It’s a pretty rare thing for a game to still be as popular five years after its release as it was the day it came out. Given that five years is longer than the lifespan of most consoles nowadays, it’s no wonder that any mention of Counter-Strike brings with it an implicit tone of reverence. Especially considering the game’s humble beginnings as a free mod to the wildly popular Half-Life, the realistic multiplayer first-person shooter’s rise to the upper echelon of online gaming is quite a tale unto itself. After five years, though, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to bring it to the console world, and Microsoft and Valve have done just that, in an offering for the Xbox titled, simply enough, Counter-Strike.
The premise of the game is incredibly simple. Players are divided into two teams: Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. Each team has an objective based on the game type. In Demolition, the Terrorists have a bomb that they want to plant, and the Counter-Terrorists need to defuse the bomb before it blows. In Hostage-Rescue, the Terrorists have taken civilians hostage, and the Counter-Terrorists need to escort the hostages to rescue points on the map. Of course, either side can win by eliminating all the players on the opposing team; in fact, more often than not, this is the way that many matches will end.
One of the main draws of Counter-Strike, both then and now, is the amount of realism infused into the gameplay. All the weapons look and shoot realistically, from the pistols to sniper rifles to sub-machine guns. In fact, how you shoot is just as important as what you shoot; crouching and shooting in short, controlled bursts is much more effective than holding down the trigger as you run around. The weapon choice is limited by your cash on hand, which is replenished according to how successful you were in the previous round. Obviously, the more powerful guns cost big bucks, but a skilled player can be just as deadly with the default pistol as with the most expensive assault rifle. Each round begins with several seconds of “freeze time” for the purpose of buying weapons; while this is an adequate amount of time for veterans who know exactly what they need for any given situation, new players may find themselves a good ten seconds behind the rest of their team as they figure out which gun is the best one for their budget.
The Xbox version of Counter-Strike comes with both single and multiplayer modes, as well as a tutorial for new players. Being new to the game, I found the tutorial to be extremely bare-bones, going just far enough to explain what the symbols on the screen meant and how to buy and shoot your weapons. All things considered, the game really doesn’t need too much more than that, as the rest is fairly self-explanatory, but some additional instruction on the control scheme (like the rather important point that pressing the white button drops your weapon) would have been appreciated.
Once past the tutorial, I entered the single-player mode and quickly discovered that it was nothing more than a multiplayer mode with bots instead of human opponents. Now, granted, Counter-Strike is primarily an online multiplayer game, and I honestly didn’t expect too much more than matches against bots. However, I was at least hoping for something along the lines of Unreal Championship, which has specifically staged bot matches of increasing difficulty to prepare one for playing online against real opponents.
In any event, the single player mode is good for getting used to the game, but it got boring extremely quickly. The bot AI is fairly good most of the time, and the bots have a good sense of strategy. You’ll see them camping around strategic points, and you can issue them simple orders via the d-pad. However, as often as they do something really smart, they’ll do something equally dumb, like walk into the same wall over and over again, and they do this enough times to make single player mode a frustrating experience.
What makes matters worse is that there is no respawning, either in single player or multiplayer modes. This is fine in multiplayer, as you can then chat with other dead players while you watch the match from the other players’ perspectives, and it makes sense in terms of the game’s degree of realism. However, in single player, once you’re dead, you need to sit there and watch the bots finish off the round, which can take several minutes. Needless to say, this is about as exciting as watching virtual paint dry. (In fact, in one particularly cruel combination of early death and poor AI, I was forced to endure four minutes of watching one enemy bot walk into the wall of the grate he was hiding in while my two AI teammates fruitlessly scoured the level for him.) I really don’t understand why the game couldn’t simulate the rest of the match once the human player dies and go on to the next round. As it is, though, the game is fairly painful to play in single player mode unless you’re good enough to never get killed, in which case single player will likely be no fun for you anyway.
