You open your eyes and look around. Beside you are four others looking anxious. You’re armed with a pistol and a knife. You descend from the high daze in your mind and realize three things: your determination, passion, and excitement to beat the other team. You throw yourself onto the battlefield with your teammates, flinging grenades and calling out locations of the enemy. Bang! Bang! Bang! Welcome to the world of Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is a first person shooter like no other. It’s not just shooting left and right. The game requires strategy, physics, memorization, reaction time, and teamwork. CS:GO will seem confusing to any new player, but you’ll soon explore the five unique game modes: Casual, Arms Race, Demolition, Deathmatch, and Competitive. Most modes are used to “warm up” or practice before entering Competitive, where your performance actually counts.

When entering Competitive matchmaking, you would notice that there are two teams: Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. There are five players on each team. When playing the Bomb Scenario game type, the goal of the Terrorist team is to plant the bomb at one of the designated bomb sites and defend it until it explodes. The goal of the Counter-Terrorist team is to prevent the Terrorists from planting the bomb, or defuse
the bomb if it has already been planted. This planting and defusing of the bomb repeats for 30 rounds until one team reaches 16 wins, and that team wins the game. There’s a ranking system in the Competitive game mode, the lowest rank being Silver 1, and the highest rank being Global Elite. One can rank up by winning Competitive matches. Despite CS:GO’s repetitiveness, the game never fails to entertain me. I could play for hours on end and not get bored. The fact that players get to flight alongside new teammates and against new opponents every round keeps the game fresh and interesting for everyone.

The game’s controls couldn’t get any simpler. Use the mouse to scroll through weapons and left click to shoot and the keyboard’s W, A, S, and D keys to move around. On the other hand, CS:GO’s graphics aren’t simple at all. All the textures in the game are realistic, and each pixel adds detail. The lighting and shading in the game is precise and pretty, but not hard to run on a computer. Another complex feature in CS:GO is the sounds. There’s a noise for almost everything in the game, including footsteps, voices, bird chirps, and grenade explosions. There’s even individual tracks for each gun’s reload. In addition, every gun has a different sound for when it is fired, perfecting the game’s immense detail.

Despite CS:GO’s positive qualities, there is one inevitable bad side to the game. With the competitive aspect in CS:GO comes a toxic player community. Before, during halftime, and after competitive games, there is always trash talk, name calling, and sound pollution. This especially occurs in lower ranks. In higher ranks such as Master Guardian, people take the game more seriously. However, CS:GO’s good qualities make up for its community. At first, I wanted to quit because of the toxic players. After about a week, though, I came back without hesitation. The community made me more passionate about becoming a better player.

From ranking up to Global Elite to fooling around with your friends in a game of Arms Race, Counter Strike: Global Offensive is always a great source of entertainment. The intense gameplay, the mind-blowing variety of sounds and the stunning graphics, CS:GO is the perfect first person shooter. Even though the game is hard to learn, when you finally get the hang of it and have some fun, you’ll be thankful for spending the $15 on Steam. Don’t just sit there, join the battle. Bang! Bang! Bang!