Can it really be an incredible year for gaming when this one might be the last for thousands, if not tens of thousands of people?
No stranger to bloodletting, the last month for video games has evolved into a full-blown generational exodus. Counting the impact of this last week alone, which saw the closure of Insurgency developers New World Interactive, the closure of Pigeon Simulator makers HakJak Studios via the TinyBuild layoffs, redundancies at Codemasters two years after EA bought it for $US1.6 billion, the industry is nearing on almost 7,000 people having lost their jobs. That’s also just what’s been reported or publicly announced, too. I’ve seen several posts on LinkedIn and other places where people announced their projects had been shut down or that they’d been moved on.
I was reading an article recently where someone – whose profile has exploded this year in part due to just how many developers have needed help or guidance on where to turn – suggested that it wouldn’t be a surprise if it took people 5 or 6 months to find a job “even in normal times”.
I’m reminded of 2007 and 2008, two years with an embarrassment of riches and generationally impactful titles. We’re talking Fallout 3, GTA 4, Dead Space, Mario Kart Wii, Metal Gear Solid 4, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, The Witcher, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Portal, Team Fortress 2, the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Halo 3, Wii Sports, Pokémon Diamond & Pearl, Guitar Hero 3, BioShock.
And while the industry earned the tag of being “recession-proof” – economic parlance that describes what luxury expenses and feel-good purchases people will continue buying even when times are tough – that same resilience couldn’t be extended to the people in the industry who made it all possible.
People, talented people, will leave for good. They cannot afford to wait for three, six, or twelve months searching for a new home with rent to pay and mouths to feed. Eventually, just like it did for so many in the tailwinds of the global financial crisis, other industries will come calling. They will offer more stability, less crunch, and a better work-life balance because they are built upon rivers of revenue that don’t suffer from the same shockwaves as entertainment.
The wonderful artists, writers, producers, coders and the many other blended talents that make up this industry will go, taking their years and decades of institutional knowledge with them.
It’s hard to celebrate the product when this year represents the last dance for so many people. It’s especially fraught when the AI horizon is already looming over so many studios and industries, with the potential to replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time roles. The true understatement is just how many roles will be backfilled by AI first or partially redistributed among those who are left. And other positions might just be reborn once conditions improve again – but only under the proviso that they exist at a fraction of their original wage.
Despite that gloomy context, this year still had lots of beats worth celebrating. Perhaps even more so: if this is to be the last opportunity for many, then at least people went out with a goddamn bang. For as long as I’ve been doing this – long enough to have a career covering video games enough that it eventually transformed into something else – I can’t think of so many years where there was so much fun to be had at any point in the development scale.
In one sense, there was maybe too much to enjoy. A win for the patient gamers, perhaps, but less so for the studios behind titles like Immortals of Aveum, a respectable mid-range shooter in the vein of EA classics like the Syndicate reboot, the Medal of Honor reboots, or something like Black. These are all games that have value and, in time, may eventually find their people. Among Us was hovering around a lowly average player count of 20, 25, 30 people on Steam for its first two years before its rapid success during COVID.
I don’t know if that fate belies the first part of my list, however, which has a bunch of games whose final chapter is yet to be written. All I know at this point is that most of what I’ve played this year falls into two general buckets: games I know I’d like more if I’d had the ability to spend more time with them, and the games that I simply couldn’t put down.
Games that probably would have made my GOTY list if I’d spent more time with them
We Who Are About To Die
The hook of We Who Are About To Die got me from the second I saw the Steam page. You’re a gladiator fighting for entertainment, albeit unwillingly. After your town was ransacked, you’re enslaved into gladiatorial combat as your last hurrah in life.
From there spawns a really clever, janky little physics-based battler that has had me smiling from the second I played it. As you progress through your first battle, you’ll start to curry the favour of various nobles who can bestow a variety of bonuses on you. There’s an entire marketplace and inventory system that you can buff through the fame and gold you get from your fights.
How you fight matters as well: hanging out in the corner for a free shot will bore the living hell out of the crowd, who will penalise your end score appropriately – and may potentially just throw weapons towards your opponent to accelerate your demise. There are solo duels, team fights and battle royales, and the roguelike element gives plenty of variety as you speed towards your eventual death.