Of course, single player is nothing but an opening act; the main event, and the reason one would purchase Counter-Strike in the first place, is the multiplayer mode. Multiplayer Counter-Strike is considerable more fun than the single player component, which makes sense given that the game was originally intended as a solely multiplayer experience. Counter-Strike is fully Live-enabled, and supports up to ten players normally, or sixteen with a dedicated server. With eight or ten people playing, Counter-Strike can be quite a bit of fun, assuming that the people who you’re playing with are the type who like to work with a team, as opposed to shouting a constant stream of obscenities and running around commando style. There are quite a few maps to choose from, some more complicated than others, but all of them provide enough alternate routes, choke points, and places to snipe from to provide enough fun to last an evening.
That is, of course, if you can get your friends into the game in the first place. Given that Counter-Strike is easily one of the most exclusively online games to come out for the Xbox, I was surprised that more thought didn’t go into the mechanics of actually hosting a game. The main problem is that there is no lobby, a feature fairly standard even with older Live-enabled games, so you actually have to start playing a game in order to invite people to it. Once in the game, there is no good stopping point for checking your friends list or invites, as the next round starts as soon as the previous one ends, so unless you get killed very early in a round, you won’t be inviting any friends to play with you. In fact, the game doesn’t even stop in between matches (which consist of a set number of rounds) to allow for a map change; you have a window of less than 30 seconds to change the map, after which the game automatically starts the next match on the same map, and does not allow you to change the map until the current match has been active for at least a minute. In all, I’m rather disappointed in the Live implementation of Counter-Strike; all of this auto-start stuff may work well in the world of the PC, where you’re likely going to just enter a game and play, but it makes managing a game on Live rather laborious.
The control transfers to the Xbox controller reasonably well, though those accustomed to a keyboard and mouse will naturally notice a drop in precision in the transition to the analog stick. Some of the button placements are questionable, however. Specifically, one must press the black button to switch to grenade, as opposed to being included in the weapons cycle that is accessible via the Y button. Again, with the number of keys available on a keyboard, it makes sense for those to be separate buttons, but when controller real estate is at a premium, why have those be separate functions? Despite some minor complaints, though, the control scheme works reasonably well, and is fairly easy for any veteran of Xbox FPS games to learn quickly.
Graphically, Counter-Strike looks like it got a decent update for the Xbox version, but it still shows its age at times. The character models are decent looking, and somewhat well-animated, but they still look somewhat cartoony compared to characters in more modern games. The maps are also rather boring-looking, and the texture work can be repetitive, so much so that it is fairly easy to get lost on any given map because it can be extremely difficult to figure out where you are and if you’ve been running in circles. The game also features quite a bit of gore, with blood spattering in all directions for even the most mundane of kills; it’s so over the top at times that it seems almost out of place for a game that is so realistic in every other aspect.
The sound fares better; given that Counter-Strike is a game in which players depend on what they hear to succeed, the designers have clearly put a lot of work into the sound work. Different guns make distinctly different sounds depending on what they’re shooting and where they are in relation to the player, and footsteps take on different sounds based on how quickly a person moves. One interesting feature in Counter-Strike that I didn’t expect to see is that custom soundtracks are supported, and can be set up differently for single player and multiplayer. While the music can obscure the other relevant sounds in the background, it is good to know that, if you’re just playing to have fun, you can kick back and listen to some of your favorite tunes while you frag your friends.
Overall, Counter-Strike does hold up fairly well five years later, but it also shows its age compared to more recent realistic FPS games, like Rainbow Six 3, in particular. The relative lack of multiplayer variety, coupled with a disappointing single player mode, make Counter-Strike difficult to recommend to anyone who is not already a rabid fan of the game, and downright impossible to recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a Live account. However, despite its problems, Counter-Strike can be a lot of fun if you’re in the mood for some fast-paced, realistic fragging; just don’t expect it to do for Xbox Live what it did for PC gaming.
