[revisit] Counter - Strike: Source

Format: Pc
Publisher: Valve (via Steam)
Producer: Valve and Turtle Rock Studios
Genre: Online First Person Shooter
Price: Variable (depends on package)
Origin: US
Reviewer: Munki

Ah Counter-Strike, cs, cs, cs. After playing every incarnation of this game for as long as I have it's strange that I'm finding it so hard to begin a review/revisit of source. I suppose the best place to start is the source engine. It's perfect eye candy delicious explosions, twisty fun ragdoll physics and beautifully high polygon models with amazing textures. It sounds great as well, carpets crunch under your feet, computers crashing apart as you knife them; and all this visual and audio beauty wrapped around the legendary cs gameplay. it should be perfect, it should be amazing, it's not. So in this revisit I'm going to concentrate rather unfarely on the negative, we all know whats good about counter-strike and the source engine so theres no point going over that again and again and again.

Deep breath Munki, you can do this, you can slate the game thats been running your life for a while now. The gameplay is flawed. There, you did it, come on you can keep this up, just breath. I don't mean CS's gameplay in general is flawed, just sources; but how so young Chimp? 'Tis simple Valve have lost sight of what made CS so fun in the first place. Ouch. I mean come on we didn't play 1.6 for it's grainy textures, poor physics and laughable lighting did we, or should I say do it's still very popular you know. So where does CS:S go wrong if it's a simple port of 1.6? Well to be honest it's not even that, immediatly the lack of a riot shield and the restriction of 2 player models per team is the most obvious difference but there are more subtle differences you only pick up on by being a complete geek like me. Firstly, rather than port 1.6's weapon behaviour to their new game, like they did in Condition Zero, Valve altered them slightly. i don't know what they intended this to do but it must not have had the desired effect, you can now spray someones legs or lower torso with an automatic and get a headshot. For a game that is supposed to reward skill this is a serious problem. Whilst on the topic of rewards CS used to reward stealth and teamwork, Source seems to like rushing around spraying your colt everywhere. The biggest problem doesn't alter the gameplay like those, it's just plain bad. When you shoot at someone it doesn't hit them. This is something of a problem for a shooter, no? What do I mean by this? Well basically sources hitboxes lag behind the model they are meant for, this is fine if the player is standing still, but it means that to kill a moving target you have to actually fire behind the enemy to do any damage. I believe this requires a collective WTF??!!111!!!eleventyone?? This isn't lag caused by engine limitations or serverside lag, this is a clientside problem that afflicts everyone, it's like they built it into the game. This problem has been known about since source was released, which was a while ago, yet still it remains. I thought Valve were supposed to listen to their fans. So what have they been doing with all these updates? Ruining perfectly good maps? Yeah, this is a nerd gripe but the new versions of classics like Inferno, Train and Assualt are pretty bad. Let us call this the Turtle Rock effect (after the company that made the maps).
Other updates have made new world model animations, wow now I can see the gun on your back or the clip come out of your gun when you reload! Or maybe adding HDR, which is nice, but not great, and most people turn off anyway. So basically yeah, Valve have concentrated on "secksifying" a pretty sexy game already rather then crush the annoying and rather fun sapping major bugs. Hey at least they got rid of the infamous (and comical) $1500 bug. Oh well, easy come eh? Back to CS:CZ for me until Valve fix up Source.

Six out of Ten (but Ten once they fix it)