We Who Are About To Die is made by a single developer, so it’s probably still got at least a year in early access. But I’ve absolutely loved every second that I’ve played so far. It’s not so much that I’d feel comfortable putting this on my top 10 list or anything like that. But if you’ve loved the combat of games like Mount & Blade or Chivalry, and you don’t mind dealing with some jank in your games, I’d absolutely recommend checking this one out. It’s unique, the hook is great, and it’s a whole ton of fun.
Brass: Birmingham
Brass Birmingham is the sequel to the 2007 worker placement board game Brass. It only supports four players maximum; the board is absolutely littered with icons that will take you hours to learn; you’ll completely bugger up the switch between the canal and rail eras, which can have an almost instant, detrimental effect on the last couple of hours of your experience; there’s the weirdness of understanding what resources are attached to the network, which ones aren’t, which ones you can take from other players; and then there’s coping with the absolute fury of someone locking you out of a vital path or resource.
Brass Birmingham definitely scratches the adversarial itch provided by games like Azul, where you have a plethora of meaningful choices that are inevitably discarded because it’s infinitely more interesting to interrupt whatever the next player wants to do.
Birmingham’s randomness makes for meaningful replays, too. The whole point of the game is to generate resources that are then flipped at one of the key cities on the map, which generates victory points. But what every town is willing to buy changes from game to game, and some towns may only ever purchase one good or potentially none at all. If the latter happens, most of the action on the board is then forcibly moved to other areas, kicking off a frenzy of canal placement, rushed deployments and general table banter.
Birmingham’s brilliant, it really is. It’s not new for 2023, but it’s absolutely fantastic. Give yourself time to parse the iconography, and you’ll have a ball. And if it sounds like I’m talking about what should be a GOTY contender, well, it probably would be – but four-hour plus board games don’t hit the table very often. I suspect I’ll play it more over the coming holidays, though.
The Talos Principle 2
I was a massive fan of The Talos Principle, and the sequel is exactly my kind of jam. It’s become a bit of a ritual for me: wake up super early, make a coffee, and then settle down to knock out a puzzle or two before getting on with the rest of my morning. I’m not typically an early riser, however, which is why I’ve only worked my way through the first couple of sections.
I was wary about whether I’d miss the meditative solitude from the original Talos Principle, but Croteam’s weird take on Robot-Twitter has been weirdly engaging. It feels more like a public, well-behaved WhatsApp group than Twitter, with the collective AIs ruminating on philosophy and the possibilities that lie ahead for the burgeoning robot civilisation.
It’ll be forgotten amongst some of the heavier hitters this year, but truly, The Talos Principle 2 has been a blast for me so far. I don’t know if it’s Croteam’s best work yet. But it’s the studio’s most interesting by a country mile, which makes me wonder what else Croteam can do if they fully shed the Serious Sam shackles for other unusual ideas.
There are other games that would have probably qualified too, although I’ve purposely held off from playing them until I have unreserved chunks of time. Baldur’s Gate 3 looks great, but I typically leave Larian’s games until the holidays when I know I have larger blocks of uninterrupted time to process the depth of their stories and mechanics.
But onto the actual list now. Here’s what I’ve enjoyed the most this year.
My favourite games of 2023, in no particular order:
New Star GP
Given that F1 2023 was a bit arse, and no game since F1 2020 has really played all that well on a controller, I started looking around for other things to scratch that racing itch.
New Star GP, as it turns out, is more or less what I was after. Similar to art of rally, the campaign mode is divvied up into decades – ‘80s, ‘90s, and so on. It’s still in early access, so they’re not all available, but there is a certain charm running around some older tracks that you just don’t see in the fully licensed F1 games.
It’s more of an arcade experience than a proper F1 sim, although you still have tyre management, fuel loads, pit strategies, personnel management and various upgrades. It’s a lot more straightforward in that everything just works – upgrades never fail, making a staff member happy always makes them happy, and tracks won’t randomly spawn drain covers underneath the floor of your car.
Developers New Star Games here have been making excellent freemium mobile sports games for years, with New Star Soccer, New Star Cricket, Retro Bowl, and others. And like many good developers before them, you can see the lineage of New Star GP’s best ideas and mechanics in those earlier titles. That’s part of what I love about this so much. It’s an accessible, smart racer that offers just enough of that simulation vibe without losing the essence of what New Star GP should be.
Hi-Fi Rush
Much like Croteam and The Talos Principle, maybe Hi-Fi Rush is a sign that Tango Gameworks should put the horror world behind them. That’s not intended as a knock to The Evil Within or Ghostwire: Tokyo by any stretch – but neither of those games had the sheer force of clarity, the verve or confident swagger of Hi-Fi Rush.
