Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Overall:

The game itself is absolutely great, it is remarkable FPS that cannot be mimicked. The aspects of this game make it extremely enjoyable to play. However, with any big name title that attracts a lot of players and a lot of money, there are a good bit of problems with the game.

Game modes:

The different game modes that come along with CS:GO are honestly great, you have casual modes that you can just jump in and out of at any time and are really fun. They’re nice to mess around in if you don’t have much time or don’t want to take anything too seriously. On the other end of that, there are competitive games. These require the player to be a certain level before they can play this mode and then is limited on the daily amount until they achieve 10 wins. This game is a lot of fun, it takes a bomb or hostage scenario and drags it out into a multi-round game with the same people through the entire game. There is no mid-game joining and if you leave mid-game it comes with a competitive cooldown that doesn’t let the player play for a certain time. For most of this review, we will be talking about the competitive game-play.

The CS:GO Skins:

Let’s be honest, the skins are cool. If you play this game you more than likely want the best skins to show off to your friends. However, the price of these skins is ridiculous. The fact that Valve is making thousands of dollars a day off their community market for skins that add nothing to the game itself other than a change of pixels, is absolutely ridiculous. The aspect of expensive skins also poses other problems than just the money, this opens up the aspect of betting sites, which is a topic that would take forever to fully indulge in so let’s just stop at the fact that they’re a problem. It’s just a money pit for Valve and Gaben, and sadly a lot of people fall into it.

Community:

The community on the most part is all right, however, it’s rare for you to spend much time on this game and not run into at least one person who is absolutely toxic. If it’s not just being an outright douche-bag, or refusing to play the game like it’s meant to be played they’re probably just screaming obscenities. The chat aspect also makes this so much worse because you can’t even get away from people on the other team screaming at you verbally in casual or textual in competitive. Valve does offer the option to block communication from players, which stops their text chats and voice chats from being seen or heard. The skins in the game also cause a lot of people around this game to want to scam people. If it’s a skin for skin or other kinds of trades, do not trust people you do not know, scamming is that common in this game. The competitiveness of this game also causes players of the community to decide that they would like to hack or smurf.

Hackers and Smurfs:

For some reason, players decide that playing legitimately or at their level is just too much to ask. The ranking system in this game if used properly is great, it pairs you up with people around your skill level that should take away the possibility of jumping into a game with someone who is insanely better than you. However, no matter how long someone has been playing this game, hacks can destroy the aspect of the skill based ranks. It’s way too common that you jump into a competitive game and one of the other nine players is hacking. The most common are wall and aim hacks which allow the player to see enemies wherever they are and the ability to lock onto enemies hit boxes with no effort. These players ruin the fun of the game because there’s nothing you can do, no amount of skill or tactics can beat a good player with hacks. Another issue is “smurfs”. These are players who purposely de-rank, create, or buy new accounts to play at lower levels. No matter their way of getting there, it’s a higher skilled player jumping in games with people who aren’t as skilled. Whatever your reasoning for this it also ruins the fun from the game, when you jump into a game and one or two of the players on the other team are way better than everyone else.

VAC:

VAC is the Valve Anti-Cheat system, And to be completely honest it’s a joke. The game is riddled with hackers and nothing happens to them. The fact that they advertise as an anti-cheat system is ridiculous considering hacks have existed for years that have yet to be picked up from VAC. Valve themselves know that VAC doesn’t work and the only thing that they have done to combat this is the Overwatch system which allows higher ranked players to be able to watch game-play from suspected cheaters that get reported in game and determine if they are hacking or not. This is where most of the "VAC-bans" come from. If Valve were to introduce a viable anti-cheat system, overwatch wouldn’t even be necessary. There is also the fact that any VAC locks a player's inventory which means the expensive skins are valueless. This is only a problem because hacks exist that change a player's steam ID to others in the game, causing the wrong player to get picked up and banned.

Conclusion:

The game-play is a lot of fun but because of the massive amount of problems with the community’s toxicity, hackers, smurfs, and Valve’s outright lack of solutions offered really kill the potential this game holds. Now, there is nothing that Valve can do about the attitude of the community, they can't stop players from being outright toxic in-game. However, when it comes to the hackers, there are tons of other games, with a smaller company developing them, that offer an anti-cheat system that blows VAC out of the water. Valve has the ability to combat these hacks and from a player's perspective, it seems as if they don't even care to try.

Rating:

3/10

Links:
Store Page
Curator Review

-Mufffinzz