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It’s 15:25 on a Saturday at PAX Prime 2011 and we are pushing our way through the masses at Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive booth. The line is pretty immense and just trying to get in contact with the community management is proving to be difficult. After a few accidental shoves and pushes, we reach our contact and are immediately put into the queue to play the game. As we stand there and watch the others playing ahead of us, I couldn’t help but think to myself: “This map is familiar…” Then it hit me, this is a classic: Dust!
The group ahead of us finishes their play through and we are allowed to move forward and given some Xbox controllers. We begin by choosing our sides and load outs which worked pretty well. You choose your main selection of armaments and then are able to fine tune those by choose more powerful or specific items within. Say for instance you want to have a stun gun instead of a hand gun, you can make that choice. There really isn’t anything new here if you have been playing Counter-Strike since it first came out over twelve years ago. Its sole purpose is to kill the other team and it is executed well. With this being our first round and the game begins we run forward as the counter terrorists and are immediately met with a bug. The game freezes and Valve handles the issue beautifully by asking us to hold on a moment while they reset things. After a brief moment we are asked to continue on forward and we do. Having nearly 12 years of experience playing the Dust map, I run to where I always run on this map and am immediately greeted by my opponent. Sadly I die and I feel the crowd behind me shake their heads in disbelief for it was a pretty lame mistake on my part. I’ll chock it up to the fact I couldn’t figure out the controls at the moment.
The controls felt a little sluggish and the speed of moving around had a bit of slowness to it. But considering this is probably an alpha/beta build of the game, it is not a surprise. Other than that, this is classic Counter-Strike and it has it all. Fast paced action, awesome weapons, AWP anyone?, and lots of the original feel that you will have from the old MOD, except completely spiced up for a new generation of players. CS: GO will feature new maps and gameplay modes along with new characters and weapons. There will also be a nice matchmaking mode, something we really didn’t get to see at PAX along with the expected leader boards. We are also being told there will be more revealed in the future as well. Expect to see CS: GO on the PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE Arcade, and Steam for both the PC and Mac early next year. 2012 is really looking to be a good year so far, especially since even though this was an early build of the game, we all know that Valve doesn’t put their name on anything crappy.
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