It’s comfortably one of the best Microsoft titles of the year, if not the best. Everything in concert just leaves a giant smile on your face, from the incredibly well-realised rhythm mechanics, the outstanding art design, the cheeky writing, a killer music selection, great boss fights, and excellent vocal performances across the board. It’s hard to believe now that Microsoft shadow-dropped Hi-Fi Rush at the start of the year. The execution is just about flawless. A small part of me hopes that Microsoft has been using Hi-Fi Rush internally to inspire their other studios to take a flyer on their own wild ideas.
Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out
I generally try and make sure I play at least a few text-based adventures or visual novels every year if I can. It’s good to diversify your entertainment where possible, even if it’s no longer a professional requirement, but I’ve always found the space is filled with tons of interesting ideas.
Six Ages is one of those games. I picked this up on iPad for $15 – it’s a vastly better deal there than Steam, which is more than double the price for some reason. It’s a perfect iPad companion anyway, as the majority of the gameplay revolves around you reading through the trials and tribulations of a fantasy tribe trying to stave off the impending Chaos.
Stemming from a classic called King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages 2 is a little more like a worker placement game wrapped up in a modern choose-your-own-adventure book than a traditional visual novel. This sequel is also designed more as a roguelike – Chaos is always coming, and your job is simply to survive as best you can.
Each game starts by dictating the history of your tribe, and then you’re simply tasked with making decisions to keep the clan alive. You decide who sits on the clan council, which is necessary for survival: each council member has their own strengths and weaknesses, and the preferred gods they worship. Having the right mix of gods matters because you’ll also have to make various sacrifices and shrines to those gods for necessary benefits, like protecting your herds from raiders, warding off Chaos (the Chaos sheep are fucked – just trust me on this, and don’t feed them), making your traders earn more goods, boosting magic rituals, and so much more.
Six Ages 2 is almost overwhelming when you first pick it up, or at least it was for me on my iPad. I had no sense of just how vast and deep the management layers were, and yet there’s an accessibility to it all that powers you through. The art direction is superb too, and the writing is top-notch. It pays well enough on a phone, although not as nicely as an iPad if you’ve got one. I can’t recommend this enough, and if this list was ordered, I’d slot it into my top three in a heartbeat. It is truly that good.
Age of Wonders 4
The Age of Wonders series has had an interesting lifecycle, starting out as a more traditional high-fantasy, lite-4X series that was running parallel to the beloved Heroes of Might and Magic games at the time. But unlike the HOMM series, Age of Wonders has continued moving forward.
The city management layers feel a lot more like something out of the Civilization series now. The faction customisation adds a really unusual flair that works well, while also adding some nice lightweight encounters throughout. You’ve got a sprawling empire development tree – with some borrowed inspiration from Civ yet again – that provides some key power buffs and strategic choices that can really impact your influence across the map. Heroes have their own inventory and divergent builds: you can level your heroes up to be out-and-out warriors, spellcasters, or more supportive powers that have reduced unit upkeep, better global spellcasting, and so on.
Also, you can just spawn giant Ents on the world map at will when you feel like it, resources willing. Those things are goddamn beasts.
My beef with Age of Wonders 3 felt like all of its systems reached a natural point where you were done with them, but you still had several hours of “map cleanup” to do – chasing down AI cities, finding the last few objectives, and generally just smashing the end turn button until you can be done with it. Age of Wonders 4 fixes a lot of that by just massively expanding, well, pretty much everything.
It also feels, oddly, the closest we have to a proper modern successor for the HOMM series. I know there are games like Songs of Conquest, but for me, Triumph Games have looked at the entire formula and thought of ways they can take that forward. That might be slightly controversial, but don’t let it detract from the main point: Age of Wonders 4 is really, really solid. The DLC and expansion faction is supposedly quite decent too – they’re an industrial force that reminds me of the controversial HOMM faction that was scrapped after it was poorly received in previews – although there’s more than enough entertainment to be had with the base game.
Turbo Overkill
I’ll put it out there: Turbo Overkill is hands-down the best project that’s come out of Australia or New Zealand this year. It’s also one of the most “complete” boomer shooters of the last few years, in terms of marrying a single great mechanic (a chainsaw leg) with some outstanding level design, killer versatility, and a hugely engaging, almost Duke Nukem 3D-esque approach.
