A Battlefield fan's first 45 minutes in Counter Strike: Global Offensive

[Teajunkie]

The first thing you need to know about Counter Strike: Global Offensive is that on Classic Casual and Classic Competitive, you only respawn at the end of the round, once the world has been saved/destroyed and/or one team is 100 per cent dead meat. True, other games have had a crack at the idea, but Global Offensive is one of the very few that's built around it, and This Changes Everything.
In Battlefield, embracing death can be a tactical gesture, a layman's substitute for reconnaissance and deduction. You'll spend a few respawns at the outset of a match, testing the other side's mettle at the expense of your own life. But when death is an unrecoverable loss equalling five minutes or more of Spectate mode, having a watertight plan to begin with is crucial. Fortunately for cack-handed souls such as myself, five minutes appears to be all the average Counter Strike match is worth - the play areas are small, with teams generally no further than 30 seconds apart, and bomb countdowns are short.



Actually, the first thing you need to know about Counter-Strike is that it's an objective-based shooter, in which terrorists struggle to plant a wad of explosives before counter-terrorists wipe them out.
Cash is awarded for good performance, and new guns, armour and gear may be bought near the initial team spawn.

The marginally expanded Global Offensive layers a couple of modes on top of this proven mix - Arms Race, in which every kill you score swaps in another of the game's 45 firearms, and Demolition, which is Arms Race again, only you'll only get your new gun at the start of the next round rather than instantaneously.
Respawns are permitted in Arms Race and Demolition, making the new modes a good pick for newcomers, but they should also suit Counter Strike veterans who fancy a change of pace.

Actually, the first thing you need to know about Counter Strike is that the maps are brilliant.
I've spent most of my time on Nuke, which curls a courtyard with long sightlines around a warehouse complex housing the two bomb targets.
This poses a fantastic dilemma straight off the bat - do you stay in the open, where you've more chance of picking the other side off without getting surprised, or do you make a run for the objectives? Cunning piles of crates and ladders allow easy switching between elevations in-doors, and every sniping point has its exposed flank.

Next up for my team was Dust 2, one of history's most celebrated unreal theatres of war. It's pretty sandy, and there are ramps and corridors and things.
Gold.
In all seriousness, the first thing you need to know about Counter Strike is that accuracy trumps everything.
Except positioning, I suppose. OK, the first thing you need to know about Counter Strike, other than the importance of positioning, is that accuracy trumps everything that isn't positioning.
Gentleman's analogy: spraying and praying in this game is like trying to pick a lock by swinging your genitalia at it. And as a rule, no less painful.



It's possible the Xbox Live Arcade version's absence of mouse and keyboard control defangs this aspect a tad, relative to the PC version, but I still managed to die a dozen times at the hands of people who kept their cool under fire, evading the attack then finding my forehead with a single pistol shot. Lord only knows what it'll be like weeks from now, once the diehards hit their stride.

;

Source