Valve
Counter-Strike 2 is Valve’s worst-rated game in the studio’s history
The community is up in arms against Valve and Counter-Strike 2 for changing the engine, missing content, and not dealing with cheaters and server issues.
We knew that most likely Counter-Strike 2 wasn’t going to mean to us the same thing that the original did back in the day, but still, we didn’t expect such a tumultuous launch. In fact, the sequel has now become the worst-rated game in Valve’s history, and not just by a little.
As of this writing, Counter-Strike 2 has a score of 30 on Metacritic and “mixed” reviews on Steam, where it has garnered over a million negative comments, more than any other production from the developer. Even professional players like Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev have recommended their community wait a few months to get into the game because of all the problems that are being experienced at launch.
What are the criticisms of Counter-Strike 2 about?
For many, Counter-Strike 2 and its new graphics engine have great potential (its grenades, for example, are what the shooter genre has been asking for 20 years, and oozes details like the most photorealistic water in the industry, but at the end of the day none of the problems that the community has been complaining about for more than a decade have been fixed. And broadly speaking there would be two: servers and cheaters. In fact, it seems like there are more cheaters than ever in their matches.
As if that were not enough, the transition from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to this sequel was obligatory. Valve replaced CS:GO with the new game, a particularly controversial decision when half of the maps and modes have been left by the wayside (there is still no team deathmatch). When Global Offensive was launched it coexisted with the original and no one understands why the company does not allow for the same while the errors are polished.
In Valve’s favor, it should be noted that launch problems are nothing new, not only today in the video game industry, but in the series, whose updates and deliveries also had startup problems. Not so many, it’s true, but neither had there been so many new developments and innovations. We will see if the company is capable of listening to and solving all the community’s demands in the coming months, thus recovering their impeccable resume (Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, DOTA 2, Team Fortress).