I remember playing a preview version of Turbo Overkill a couple of years ago – it was one of the last things I played before leaving Kotaku Australia, funnily enough. And those opening levels do still serve their purpose. You get to grips with the chainsaw leg, you learn how it functions with the boost mechanic, and you start to get comfortable with the amount of space you can vault and how much room you need to navigate.
But what’s wild is how much Turbo Overkill opens up after the first chapter. It’s reminiscent of the brilliance of DUSK in that way, so much so that I’d almost argue the first chapter does a disservice to all the set-pieces, interesting ideas and enemies that follow. It’s staggering at just how much variety the game has, and how much of that has come from the efforts of a single creator.
I think Turbo Overkill has completely gone under the radar a lot this year because of its boomer shooter roots, but also because it’s one of those titles that left Early Access around August. August was busy enough with Starfield embargoes, Baldur’s Gate 3, Stray Gods, Immortals of Aveum, Armored Core VI, Sea of Stars, Goodbye Volcano High, the Quake 2 remaster, and everything that was happening around Overwatch 2.
That’s a hell of a lot, and that’s a hell of a lot of games that demand a huge chunk of hours. But if you do get the chance, definitely give this one a chance. It’s not my favourite boomer shooter of the year, but I think for the majority of people it’s a better overall package.
Also, holy shit at that one particular boss fight. When you’ve played it, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022)
2023 was the year my fiancee Tegan became – and I mean this in the most loving of ways – a Call of Duty bro.
For years, I’ve thought Tegan would be hugely into Call of Duty. Some of our best joint experiences – that would end up being my favourite bits of gaming in the year – were our times with the original Destiny, or the halcyon days of the original Overwatch.
Overwatch was always especially interesting for me because I got to witness Tegan’s growth over the course of a video game. When people gain confidence in a multiplayer setting, the way they approach situations changes. The way they approach other players changes too.
There’s a level of assertiveness, a resilience formed through hundreds of hours that fundamentally changes how they experience not just one game, but all other multiplayer games.
But there was always a catch. And for my fiancee, that catch was a controller. Even though we were playing on PC, with PC lobbies, and in competitive for the majority of the time, Tegan was always playing with a controller. Mainlining D.Va as a second tank or doing Moira things, as you can imagine. And that was fine, we were all happy, and everyone was having fun.
That was, until a joint friend gently suggested that we should all be – and I quote – sickos together by playing Call of Duty. But nobody wanted to pay the astronomically absurd $114.95 price on Steam at the time; there were concerns around COD’s infamously toxic lobby chat, and then there was the mouse and keyboard hump.
So we started running around in the free modes, picking some people off in the DMZ mode. The larger maps weren’t really to either of our likings, but it was at least a good start for getting used to the controls. And when you’re just finding your feet, building muscle memory for all the keys and learning all the iconography and basic COD fundamentals, it was good enough. But our friends weren’t playing Warzone or DMZ; they were playing good old regular Call of Duty matches.
So I did what any good partner should do. I simply bought the game and gifted it to her account, and said we’d all play the same modes together. We played for about four weeks straight until the white lie came undone, but we’d had so much fun by that point that I was truly forgiven.
What was most surprising to me throughout our few hundred hours was the various characters that we kept running into. Every now and again, you will run into someone that I’d characterise as an “angry old COD dad”. You can already picture who I’m talking about. They’re the kind whose speakers are bleeding badly into their microphone. They whinge about “campers” with every death, no matter how ridiculous the situation or how inept their gameplay was. Everyone else is the problem. And it’s a 50/50 on whether they’ll spout some sexist or racist twaddle at the very end of the match.
But we ran into those types of COD players a lot less than I expected. What caught me by surprise was the legions of older women that we seemed to routinely end up in lobbies with. Folks talking about Scouting adventures, giving their partners shit on the microphone, or just unwinding and having a good time. With Call of Duty of all things. It was a breath of fresh air, but it’s also something that probably warrants investigation. COD has found a way to diversify its audience, and the skins seem to be leaning into that ideal as well with over-the-top creations like Nicki Minaj.
(As an aside, everyone who worked on the Nicki skin deserves at least a significant holidays bonus. The rigging, the motion and entire layout of the skin is downright superb. Yes, it’s a paid microtransaction, but the level of work is top-class beyond compare. Fuck that Groot skin though.)
