Counter-Strike 2
It’s CS:GO Jim, but not as we know it, says Rich Stanton, as he takes the long-standing esport stalwart’s successor for a spin.
This lot look a little overdressed for the weather.
SPECS
CPU: 64-bit, four-threads
Mem : 8GB
Storage: 85GB
GPU: AMD GCN+, Nvidia Kepler+, Vulkan driver
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit
Valve announced CounterStrike 2 at the start of 2023 and has been running it in a limited beta ever since, swapping one or two maps at a time, adding isolated features, and generally withholding the full package that it unveiled at the end of September. That limited rollout made it hard to get a handle on just how different it feels from CS:GO, but now we have no option. When CS2 went live, CS:GO became a beta branch on Steam. Despite some mixed messages from Valve, CS:GO has not been disappeared, Stalin-style, and remains accessible, albeit only with community servers.
All change, no change
Perhaps Counter-Strike 2’s biggest problem is that number. In a series that has always been iterative, new Counter-Strikes have been pitched as variants on the existing game: vanilla Counter-Strike is better known as Counter-Strike 1.6 (after a particular patch version), then there’s CS: Condition Zero, CS: Source and CS:GO. Whatever changes these versions made, they weren’t positioned as replacements in the way CS2 has been.