Recent reviews by 「MasterminD」AndyMcNab

S-tier game confirmed: Within just 2 hours of play and already the whole Discord is laughing, so much that we had to take a breather.

Like all the other Unity based meme games, buggy as heck and not worth it.
Stuck going forwards, unable to drop items or interact. If it lets you jump you glitch half way through the floor.
-AIDS/10

CS:GO was already treading on thin ice for most of its life, perpetually unsure what it was, should be and making game-breaking changes weekly.

CS 2.0 is only a partial fix for fundamentally broken:
- Physics + smokes + molotovs/incendiaries
- Aspects of the UI - e.g: Per-player VOIP volume controls etc.

... but there's a huge set of catches.
In fact more side effects that make it objectively worse than the predecessor from a core game play standpoint.

Too many things have not been fundamentally fixed or otherwise made worse:
- No obvious settings to ensure RAW mouse input
- Subtick leads to worse back-tracking than in CS:GO and general motion feels like you are moving through a swimming pool.
- Sound design is worse overall, occluded sounds are fine, what is not fine is the utterly broken directionality (stereo imaging), heck CS:S had better directional sound and that is saying something.
- Worse visibility at all added to which hyper-brightness looks like cheap image processing gimmicks that an iPhone does, overly bright and saturated to make everyone's game look like garbage tier NVidia Digital Vibrance got baked in to the game locked at maximum.
- HUD is overall worse in design
- Sprays are worse, almost zero visual feedback on the vast majority of weapons.
- MR12 is objectively worse because it reduces chances of come-backs, leading to more force-buy-rush/give up behaviours. But then again the average audience probably has a shorter attention span now too.
- No custom game servers
- No ability to change key settings for servers or clients.
- Particle effects that nobody asked for that randomly float in places that make zero sense causing distraction at certain angles due to shimmering (No image scaling on, that ♥♥♥♥ needs to die in a fire too).

Things that have not changed between CS:GO and CS 2.0:
- Peering has long been utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, especially for any UK players, and this is not an ISP-thing this is the decision of Valve to use the garbage tier peers+VPS's.
- Months of "work" pending release to deliver essentially nothing and a future bug set that will likely only grow.

This is living proof Valve long ago gave up on improving the fundamentals of the game or series at all.
At the very least falls well short of the vast majority of its own goals plus promises to class as a full release - And for sure it isn't because they do not have the money to pay the right folks to do this stuff.

The only thing that will make game play any more interesting is the smoke changes, but this is offset by MR12 making it less fun to play and will impact majors since it takes away many chance of exciting comebacks / equalisers to make it a close match.

The only part of Valve that is doing anything good towards the future of gaming ecosystems, I feel, is the contributions to WINE/developing Proton and SoC/hardware platforms such as the Steam Deck + other peripherals.

I can no longer take Valve seriously about any of their future game releases.
Too much trust has been burnt at this point and the bare minimum core gameplay fix hopes for CS 2.0 fell well short.

Garbage walking simulator with performance issues for so much of its development it was never possible to play with any consistency, means it was never worth the price at any point in its history. Because now the weapons are so inconsistent there's no fun playing it.
Hence, why it is now free to play.
Still haven't even managed £1 per hour of play, but hey ho, good to know the battle royale meme game style is fundamentally flawed enough to not waste my money on ever again after the similar utter failure that was H1Z1 as well.

Reasons to get this game:
- Getting stuck a hand full of times on puzzles because I missed something in plain sight giving you that "Aha!" moment, haha!
- Character references to many popular things, great story (builds very nicely) and the ending is deeper than I was first expecting!
- Kitty.
- Impressed with the natural animations and behaviours for the cats! (And to a large extent the humanoid robots too)
- Kitty!
- Not unnecessarily huge to download ~10GB for almost 10 hours of game play is a very decent result when looking at many modern titles.
- Did I already mention? Kitty!!1

What more do you need? 12/10. :> It would be amazing to see this grow and become a series!

There's somewhat limited graphics tweaking, which I suspect could be improved a bit for older hardware, but at least you can disable/reduce the motion blur to zero (Personal preference).
There did seem to be a 60FPS maximum limit from the menu system, unclear specifically why but I have a few guess.

Note for Linux users:
- I have not managed to get this running under Proton at time of release
- For clarity: I didn't expect it to be, knowing it's a Windows only release title and expected this with my purr-chase (Get it? :P)
- I plan to experiment a bit more and submit any Proton/Wine issues that I can identify (I suspect the game automatically uses some raytracing if your GPU is capable of it and balances for the 60FPS limit without burdening the user with dozens of settings)

Great game overall and looks good even in 2021, only completed main storyline.
As can be expected from a Hideo Kojima game, many great plot items and mechanics which are really cool, fitting music and voice acting too (With the likes of Keifer Sutherland being an apt choice for Snake)!

Only things that became repetitively annoying were:
Movement bugs on rocks and sliding which did get infuriating at important points - Interrupts fundamental actions such as reloading or trying to climb faces.
Slight over stickiness in automatic corner/wall following.

For Linux users: Runs fine in Proton.

Another great adventure and story line so far, although unsure how much play time is left being about '1/3rd' of the way through (~10hrs) in comparison to Rise of the Tomb Raider this seems like it's possibly a little shorter.

The high quality visuals really make for the atmosphere of the game and bring the scenes to life -- However to enjoy some of this does require decent hardware which is sought after in these times in 2021.

Runs flawlessly on Linux natively*1 -- Another high quality port by Feral, save for the common movement quirks/bugs in the engine. So keep up the good work!

*1: At time of writing, the RX 6700XT on Linux requires a custom development build of both the amdgpu-dkms 20.50, Mesa 21.0 + overrides in launcher args for Vulkan to work around this on OpenSuSE 15.2 stable with kernel 5.3.18-lp152.66.

Quite a deep story line, Black Mirror-esque in ways, with choices to be made along the way.
Some neat puzzles you have to piece together as you go.
Has some replay value as there are some different choices you can make, the main story line is almost 8hrs of play time.
Have to say I was quite impressed by the lighting and reflections which are pretty impressive without being overly costly, a la HL2 engine but seemed better.
Since this is not a competitive shooter so pretty and 60FPS is a perfectly valid target and it works really well.

Works on Linux which is real nice :)

Minor bugs:
- Movement out of line with mouse position/character models forcing you to rotate 360 (keys or mouse).
- NPC actors blocking doorways can lead you to getting stuck, simply have to reload.
- Slightly unintuitive mechanics for a couple of the puzzles that seemed to lack sense.
- Broken camera visibility checks, I mean, there was a whole wall in the way so clearly some minor shortcuts taken but didn't break the overall game.

A good ~40h of play for the main story line and side challenges, excluding any DLCs.
Good story line, lots of fun exploring and levelling up skills/items.
Pretty well polished, occasional collision detection/context key action issues.
Runs perfectly well on Linux.