Miserably, the COD train for our household seems to be over for now. Nobody in our group enjoyed the longer time-to-kill and movement tweaks that were added into the Modern Warfare 3 beta, and nobody is willing to drop another $114.95 to be the guinea pig. But nothing lasts forever, and that’s OK. We’ve gotten countless hours of laughs from COD this year, and now that Tegan has fully graduated with confidence into the world of mouse and keyboard twitch shooters, she gets to experience another rite of passage: skipping every second annual COD release until “they get good again”.
DREDGE
I’d called DREDGE as a GOTY-candidate at PAX Australia last year, which ordinarily would be a foolish claim to make. But I think the foolhardiness of that call wasn’t necessarily over DREDGE’s quality but the lack of visibility in what would follow in the latter half of 2023.
If we’d just ended the year at July, you’d probably see DREDGE feature in a lot more lists. It’s another gem from New Zealand, combining eldritch horrors with the pleasantness of controlling a fishing boat on the high seas. It’s a truly enchanting title, although by the time you reach the end, the game’s threat levels tend to diminish significantly.
But we’re talking maybe one hour max from a 10 to 12 hour experience – recent DLC not included – that is still one of the most polished games to come from our shores. It absolutely nails the curious element that makes Lovecraftian settings so engaging, The music is an excellent accompaniment, and there’s an understated brilliance in how you can manage the difficulty by how far or how little you want to push in the evening. It’s a clever, clever little game, and I’m fascinated to see what Black Salt Games does next.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Phantom Liberty was never going to fix some of the structural issues in Cyberpunk 2077, but it almost certainly has come the closest to Cyberpunk at its best. Wracked with a string of excellent heist-style missions, vastly improved boss fights, and significantly better level design from the original, Phantom Liberty feels a lot more like the kind of game CD Projekt Red had in mind all those years ago.
A huge amount of appreciation also has to go to the complete rebalancing of the perks system, which enabled fundamentally divergent playstyles that made a second or third playthrough well and truly warranted. Instead of functionally abusing the hacks and using the ping ability to effectively let me wallhack enemies with a sniper rifle, the added dash mechanics allowed me to transform my V into a Max Payne-esque character, slowing down time with a Sandevistan and clearing out entire rooms with precise pistol headshots. I had to sacrifice hacking entirely to make it work – which made some gigs extraordinarily complicated, and outright failures in a couple of instances – but it was the first time in Cyberpunk 2077 where I felt like I had to make a sacrifice, and that sacrifice led to something meaningful.
But you’re not permanently locked in either. The perks came with a rebalancing of the game’s economy, so much so that you should never really be in a situation where your V can’t afford that piece of cyberware, that apartment, or that vehicle you’ve been itching to try out. CD Projekt seems to better understand the power fantasy at play within Cyberpunk, and removing some of the more game-y barriers to that fantasy was a wise call that definitely improves the early-to-mid game.
For everyone who stayed away, Phantom Liberty is definitely the right time to jump in. Night City is still an astonishing technical achievement – seeing this game run at full tilt in 4K with path-tracing is certainly something else. The voice acting also deserves some praise – Keanu Reeves’ performances are more consistent throughout Phantom Liberty, compared to what’s left in the original storyline. Idris Elba (Solomon Reed) and Minji Chang (Songbird) are great from the off, while Cherami Leigh continued to knock it out of the park with her female V impression. (She’s also streets ahead of the male V, Gavin Drea, although that’s not a knock on his efforts – Leigh quite literally carries large sections of the original Cyberpunk storyline, even when everything else is a bit mid. It is, truly, a breakout performance, and I can’t wait to see Leigh in more headline roles in the years to come.)
Also, a word of advice: despite Kenneth’s recommendation, I would lean towards doing the Phantom Liberty missions sooner rather than later. You’re only locked in Dogtown for the first hour of gameplay, but after that you’ll immediately get access to new abilities that can fundamentally change how you approach the rest of the game. You can also use the breaks in between Phantom Liberty missions to venture back out to complete other sidequests or options, which will then help trigger all the extra bonus content and messages that you get when you head back into Dogtown. It’s a more organic adventure for V – I doubt he or she would postpone any opportunity to grab a fix for the Relic as soon as it’s presented – but Dogtown will be a blast whenever you choose to experience it.
SPRAWL
I said I’d have another boomer shooter on the list this year, and SPRAWL is it. It’s also the cheapest game on this list at the time of writing; you can pick SPRAWL up for just shy of $11 on Steam for the next few days.
SPRAWL’s main hook is that you have an adrenaline bar that lets you slow down time. You’re also given a slide and the ability to wall-jump three times in a row before losing momentum, which allows you to literally springboard from one side of a room to another when used in concert correctly.
