CS Fans Criticize Counter-Strike 2 For Poor Optimization

For the past half a year, gamers and fans of the renowned Counter-Strike series from all over the globe eagerly awaited the release of Counter-Strike 2, a new and improved version of Valve's legendary first-person shooter powered by the Source 2 engine. First announced in March 2023, CS2 promised to bring overhauled and visually-enhanced maps, volumetric smoke grenades, sub-tick update architecture, new high-resolution VFX, and more, with the developer even going as far as calling the release "the largest technical leap forward in Counter-Strike's history".

Six months of active development later, Counter-Strike 2 finally made its long-awaited debut earlier this week, released as a mandatory replacement for the beloved Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. While many in the community were happy with the release, a significant part of the playerbase has seemingly disliked the update, as evident from Counter-Strike 2's Steam reviews.

Within a day since its release, the new game amassed more than six thousand negative reviews on Steam, which, while a drop in a bucket, considering that Counter-Strike 2 uses CS:GO's ratings and already has more than seven million reviews, is still quite telling.

The majority of the negative feedback revolves around the game's performance, with players criticizing CS2 for low FPS, freezes, and other technical issues, even on high-end PCs. Others denounce Valve for "pulling a Blizzard" and removing CS:GO entirely without providing an option to play the previous iteration. Some condemn the new game for removing content that was present in the original game, such as maps and game modes. And finally, some players note that the game is currently full of cheaters and hackers, who, as they usually do, ruin the experience for everyone. Steam user, known as "domalake", summarized the main complaints perfectly, with their review reading as follows:

And here are some more reviews shared by the community:

• "What was the point of releasing this? A large amount of features and modes that were in CS:GO are just gone. War Games and most of its associated maps are removed. All of the local T's/CT's are missing, even the ones they remade for Dust2 and Nuke a while back. Danger Zone, the mode they added before they went Free-to-Play is also just gone."
• "Don't get me wrong, I approve CS2, but removing CSGO entirely just makes me mad."
• "Valve did an Activision-Blizzard, and force upgraded everyone playing CS:GO to play "Counter Strike 2" – so Valve which is it a sequel or a major patch?? On top of that they replaced the store page so all the millions of reviews and stats are now attributed to CS2 even though they were earned by CS:GO, underhanded and disgusting behaviour."
• "You've decided to drop old game and drop macOS support. Great"
• "Should've been a seperate game. I have a low-end laptop that ran global offensive perfectly fine with 70-90fps on the lowest settings, and now I get a major fps lag every couple minutes or so that completely freezez my game making me unable to do anything."
• "I paid for a game and they removed it. This is absolute disgusting, just release your new game and keep the old one people paid for."
• "I get most of the reasoning behind most of it, but where's War Games, why cut off all the three players who are on Mac, why kill CS:GO before CS2 is actually ready for tourney level play, what is going on"
• "CHEATERS own this game."
• "Return CS:GO."

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