Counter-Strike: Condition Zero is, as the title says, a middle child between CS 1.6 and CS: Source that had a pretty damn rocky development cycle, but despite that it still does things I haven't seen any other CS game do and most importantly is still fun to play.

Now, the most unique aspect of Condition Zero is the campaign. Completely single-player with many levels and four difficulties, though unfortunately it's simply a regular CS match but with added on challenges that you have to complete to progress. You can also give commands to your bot teammates and sometimes they will listen to you, sometimes they won't. Most of the time if you die they are NOT gonna clutch, but despite all that the gameplay is still basically the same as 1.6, making it quite enjoyable with slightly better graphics.

As someone that played through the campaign on expert difficulty, DON'T. GENUINELY. The expert difficulty bots (on the other team) have straight up wallhacks and aimbot. If they hear just one tiny little footstep you are NOT reacting fast enough to hit them first, so unless you stay silent most of the time you are likely to get frustrated trying to beat the campaign.

Of course you can still play online and that's fairly similar to 1.6. If you feel like experiencing the history of Counter-Strike then you'll likely enjoy this entry, otherwise I'd recommend skipping this one and either playing CS2, Source or 1.6.

Why do you read my reviews?

Pretty underrated Counter-Strike game. No one really cared about it back in the day, because both Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source came out the same year. Nowadays it has a small, but dedicated community that is pretty chill, with all the sweats occupying 1.6 and CS2. And then there's the singleplayer content, which was probably the game's main selling point. Tour of Duty is okay, just a collection of matches with bots and additional objectives, like "kill enemies with a sniper rifle" or "rescue 2 hostages". Deleted Scenes on the other hand is where things get interesting. It's Counter-Strike's attempt at a singleplayer campaign and a pretty good one. There's 18 missions overall (12 main and 6 additional) and they're quite varied. Apart from regular bomb defuse or hostage rescue situations there's also infiltration, sabotage, collecting evidence, etc. It almost feels like playing COD Modern Warfare or Rainbow Six, but on GoldSrc engine. Speaking of GoldSrc engine, unfortunately there's one hitch. HL1 25th anniversary update broke a few things in CSCZ, especially regarding pushing and pulling objects, so expect to play around with console commands to avoid getting softlocked. Another mildly annoying thing is the fact that enemies need like 100 bullets to die, so you'd better nail these headshots, otherwise you'll run out of ammo pretty quickly.