The amount of momentum you can gain is incredible; it’s almost like playing one of the original Tribes games, where you’re flying past helpless enemies at almost warp-speed. And that’s in essence the entire hook of SPRAWL. You’re a bioengineered super soldier breaking out of a industrial, cyberpunk dystopia, which lays the stage for a string of almost non-stop firefights where you’re bouncing around, slowing down time, picking off enemies one-by-one, switching to the absurdly powerful super shotgun, vaulting yourself backwards at the recoil, bouncing off the walls again, and repeating that process until the area is clear.
SPRAWL’s held up by its mechanical brilliance, which it needs because there are quite a few rough edges. The industrialness of the levels adds an almost 2000s, gun-metal grey and army-brown feeling to the proceedings, which isn’t as enticing to look at as, say, Turbo Overkill. There are some neat platforming sequences with the wall-running and jumping mechanics, but those are also let down by some bland level design that sometimes doesn’t properly signpost things that it should.
It’s one of those games that most people would happily describe as a “solid 7/10”. For me, SPRAWL is one of those games that’s an absolute blast at its best with some sections that you just have to work your way through. So I stick by my earlier assertion: if you’re after just one boomer shooter this year, then Turbo Overkill is probably a better shout. But for the $11-ish that I paid, SPRAWL has been excellent. (And if you’re wondering why you might not have heard of it yet, it’s because it’s another sacrificial lamb at the altar of August. Why did so many good games all pick August? Potentially dodging Starfield, I guess.)
Counter-Strike 2
Let me be clear: there is a lot that’s wrong with Counter-Strike 2 right now. The rate of cheaters – and I’m not talking perceived cheaters, but actual people running around matches with quantified 50 millisecond reaction time-level cheats – is uncommonly high, even for a franchise that has historically struggled with them. The game’s vaunted sub-tick system, where movement and weapons are calculated at the point of click rather than the next server update, has created a string of issues from inconsistent movement, grenades not landing, visual feedback out of sync with the server state (colloquially known as the “I’m behind the fucking wall” experience), and infrequent stutters that always seem to happen at the worst possible moment.
And yet – there’s still nothing quite like Counter-Strike. The new Source 2 additions haven’t totally revolutionised the decades-old experience that’s best described as a fast-paced, first-person brand of chess where two teams fight for position, jiggling small angles, boosting off each other and lobbing grenades over walls to eek out whatever advantage possible.
There’s a wealth of fun to be had with the tactical opportunities around temporarily eliminating the volumetric smoke grenades; I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve gotten a free kill or two by underarming a HE grenade at a smoke, catching an enemy unawares on the other side. But people are starting to get really clever with what’s possible too. I saw one match the other day where two defenders worked in concert to remove the advantage of an attacker’s smoke: one spammed their entire rifle to punch a gap through the smoke, while the other sniped enemies running across, unaware that they were entirely visible.
But that’s not why this has been one of my favourite experiences of the year. It’s been the return of the legacy community to Counter-Strike 2, the old faces who have re-emerged from classic titles that I remember seeing from the LAN parties and netcafes of decades past. Counter-Strike almost reminds me of Call of Duty in that way – in the sense that the player base is probably closer to 40 than 20, at least based on the people I keep running into.
The game has a long way to go, to be sure. Basic features are still missing; a lot of casual friendly modes available in CS:GO are yet to be readded, and the game lacks any form of a functional tutorial or onboarding experience for new players. Valve should implement most of those over the next 12 months, based on the rapid rate of patches the game has had in the last couple of months.
But what’s important is that the community has fully crossed over. Counter-Strike 2 is a proper successor to one of the most successful titles ever made, and the strength and ease-of-use of the upgraded Hammer editor will result in an embarrassment of riches when it comes to community content. The foundation is excellent, and it’s that foundation that has brought so many old faces back.
What Valve sees for the future of Counter-Strike is the real interesting question, though. Right now, it looks a lot like the past – but with the Source 2 engine, adding new features, modes, maps and functionality should be infinitely easier than what it was for CS:GO. And the scene will continue setting the standard for a third-party driven ecosystem, which might become increasingly necessary for esports survival as the impending “winter” settles in.
Also, for what it’s worth: the menu music is an absolute banger. Really.
Image: Black Salt Games, Xbox, Trigger Happy Interactive, Kotaku Australia
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