Recent reviews by umbra

Another amazing open world with a million fun things to do. Not a great storyline, worse even than 4 so far (only 13 hours in...) but the world makes up for it. The perks system is better than the old crafting system, and the new crafting system is easy to use and simple to master. Having more control over your Guns for Hire really makes that feature shine much more than previously, and the map is useful and powerful. Really overall a great game.

I've been playing CS since the early betas, and I have to say that although CS:S was divisive in some ways and frankly just poorly coded in others despite these drawbacks it was still a step up in CS as a game. If only Valve had invested the time necessary to fix the code and hadn't chopped the tickrate, &c. Well, they didn't.

Instead, they made this. It's CS, and it's fun, but it has a lot of issues of its own (not the least of which is the constant changes made by developers in a closed room...a very different feeling than the open betas had).

If you ignore the jazzed-up skins and all the frill around the edges, this is still a game designed to be played competitively; this is still CS. It's just the next generation of it, so we all have to get used to it. Once you do, you'll like it.

Of course, don't expect Valve to have changed: they will add a thousand features that do nothing to add to the game as long as it makes them a cent, while still refusing to make the basic changes that are necessary for real competition in CSGO because it would cost them a sliver of their already absurd profit margins. In the meantime, they're happy to let the third parties like ESEA and FACEIT do the work they won't (running servers at 128 tick or developing an anti-cheat that, you know, works).