Counter Strike: Global Offensive First Impressions on Xbox 360

Xbox Live Arcade got quite a treat today with the release of Counter Strike: Global Offensive. If for some reason you have not heard of the name before, it’s a first person shooter from Valve that is made for hardcore players. As the core following is PC based, gamers have been wondering how it would fair on the consoles, I can gladly report that it plays very well indeed and has the potential to be a game that will be played for a very long time, if it can find the fan base.

If you’ve played Left 4 Dead on the Xbox 369, you’ll be right at home with the controls, they feel just as precise and smooth as you’d like, though obviously it does not have the same precision as the PC with mouse and keyboard. The sensitivity can be varied to your liking, and I found the default settings to be fairly slow and gave me little time to react to enemy fire. Once you play around with these settings though, you will be pulling off headshots in no time. There are four main competitive modes in the game, Bomb Defusal, Hostage Rescue, Arms Race and Demolition.

Bomb Defual sees one team trying to plant a bomb and the other team trying to defuse it. Hostage Rescue has one team defending hostages whilst the other team must capture them and bring them back to their base. The two new game modes play a lot like Call of Duty Black Ops Gun Game mode, where with every kill you gain a new gun. In Counter Strike: Global Offensive you earn your gun in the next round. Arms Race is a free for all and Demolition plays exactly like Bomb Defusal. In all the modes you only have one life in each round, no re-spawns so this is most certainly not a game for casual players.

Valve clearly has something against iron sights and there are moments you wish that they weren’t. When an enemy is a fair distance away from you, the accuracy goes out the window, especially when using automatic guns like the AK-47 and chances are you will find yourself dead. Some guns do have scopes, which are far better to use and provides the accuracy that you need.

From the maps I have played they are extremely well designed with multiple routes for both teams and well-placed cover spots. So far I am really enjoying the game and finding it hugely addicting, there are moments of severe lag, but this is something that can hopefully be fixed in a future update. My only real concern is how long people will play this, with the popular Call of Duty seeing a new game in a few months and Halo 4 being released in November, Counter Strike: Global Offensive is going to have to provide a fair bit of content to keep players coming back.

So far so good then but I have only played it for just over 2 hours, hopefully a review will be up sometime next week, until then why not give the trial demo a go and tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive is out now for 1200 Microsoft Points.