Home Page / XBox / C / Counter-Strike / Review Listing / Review

It’s finally here: Counter-Strike for Xbox. Years ago, Counter-Strike came out as a mod for the popular Half-Life game, and was met with an outstanding response and soon became the most popular mod for the title. Millions of gamers logged in daily to play the game for hours on end, and it even eventually spawned its own stand alone version for PC that no longer required the original Half-Life game to play. Now all the mayhem and action that made Counter-Strike so big on PC has hit the Xbox, but did it make the conversion unscathed?

First things first: All you hardcore crack gamers that played Counter-Strike on your PC until your computer burst into flames can breath a sigh of relief, because Counter-Strike hasn’t lost anything in the conversion to Xbox. All the gameplay elements remain untouched, and all the original weapons are still kicking around. There are even plenty of the maps that you remember from the ‘good ol’ days’. For those of you unlucky enough to have never had the chance to play Counter-Strike when it was first released as a Half-Life mod, allow me to shine some light on things for you:

Counter-Strike puts you in control of a member of a group of Counter-Terrorist group, or a member of a Terrorist group, depending on your choice. Counter-Strike for Xbox has 18 maps in all, unevenly split up into two objective groups: demolitions (14 maps) and hostage rescue (4 maps). Gameplay varies drastically depending on which objective is present. During Demolitions, the Terrorists’ objective is to plant a bomb at a specific spot on the map, while the Counter-Terrorists try to stop them. If the Terrorists still manage to plant the bomb, the Counter-Terrorists have a chance to disarm it before it explodes. In hostage rescue, it’s up to the Counter-Terrorists to save any and all hostages from the custody of the Terrorists, while, as expected, the Terrorists try to stop them. As either team, you have the option of either finishing your goal, or simply killing off the entire opposing team to win the round. At the beginning of each match, you have the chance to purchase weaponry and additional items (including grenades and body armor) to help you during the match. You earn money by winning rounds, rescuing hostages and killing enemy forces. Kill a team member or a hostage and you will lose money. The sole purpose of the money is to purchase items.

I’d like to point out the only one big difference between the PC and Xbox versions of Counter-Strike: Graphics. The game looked nice on PC, but it looks amazing on Xbox. Each character is rendered beautifully and realistically. The players all animate smoothly save for unexplainably jerky death animations, which seem very out of place in such a smoothly running game. The games environments are gorgeously detailed and well fleshed out. Sadly the game’s audio quality hasn’t had quite the update that the visuals have.

Where the graphics have been updated greatly, the games audio stays tried and true to the original Counter-Strike. All the same sounds for voices, gunfire, footsteps etc. have been recycled and thrown into the game. That’s not to say that the audio is bad, because it still stands up to the audio in the latest shooters, but an update would have been welcomed. A cool inclusion to the audio is the addition of custom soundtrack support. Depending on what kind of music you use in the game, you can change the entire atmosphere of the game.

Counter-Strike is a good multiplayer experience with friends, but it makes an even better experience when played over Xbox Live. From start to finish, the game was built from the ground up as an Xbox Live title, and it’s very evident, since the game is completely devoid of any form of campaign mode. The game’s single player mode is simply multiplayer with computer-controlled bots. While this is helpful for polishing up your skills before you hit the online arena, it can get pretty boring sitting around shooting bots by yourself. The game could have benefited greatly from a single player campaign, and the lack of one does hurt the experience a bit, but in the same vein as Id Software’s latest Wolfenstein game, the multiplayer experience makes up for a mediocre single player mode. If you have Xbox Live, Counter-Strike should be the next game on your list. If you’re still just kicking back, playing split screen for your multiplayer fix, then you should probably be looking elsewhere for your next fix.