Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disastrous"

Condition Zero tried really hard, but sadly all this effort amounted to a game that simply wasn't very good and could be easily skipped. Especially when Half Life 2 was less then a year away and a much better Counter-strike game, 1.6, was already available I just don't know why Sierra had to make this game. Nothing about the multiplayer was different from the original game but instead they added in some really bad maps. One of them takes place inside a stadium, and the others are just plain forgettable. Nothing really was great about them. The community from the game isn't as large as the other counter-strike games either so essentially you lose a huge part of the appeal of the game which is the custom content and games. Luckily when I bought this game I got a much better game called Counter-Strike 1.6. Funny thing is 1.6 came out in 2000 and back then it had top of the line graphics. Sadly four years later they couldn't improve the graphics even a little bit. There are some better lighting effects but other then that there is nothing worth while that would make the graphics much better over 1.6. Four years and nothing was accomplished by Sierra, sad...
The single player is a joke, it's basically playing a map with bots and that is it. There is nothing special about it and this was supposed to be the selling point of the game. The Counter-Strike deleted scenes game is slightly better but there is still no story and it fails at trying to be the intense shooter. It just doesn't compare with other games to boot like Call of Duty. What Condition Zero tried to do is basically do what Battlefield did. Make the single player just a multiplayer map with bots and make no attempt at a story. At least Battlefield didn't pretend to have a story. Condition Zero sadly attempted though.
There is some fun to be had with the multiplayer but why would you buy this when Counter-Strike Source was coming a year later. What a waste of development time which in the end only resulted in this poor and rushed game. Avoid at all costs unless you have friends who bought this mess and you'd like to play with them.