![]() ![]() But nowadays you can also practice offline with bots, who won't abuse you when you fail but who will put up a very convincing challenge - so much so that the game uses them to fill out online matches with unbalanced teams and nobody seems to mind. If you start with the main modes - whether in Casual or Competitive flavour - then yes, you're going to suck down a lot of failure before you taste the sweet air at the top of the scoreboards. Yet another multiplayer FPS where newcomers can look forward to hours of crushing failure before getting anywhere, then? Well, yes and no. It's not as cartoony as the good old days, but CS GO retains a lot of the classic Counter-Strike's slapstick humour - like excessive physics. People who don't realise you need to manually fire in bursts or walk or crouch to increase your accuracy are going to get slaughtered. I've probably played Counter-Strike for hundreds of hours in total, and these aren't new maps, so I know every choke point, shortcut, physics trick and optimal vantage point, but I was still struggling to stay alive when I started back. Even in Casual mode, where friendly fire is switched off and everyone has Kevlar to give them a bit more protection, the standard of play is still very high - the 'Casual' reference is more to do with how quickly the maps cycle. It's a simple skill-based game, then, and if you dive straight into Counter-Strike's core modes then you will find everyone else is pretty damned skilled already. You're also rewarded with superficial awards and MVP points, but beyond that there's no XP-based progression, classes or custom builds, and once you're dead there's no respawning until the next round begins, so life is a bit more valuable than it is in other shooters. Cash earned from kills or team success allows you to buy better weapons before each round, and these modes take you on a tour of some of the best multiplayer shooter levels ever designed: Dust, Italy, Nuke, Train, Dust 2, Aztec, Office and Inferno. The main team-based objective modes see Terrorists trying to plant a bomb while Counter-Terrorists try to wipe them out and/or defuse it, or Counter-Terrorists trying to rescue hostages while Terrorists try to wipe them out. I can't remember why I stopped playing Counter-Strike, but I'm immediately back at home in Global Offensive, Valve and Hidden Path's latest overhaul of Jess Cliffe and Minh Le's original Half-Life modification. (I also played as a Counter-Terrorist half the time, obviously, but my heart was never in it.) No matter how many times I would charge into battle, knife in hand for faster movement, only to be blinded by a flashbang and then slain while hopping wildly into a wall of gunfire, I would always be there the next time around, ready to lay down my life all over again. I wasn't exactly a brilliant servant to the cause - some of my exploits made the underpants bomber look like a pro, like headshotting one of my team-mates with a grenade while he checked a stairwell - but I was dedicated. Around a decade ago, you could often find me skulking around Italian wine cellars with AK-47s, or cowering behind hostages in a conference room watching for SWAT. I am what you might call a lapsed Terrorist.
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