Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes

What is there to like about Condition Zero Deleted Scenes?

• The care, the attention to detail, and the sheer level thereof in the environments is quite impressive, really getting the most mileage out of GoldSrc at the tail end of its lifespan. There are details as minute as condensation dripping from air conditioners. Most anywhere you're expected to look has something to look at. It's clear that care, passion, and artistry went into the presentation.
• It's stunning how many unique assets there are, and how distinct one map can be from another with the number of textures and models that only get used there and in no other— or maybe they're only used for a single cutscene.
• The setpieces and scripted sequences are frequently entertaining, as well as highly animated. It's not just the stuntmen falling from windows, but also stuntmen interacting with the environment as they fall, or individual pieces of the environment interacting with each other. It's good flair and a good supplement to any mission in the campaign.
• There's a wide variety in the campaign settings. Day, night, summer, winter, North Africa, North America, South America, the Middle East, Siberia, Japan, or out at sea— it's a proper world tour.
• There are Easter eggs scattered throughout most every mission, and the game rewards you for going out of your way to find them. They're quite funny. Ritual Entertainment developed this campaign, and if you've ever played Sin, then you may recognize that the sense of humor on display is very Ritual.

What is there NOT to like about Condition Zero Deleted Scenes?

• Unfortunately, too much. It pains me to say that the gameplay itself sinks the whole ship.
• I was never a big fan of Counter-Strike, but even if I was I wonder if my enthusiasm would have been much greater for the idea of translating an arena shooter to a corridor shooter. There's not a lot of (if any) appeal of the former that comes out in the latter. Counter-Strike in multiplayer is about a certain level of strategy: predicting the opposing team's movements, using open areas or bottlenecks to your advantage, hide-and-seek, and maybe coordinating with teammates to flush opponents out of an area by lobbing grenades or making some other distraction. There's no such dynamic in Deleted Scenes, nor, really, much tactic. There are computer teammates, of course, but you're acting alone for a shocking proportion of the time you're playing— even outside of stealth missions. And even when you do have teammates, it's never for long, and there's basically no situation where you're really in command of a squad. And computer opponents don't respond to grenades or to your movement, they just stand in place.
• To top it all off, there aren't very many opportunities to add variety to your character's movement with puzzles more involved than hitting buttons, throwing switches, or turning valves. The end result of all this is that the bulk of the primary game loop is just, frankly, pretty mindless running-and-gunning. In spite of the pretty environments, most of my time was spent being kind of bored or frustrated.
• The game doesn't sell a sense of urgency very well much of the time. In the first Japan level, for instance, you're supposed to be in hot pursuit of a suspect on foot, but it doesn't feel very much like one because there's no penalty, not even a time limit, for going sightseeing in-between scripted sequences. The suspect isn't going to get away, he's still going to be right there when you're done. I ended up spending several minutes just looking at the shelves in a manga store before I even left the first area.
• The stealth is downright bad. Enemies have a sense of object permanence measured in seconds and might take as long to raise an alarm. It feels mostly like an artificial slowdown and one that you just want to get over with, so you play sloppy, because the game allows you.
• The mishmash of English and foreign-language dialogue doesn't work for me. I think settling for one or the other— all English or all not-English, where applicable —would have been best, but this game settles for neither. You'll encounter characters converse in Russian and then in goofy Russian-accented English in the same breath. I do at least admire the variety of languages on display: there's Russian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, possibly Arabic, and more I'm missing, and these are all frequently subtitled. But if they are subtitled, I feel like the whole game could have gone with that. Both options at once, as it's implemented here, is too jarring.
• I think I understand the reason why the zones exist (the places in the map where you can use equipment like the radio, the fiber optic camera, the blowtorch, or the explosives) , but it's still comical to see it in action. The game really needs to tell you each time exactly where on the map to use the blowtorch, even though the one thing you can use it on is padlocks.
• Maybe this part was done to avoid direct real-life parallels, but it's remarkable how one-dimensional the enemy factions all are. None of them have clear political or ideological motives, and frequently don't even have stated goals. They're just bad guys 'cause they're bad, and you're the good guys because they're the bad guys.
• On that note, it's pretty disappointing that you don't ever get the opportunity to play as the terrorists, considering that's quite literally the other half of Counter-Strike. But this was 2004, so I guess that wouldn't have sat well.
• The ennui that began to set in as I kept playing stopped me from even finishing the game. I was on the mission where I'm in a fictional, nondescript Middle Eastern country, and there was something about clearing the LZ for a Blackhawk to land. I just sort of stopped caring and turned the game off, it being late in the evening and me feeling no incentive to stay up late for it.

What's the verdict?

• A game that's fun to look at, and admirable for the dedication where it was spent, but a game that's, in the end, just not fun to play. I'm not convinced that Counter-Strike can be adapted well to a singleplayer campaign, in the same way that I wouldn't be convinced Team Fortress 2 can.
• In spite of everything going against it, this might still be worth one playthrough to you, if only to admire what it manages to do right.

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.