This reviewer had not expected that Valve would set its eyes on what began as a user-made mod for the first Half-Life game. Yet, it did, and in hindsight, it was certainly a decision that yielded very lucrative returns for Valve.
Counter-Strike had been made into a fully-fledged retail game that runs on the GoldSrc engine. It was an apparent attempt at portraying real-world modern combat from an FPS point-of-view, specifically covert operations involving so-called terrorists and their perennial nemeses, the counter-terrorists.
In this mainly multiplayer-oriented game, players look up a list of match-hosting servers that can be populated with searches over the Internet and/or LAN. This infrastructural aspect of the game was perhaps the most developed portion of Counter-Strike, for it was the most frequently updated. Features like server filters were introduced into Counter-Strike. It can be observed that many of these features can be found in Valve's later games.
After entering a session, players split themselves into the two aforementioned factions, select their models (which are designed after the looks of known terrorist groups and organizations of covert operatives, but are otherwise merely cosmetic) and then form teams to start the match.
It has to be noted here that the initial versions of the models for the counter-terrorists were very dark and had little contrast with many maps, giving them a visual advantage. Likewise, the same can be said for certain terrorist models in certain maps, which were similarly difficult to distinguish from the background. Fortunately, later versions of the game updated their models to have greater contrast, such as including glossy surfaces and details like exposed eyes and fingers and wound decals.
Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of the game is that players in both teams start out with a pool of money for each of them. By eliminating enemy players, completing objectives and winning rounds, they gain money which can be added to this pool up to a maximum of $16000 (the amount of which is also peculiar, though this could have been set as a gameplay balance consideration). This pool of money can then be spent on a wide selection of weaponry and equipment that had been designed to mimic their real-world counterparts to a certain degree. This aspect of the game appears to introduce a conflict in the thematic design of the player characters, who, with this feature, seem more like clandestine mercenaries instead of what they are officially depicted as.
Regardless of the type of the map in play, these teams generally have diagonally opposing objectives to achieve.The counter-terrorist team may be attempting to recover a bunch of hostages (whose models were initially and expediently sourced from the original Half-Life's range of models), whom the terrorists have to prevent from being rescued. (Interestingly enough, there are monetary penalties that would be inflicted if the terrorist team resorts to scorched-earth policies.)
In another map, the terrorists would be trying to plant a bomb at a location and defend it until detonation, whereas the counter-terrorists are trying to dismantle it (after it has been armed and planted).
As a rule of thumb, the current match ends if one team managed to annihilate the other team, even if the objectives have not been achieved (that is, if the objective does not explicitly require the annihilation of the other team), with the exception of maps involving bombs. With the end of a match, more money goes to the victorious team, while the vanquished still gets some. It is a system that is certainly different from the typical "winner-takes-all" concept and serves to instill some gameplay balance of sorts, but not so forgiving to the losing team as to cause long drawn-out battles in later matches.
(Apparently, quick matches are the preferred design target of the developers, so steam-rolling can and will occur if a team is distinctly more skilled than the other.)
As mentioned earlier, players can spend their virtual money on purchasing weapons and equipment to deck out their characters with. Generally, except on servers using different sets of rules for the game, players are only given several seconds to make their purchases after having been spawned into the map. In the initial versions of the game, purchasing equipment can be cumbersome, as players have to purchase them by browsing through unwieldy menus while having their player characters already spawned into the map. Usually the starting area of either team is well protected against immediate attack from the other team, but there were more than a few maps where the lack of ceilings meant unscrupulous players can lob grenades over into the other team's starting location, probably resulting in an untimely demise for indecisive players.
Using scripts for the instantaneous purchase of a particular set of hardware helped, but this was merely a work-around that may or may not affect the stability of the game. It was only until later that the purchasing and spawning systems were combined together such that a player can delay the spawning in while deciding what to buy - though they still have to adhere to the time limit or get spawned in anyway (and possibly already having been left behind by their quicker team-mates).
There are several categories of guns, from sidearms and submachineguns to rifles and special weapons that do not belong in any previously mentioned category, as well as a few types of grenades and body armor. Each category of guns has its own effect of encumbrance on the player character when wielded (though switching out to the sidearm categories negates any loss in speed).
Every weapon also has its own very limited reservoir of ammo as well, which cannot be replenished in any way other than purchasing more ammo during the start of a match. A player can also resort to looting the corpses of enemy players to rearm themselves with different guns, if they are short on cash.
In addition to the above characteristics, most of the weapons are balanced against each other by having different attributes in recoil (which affects the spread of shots), reloading speed, damage, penetration of body armor (which would otherwise negate a significant amount of damage) and, of course, purchasing price. The last attribute, however, often misleads inexperienced players into thinking that the most expensive gun happens to be best, when there are supposed to be none.
