period.

Overall: 9/10 but some parts need some fixing, and then it will be a perfect 10/10.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/03/05