At the end of the day, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero is the same song and dance that hardcore CSers have been playing for years. The only significant change? The inclusion of a single-player bot mode.
The graphics have been given a minor update, but the fact remains that Counter-Strike's roots in the Half-Life engine are still painfully evident. Sound effects are largely the same, though they hold up far better than the visuals. All in all, Counter-Strike's presentation has aged like the plague.
Thankfully, the gameplay remains intact – almost to a fault. The appeal of Condition Zero was supposed to be the inclusion of a single-player campaign for a game that had previously been online-only. The problem, quite bluntly, is that Counter-Strike was never designed to be a single player game. Perhaps aware of this fact, the developers designed the offline portion to be identical to the online game.
What does this mean? It means that for all the hype of a single-player Counter-Strike, you are paying full price so that you can play, offline, a game designed for online play. What makes this even more ridiculous is the fact that the multiplayer portion remains a free mod for Half-Life, a game that most PC gamers own a copy of. Condition Zero's problems don't stem from its gameplay (which has actually held up very well), but simply from its lack of value as a retail product.
-George
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