Doesn't compare to CS on a competative level

It's more casual and it's just all around boring

Not to mention the intrusive anti-cheat fucked with my fanatec racing wheel drivers causing it to brick

CSGO: Lose 600 dollars to virtual skins
Valorant: Loose 700 dollars because it's developers are a wannabe surveillance state

It's a fun game but, requires you to be good to actually enjoy it. I never played CS:GO so I had a hard time adjusting because my last FPS I played before was R6 and I stopped playing it 1 year before I started playing Valorant.

But honestly this game requires good map knowledge and lots of experience, like you need to take in alot of things that people can do because this game is way more flexible that CS:GO looks to be just because it's a "tactical hero shooter". By that I mean unlike CS:GO you don't have to practice on hours end getting smokes and flash line ups to some people this means you're getting skilled at the game. Which I agree with but Valorant just baby modes it and makes it alot flexible and easier to pull off but in less orthodox ways.

To be honest I think it's hard to enjoy this game because it's extremely reliant on your teammates being good or having a good mental because unless you're cracked out of your mind, you won't be playing with great players and sometimes there's just players who just won't talk or communicate which is an important thing in "tac shooters" in general. And like I said before I did not have a CS:GO background so getting into this game was a little hard. I at least had a friend who helped me out when I learned but for the most parts I watched guides.

Another annoying thing is, random spray patterns, walking headshots and all that dumb bs. Like imagine you're holding an area that has a doorway. And you've been looking at it for so long yet for some reason you'll see players just run and gun you because of riots random spray patterns. But honestly these are things that riot will hopefully fix, the game is still new and has time to fix these things.

But it's still unacceptable to sell in game cosmetics for such a steep price, like wow that dragon skin line looks okay but like it is not worth $100, also I'm just going to call this out because the way riots Valorant team are making these skins actually change the gun model, eventually riot will release a cool looking skin but it will somehow give an actual edge to gameplay. I don't know how they'll do it but I feel like that's something's that gonna happen. Also these weapon upgrades using "radianite points" is complete bullshit but it's a good excuse to grinding this game but that also is pretty annoying because, I paid for this $100 skin set that isn't even that great and now I have to play 100 hours of this game or get half of the effects that I can get from it. Like now that's just straight up a trashy to do skin sets, like if you really wanted to do that at least when we're paying the same price as a collector's version of a game, give us some of your "radianite points" as well. Some people don't just wanna grind this game out for hours on end. Because at some point it just doesn't become fun at all.

Tldr; If someone kills you, they're just better.

I'm not a fan of FPS in general. But this game is really cool. I'm having a lot of fun, even though I'm not the master of flawless aiming.

It gets everything right from CS and Overwatch and mix it up without heiring their problems (which are a lot in the case of Overwatch).

Of course the metagame from these kind of competitive e-sports change a lot over time and keeping the balance could be a real challenge for the delevopers, but so far so good in it's first year.

Also, the art direction is cool.

First Impressions (kind of a new format I wanted to do, I kind of treat backloggd as a journal of my thoughts to begin with so why not!)

It's good.

Better than I expected from the team that sucked a lot of my adolescent hours away for a moba I'm incredibly mixed about. It does a pretty fun accessible combination of CS + hero powers, and it's fast paced enough with neverending split second decisions. Mostly just happy about how they landed the ingame economics, not just of where you spend money, but how you make moves at any point.

The biggest standout difficulty curve to climb was weapon and ability swapping, as whenever you ready something there's a HUGE startup, and that can very easily be your downfall. Knowing exactly when to do something as simple as that is a key point, adding that onto map control, the tradeoffs of weapons and ability usage, and you have something that is probably really interesting.

I tried out mostly Commando and Jett, and also the two meme modes. Spike Rush is just "I feel like wasting time", and deathmatch is "I want to lab my aim". Neat stuff.

There's a couple other miscellaneous stuff there, game looks bad but perfect for competitive play and weaker end systems, so it's just a heartless tradeoff but whatever. Feedback is INCREDIBLY good, in that you don't even need to like know all the agent abilities, they're very intuitive to figure out just from looking at them. Some of the best visual info stuff I've seen in a while. Matchmaking was smoothish, but not knowing what map you're going to get queued on can make things disgusting when you're thrusted from maps you haven't yet learned to ones you were just getting to learn.

Overall, good time, looking forward to coming back and getting not-shit at it.

A mix of Counter-Strike gunplay with Overwatch hero abilities. An interesting concept in theory and it can be fun for a while but the problem comes in with the maps. Too many fatal funnels and too many corners make the game a contest to see who knows all the hiding spots very quickly. These maps are clearly designed by an inexperienced team and if you're going to try and compete with Counter-Strike which has a dedicated playerbase that have been playing the same maps for almost 30 years then mediocre maps just don't cut it.