I think it is, with DayZ, my least liked game.
It's basically everything I hate. Let's pass very quick on obvious and exogens factors like toxic community, poor matchmaking and suffocating theme to speak about game design.
When I play a game, I actually want to play a game. When I play CS:GO, I do as everybody does : I take a gun, I move myself in front of other people with guns, sometimes I win the fight, sometimes I loose the fight. At this point, a game that pretends to be a game would give me a fair penalty, make me wait for 10 seconds, and then make me respawn to try again. This is what does 90% of games, and it is very useful in order to both reducing frustration and keeping me in the flow : I have the chance to try again, and I'll learn from this new situation. CS:GO does not have respawns, so once you're dead, you'll have to do one thing, which is the baddest thing that can happen in videogames : wait.
Ok then, CS:GO is a hardcore videogame. Agreed. It also pretends to provide coherent balistic and gunfights.
They indeed are coherent, but they also are stupid. CS:GO's recoil follows its own logic : if you shoot an automatic gun, you better crouch and look at your enemy's feet because every single bullet after the 2 first shots are going waaaaaaaaay upward. It is unfun to use (I have no pleasure looking at feet and praying a random bullet will go in a head), unfun to play around and unfun to play with.
When it comes to actually being a videogame, CS:GO here again fails miserably. It's the symbol of those awful games, where snipers are a rule acclaimed by the playerbased, whereas shotguns are fully useless. Unfortunately, game design wise, a shotgun make way more sens than a sniper : the first one is a high-risk-high-reward weapon (you have to come close to your opponent to deal massive damage, which gives your opponent the time to react) whereas the second one is a low-risk-high-reward weapon (you can be as far as possible from the target, you'll still be very efficient). It is an fps with asymetrical teams, where there are no differences (aside from an assault rifle, woah !) between the two teams. It is an FPS that doesn't feature weapons that try to be different : there are no flamethrower, no grenade launcher, no rocket launcher, no automatic shotguns, no miniguns, no mines, no outside-of-the-box weapons... (and of course if you try to use semi auto sniper, you'll be insulted by both your team and the ennemy team). Both game design and level design encourages camp, which is the lowest point of multiplayer action games. In the other hand, I must say it also encourages stealth, which is a really good thing.
It is a multiplayer game where there really is no multiplayer gameplay. Everybody goes its way and gets randomly shot at a badly named location (long ? Short ?). It's a vindication of kill-culture, which isn't fun.
Considering the amount of FPS that exist, I do not recommand playing CS:GO. I also recomand playing way more arcade games and way less competitive games.
It's basically everything I hate. Let's pass very quick on obvious and exogens factors like toxic community, poor matchmaking and suffocating theme to speak about game design.
When I play a game, I actually want to play a game. When I play CS:GO, I do as everybody does : I take a gun, I move myself in front of other people with guns, sometimes I win the fight, sometimes I loose the fight. At this point, a game that pretends to be a game would give me a fair penalty, make me wait for 10 seconds, and then make me respawn to try again. This is what does 90% of games, and it is very useful in order to both reducing frustration and keeping me in the flow : I have the chance to try again, and I'll learn from this new situation. CS:GO does not have respawns, so once you're dead, you'll have to do one thing, which is the baddest thing that can happen in videogames : wait.
Ok then, CS:GO is a hardcore videogame. Agreed. It also pretends to provide coherent balistic and gunfights.
They indeed are coherent, but they also are stupid. CS:GO's recoil follows its own logic : if you shoot an automatic gun, you better crouch and look at your enemy's feet because every single bullet after the 2 first shots are going waaaaaaaaay upward. It is unfun to use (I have no pleasure looking at feet and praying a random bullet will go in a head), unfun to play around and unfun to play with.
When it comes to actually being a videogame, CS:GO here again fails miserably. It's the symbol of those awful games, where snipers are a rule acclaimed by the playerbased, whereas shotguns are fully useless. Unfortunately, game design wise, a shotgun make way more sens than a sniper : the first one is a high-risk-high-reward weapon (you have to come close to your opponent to deal massive damage, which gives your opponent the time to react) whereas the second one is a low-risk-high-reward weapon (you can be as far as possible from the target, you'll still be very efficient). It is an fps with asymetrical teams, where there are no differences (aside from an assault rifle, woah !) between the two teams. It is an FPS that doesn't feature weapons that try to be different : there are no flamethrower, no grenade launcher, no rocket launcher, no automatic shotguns, no miniguns, no mines, no outside-of-the-box weapons... (and of course if you try to use semi auto sniper, you'll be insulted by both your team and the ennemy team). Both game design and level design encourages camp, which is the lowest point of multiplayer action games. In the other hand, I must say it also encourages stealth, which is a really good thing.
It is a multiplayer game where there really is no multiplayer gameplay. Everybody goes its way and gets randomly shot at a badly named location (long ? Short ?). It's a vindication of kill-culture, which isn't fun.
Considering the amount of FPS that exist, I do not recommand playing CS:GO. I also recomand playing way more arcade games and way less competitive games.