izigame.me

I've been playing Counter-Strike since 2014 and have accumulated close to 5000 hours across multiple accounts and I can comfortably say that I would not recommend this game in it's current state.
Premier was one of the worst ideas Valve has ever had, they introduced a game mode centered around global leaderboards without implementing the 1 thing that everyone has requested since CS:GO's release.. An effective Anti-Cheat. Now, I'm not saying that they have not attempted to do this with the announcement of AI learning being incorporated into VAC but this simply is not enough with how sophisticated cheats really are today and the bypasses in place for active monitoring. Looking at Counter-Strike's direct competitors (Valorant) I believe it's time to implement a kernel level Anti-Cheat to allow a level playing field for both new and veteran players. This isn't completely effective in Valorant but it acts as a huge deterrent for cheaters that do not understand how cheats actually function and makes it a huge amount more difficult for the creators of these cheats to constantly provide updates and bypasses.
The lack of effective Anti-Cheat forces veteran players that wish to take this game seriously to play on 3rd party clients, which divides the community massively. However unfortunately as it stands there are also cheat bypasses for popular 3rd party clients too such as FACEIT. It feels as if Valve cares more about the economy of the skin market than they do about the actual gameplay which is understandable looking at the annual turnover of cases.
I really do hope that in the future I can return to this review and provide an update that invalidates all of the points I made above, however at this point in time (04/01/2025) I sadly do not see this happening soon.
Counter-Strike has been a huge part of my life and I've met some life long friends during my time playing, please revive my love for this game Valve.
Update (09/01/25): Perfect timing on this review, instead of improving any feature at all in the latest update they just decided to break the ragdoll physics and weapon inspect animations instead..