bad

cool

As someone with around 5000 hours spread over more than 10 years in Counter-Strike, most of them spent grinding competitive and FACEIT (peaking at ~2300 ELO in 2019), CS2 feels like a mixed bag of potential and frustration.

I’ve never been a casual player. I didn’t play for skins, operations, or community servers rather than some retake, I played purely for the competitive aspect: improvement, structure, and high-level matches. In that sense, Counter-Strike has always been unmatched. CS:GO, especially in its later years, felt like a refined eSport title where mechanics, utility usage, positioning, and team play actually mattered.

CS2 looks like the next step, but it doesn’t always play like one.

On the positive side, the core of Counter-Strike is still there. Gunplay is familiar, movement still kind of rewards precision, and when the game works as expected, with all things matching together (ping, hitreg, servers), it feels like CS. Smokes are more dynamic and open interesting tactical possibilities, and visually the game is cleaner and more modern. At a high level, CS2 still has moments where teamwork and coordination shine — and that’s why many of us are still here.

However, from a competitive-first perspective, CS2 currently feels less reliable than CS:GO did.

The biggest issue by far is competitive integrity, mainly tied to anticheat and matchmaking quality. Compared to CS:GO, CS2 feels like a step backwards here. Running into cheaters players feels more common, trust in the system is lower, and the overall experience is inconsistent up to a point of +5 rage-cheaters/premier game if your trust factor is bad, and guess what, your trust factor gets lower if you are a good player, because people will report everything. For someone who played mostly on FACEIT to avoid these exact problems, it’s disappointing that the official competitive experience hasn’t improved, and arguably worsened.

When you compare CS2 to games like VALORANT or even Rainbow Six Siege, the difference in competitive infrastructure becomes obvious. VALORANT, despite its flaws, delivers consistency: stronger but not perfect anticheat, clear hit registration, and predictable matchmaking. R6, while mechanically very different, also puts a strong emphasis on competitive integrity. CS2, right now, feels behind in that regard, which is frustrating for a game that prides itself on being the pinnacle of competitive FPS.

Another issue is polish. At high levels, small things matter: hit registration, movement consistency, peeker’s advantage, sound clarity. CS2 still feels like it’s ironing out problems that shouldn’t exist in a released competitive title, especially one replacing a game as mature as CS:GO.

In short, CS2 has the identity and foundation of a great competitive game, but it hasn’t yet earned the trust that CS:GO built over a decade. For veteran players who lived for ranked, leagues, and FACEIT ladders, it currently feels like we’re beta-testing rather than competing at our best.

I’m still playing because Counter-Strike, at its core, is irreplaceable, and indeed, faceit still exists. But until anticheat, stability, and competitive systems reach or surpass CS:GO standards, CS2 feels more like unrealized potential than a true evolution.

The game is good enough even if it's copying the agario and slitherio games