Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes

obviously feels unfinished and inconcsistant as fuck as none of the levels are connected in the story really, so level 5 could be way easier than level 2 for example. but compared to modern shooters? its generally above average. i miss old FPS design and weapon mechanics, and if you attempt to hold down the mouse button to spray n pray here you wont get far. 13 campaign levels + 6 post-release added levels (that i haven't played) but the general story was enjoyable enough. lots of annoying "HAHA GOTCHA!" moments where the enemies spawn behind you or are tucked in stupid corners, but thats fine i guess.

6/10

This game would've been yet another linear 00's first-person action game if it weren't for the Counter-Strike name that preceded it. And with the Counter-Strike name, the gameplay comes as a gigantic double-edged sword. It's the older CS 1.6-type aiming and movement that many have come to love, but translating these moderately well must have been the most difficult thing all of the development teams that juggled Condition Zero's singleplayer portion, from Rogue Entertainment to Gearbox Software, and then ending with Ritual Entertainment doing the singleplayer segment (which then got cut out from Condition Zero, as seen in the title of it), and Turtle Rock Studios doing the multiplayer segment. In that camp, the game severely suffered from the game of 'Game Developer Hot Potato'.

The 'Deleted Scenes' constantly show glimpses of 'what could have been', to where I believe would place it in the ranks of a solid FPS game from the 2000s. The environments and scenarios are surprisingly unique in this field. Some scenarios involve you neutralizing threats in an ICBM silo in Siberia, to infiltrating a gang of bank robbers holding people hostage, to stopping terrorists from blowing up a bomb in a giant church.

The big sticklers of problems reign in harder than the heating bill of a Sears house built in North Dakota. Translating or interpreting the gameplay of Counter-Strike into what would've been a 'typical' game ends up with results worse than a car tire filled with concrete cement. For starters, the aiming system of CS requires a standing still of the player, and quick yet precise aiming. Nearly all of the levels are poison to this design thinking and actively clash, to the point where the developers had to sprinkle ammo and health rations everywhere as a weapon's firing range spreads faster than the whooping cough. This could have been avoided if the level design didn't heavily favor linear run-and-gun hallways. The bizarre AI helps to emphasize this, with the multiple paths of either running directly towards the player, to running up to and standing 60 centimeters away from the player, standing in the same spot, or scripted invincibility for a brief 2 seconds and proceeding to run away. The usually cramped levels also lay bare for numerous item traps that spawn more enemies out of nowhere, similar to the Serious Sam games, but absolutely don't work at all here when suddenly fabricating into Z-space. Serious Sam wouldn't work if the levels were claustrophobic and the weapon spread spreaded faster than microwaved cream cheese

The visuals are nothing to write home about. They mostly take a very mild poly bump from CS 1.6 and some texture improvements, but nothing else. It's 1.6 with more polish

In order to fit the game's model into (what would've been) a singleplayer campaign, there's the obligatory puzzle and stealth sections. For example, there is a stealth section where the player has to avoid being detected by the bank robbers. The problem is that due to the unfinished state of the game and the polish (or lack thereof), all of these segments of overwhelmingly finicky, where a single slice of light in their sight can automatically trigger the mission to and and fail. It sets up for more repetition and frustration in a game already rife of these two elements.

The 'Deleted Scenes' section of Counter-Strike Condition Zero is another study of "what could have been", where a potentially decent game on its own is indunated with the state of unfinished-ness, to the point where even a (what would be) 2 minute mission can morph into a tedious slog.