User Rating: 7.9 | Half-Life: Counter-Strike PC
Counter-Strike is one of the most popular online action games to this day. As a Half-Life Mod, it is more popular than the game that actually made it. That's how CS proved itself to be such a strong competitor in the online world today. Being such a popular mod and giving people who play it the fun they deserve, there's no reason why it can't be popular. But with many people using cheats and hacks to defeat the opposing force online, it definitely ruins the whole game for many people, and shows that online games are definitely never safe. CS takes alot of skill to get used to. When you begin, you will be playing like a beginner if your online, and many people will start calling you a "n00b" or a "llama" because of your low skills and no strategy. It's basically how it goes in the CS world. You can't tell if a person is extremely good or he is just simply hacking and cheating his way to victory. That's something you need to know about, and just like that, someone hacking in the server your playing in easily ruins the game for you, no longer not being fun, but being plain out stupid to play when you know you'll get cheated out by dying many times in CS. Alright, enough of the hackers and cheats in the CS world. Let's get into the review. First off, the graphics are outdated since it's a really old mod. Sure, with the release of Steam and the updated graphics in it, it still can't hold up to the outdated graphics that plagued it back then. It is 2003, not 1997. Even with that, CS proves that it can be fun even with it's not so good graphics. The gameplay really hurts CS just as the graphics hurt it alot. The game is surrounded with hackers using cheats to cheat their way to victory, spoiling the fun for many people. Everything about hackers is explained above, but the only way to get the most fun out of CS is to find a server without no hackers or cheaters in it. The Sound for CS is great, period. The sound of the guns rattling and the sound clipping animations show why CS has won lots of "Best Sound Award" for the year 2001. Half-Life had some of the best sound as well, and as a mod, Counter-Strike is no different. To put this review into a short summary, CS is full of hacks that ruin the fun for lots of people. Because of that, ir ruins the experience that CS definitely shows. If you have the Half-Life game, you can simply download CS and install it yourself, but buying the CS Retail might not be good enough. Wasting your money when you know that the game is plagued with many cheats (of course, its the most popular online mod and action game) is not worth the buy. If you wish to take your sacrfices and buy the retail version, then there's no problem, but be warned that you will at least run into 3 hackers or cheaters in about one sitting.
