Riot Games presents their own take on the counter-strike franchise, but notably with agents that have their own abilities. As someone who has like 1.5k hours in CS but had hit a clear wall in skill, this was refreshing and very fun to play.

Gameplay wise, the shooting and aiming is easier as is the economy (which is really just more fun since you don't have to save as often), but the characters and their unique abilities give the game a lot of depth. Characters have smokes, flashes, teleports, healing, etc. I also particularly like the addition of things like teleporters to maps, adding a new level of depth that CS can't.

Because the game is new and built on a newer engine, there are many QOL fixes over CS. The economy is much more user friendly to view, you can sell your guns before the round starts, you can ping, etc. There are some notable misses though: you can't view your own games, and the anticheat is intrusive (though at least it works, which is more than I can say for CSGO matchmaking). They also postponed an update to nerf a broken gun because an esports tournament wasn't over yet, which means they somehow could not get a tournament patch working. And you can't que for specific maps, presumably because Icebox would turn into the Office of Valorant.

Overall, this game was pretty darn fun to unpack compared to CS. There will always be problems since it's an online competitive game (trolls, toxic people, etc) but I had a lot of fun in Valorant as I slowly improved and will likely come back to it to grind. Sometimes you just want to view the more colorful aesthetic of Valorant compared to the duller colours of CS. As a player and an esports fan, it's an exciting game.

It's honestly really disappointing how I just enjoyed this game less and less as I got further into it. The game's mechanics are on point - the sense of speed is very much here, and it's easy to feel like a badass hooking and swinging around. But it gets insanely bogged down by the inconsistent level design. The first levels are wide open arrangements of platforms in the air that demand you think outside the box and head off a beaten path in order to get the best time possible - something that genuinely got me excited for the rest of the game, improving times through experimentation like that with such a useful moveset? Hell yeah.

Then, as the game goes on, levels shift towards being more closed in "boxes" that prioritize precision over speed. In a game that, with it's time-based scoring and rankings, tells you speed is important. This isn't "the levels get harder" - the difficulty spike is extremely noticable, and you go from replaying levels to improve your time to replaying levels because you have to hook yourself through a tunnel just big enough to fit through. It leaves you with zero drive to play them again to improve your time.

While this is the biggest issue for me because of how genuinely great the controls are, there are other things I'm not a fan of here. The aesthetics are great, but then you realize that all levels use the exact same background and block designs. It never gets switched up - aside from the DLC that is. There's also the story. I get it, this game isn't supposed to really have much of a story, it's "you go fast". But I would have rather it didn't have any at all instead of what it has. The story is another thing that gets worse as time goes on - you start with this command line intro and you get dropped into a cybernetic world and meet the tutorial character. Cool. In between levels there are some brief dialogue cutscenes that are neat. Then by the end of the game, the antagonist is...just kind of ignored. There wasn't even a credits roll. The story only truly concludes in the DLC, which even then the conclusion there feels off but that's its own review.

It's not all bad though. Aside from the positives I already mentioned, the music is amazing. And the visual style, while repetitive, is still pretty good. And when the game lets you feel like a badass, you sure as hell feel like one.

Anyway, in conclusion this game has an incredibly strong start but progressively takes a sharp dive downhill. It's got a great foundation, but the mileage varies a lot with how it's built on.