However, a few weapons happen to have wall penetration capabilities, whose contribution to gameplay that this reviewer suspects to be somewhat flawed. Certain terrain features, like wooden fences and most doors can be shot through with more powerful weapons to hit anything behind them (albeit for slightly reduced damage). This penetration mechanic rewards players that have the skill and experience to estimate whether there are enemies in the next room or not, but it also happens to reward blind-firing as well. For example, hardly subtle players may get lucky and score a kill by simply riddling every door before they pass through it.
Furthermore, the GoldSrc engine has loopholes that allow unscrupulous players to use exploit known as wall-hacks, in which walls are rendered down to transparent wireframes that hardly obscure anything behind them. Coupling this exploit with wall-penetrating weapons pretty much allows such players to ruin matches for everyone else. Valve has attempted to plug such loopholes, but the GoldSrc engine was just too perforated.
Grenades are categorized under three types: smoke, flash-bang and high-explosive. The first creates what is essentially a column of muddled, floating black textures that visually obscure the sight of human players, while the second is intended to temporarily blind players looking at its detonation and the third is meant to flush out enemy players from where they cower.
All three would have delivered well on what they were intended to do, if not for their early-build glitches that can be deliberately exploited or cause unintended mishaps. The initial version of the smoke grenade could cause crashes on some systems, the flash-bang's blinding scripts sometime last longer than they should and the HE grenade can clip through certain obstacles as well as thrown across the map to slay someone far away (especially if hacking had been used). Fortunately, later revisions of the codes for the grenades, map designs and the actor scripts for player characters fixed most of these glitches (and also provided some valuable programming experience to Valve's staff).
The graphics was as what can be expected from the GoldSrc engine: seamless transition from outdoors to indoors and back again. However, it has to be noted here that the real-world groundings of Counter-Strike makes it a bit difficult to discern player models from the background (as mentioned earlier), especially in maps where there tends to be drab environments (particularly industrial complexes). Muzzle fire is also difficult to spot, meaning that certain players can well hide themselves in dark secluded spots and get away frequently with clever camping tactics.
The sound designs for this game are much, much more prominent than its graphics. Every weapon is loud, has almost distinct firing reports and has (generally) different reloading noises, which makes identifying types of weapons being used by nearby combatants easier (for more experienced players, that is). Player models emit footsteps of varying qualities as they move over different surfaces, so players have only themselves to blame if they did not hear danger coming when everything else around them is quiet.
Voice-over, however, is a bit disappointing, as apparently, only one single person (one of the co-creators of the Counter-Strike mod) provided most of the voice-overs - much of them lacking the tone of urgency that one would expect from trained operatives engaged in covert activities. Fortunately, most of the voiced-over messages that a player can send to team-mates can be heard over the din of gunfire.
This game is primarily geared towards multiplayer, though later builds included bots that can be used for practice sessions. However, most of the challenge from playing against bots comes from their typically unerring accuracy, and not their more-or-less predictable behavior.
The experience of playing this game online with living players ultimately depends on whoever else the player is playing with. This reviewer knew of Counter-strike communities and clans that are civil and rational in their playing style, but as of yet, this reviewer had only encountered ill-mannered players who were hardly a joy to play together with. Moreover, the lack of features which are now commonplace in Valve's current generation of games, such as the ability to render other players mute, were not there in early retail builds of the game.
Furthermore, there were many bugs that took a long time to be resolved, such as a highly exploitable one that involved the switching of weapons to bypass time-consuming animations. There were also glitches in the walls of early builds of certain maps, where the penetration capabilities of weapons did not work as expected. There were also ridiculously silly exploits like unintended speed boosts that involved a lot of jumping. Many of these bugs had to do with undiscovered flaws and loopholes in the GoldSrc engine.
To Valve's credit, it did eventually got around to fixing the bugs and had also implemented the first version of Valve Anti-Cheat for this game. Still, fixing the game took a long time and ultimately Valve had abandoned this game altogether to work on the more powerful Source engine - which ironically happens to be the results of implementing the lessons that Valve has learned from having worked on the first VAC and GoldSrc, bugs and all.
Nevertheless, all these complaints are practically history now - history that Valve and more tech-savvy players had benefited from knowing. More importantly, this game went on to become a run-away commercial success and may have contributed the capital, both monetary and technical, necessary for the development of Valve's later, greater games.
In conclusion, while Counter-Strike may not have been the first game to do so and had plenty of flaws from launch, it had more or less effectively incorporated real-world modern combat into its gameplay and was definitely one of a few games that have inspired the birthing of a sub-genre of shooters.