2D Counter-Strike is kind of amazing

Counter-Strike has always been a 3D game even from the beginning that should be obvious if you're older than 12. the server's getting gay as if you're younger than 12 though then let me show you what the first Counter-Strike looked like now I know this might look two-dimensional to you and this might be a bit hard to believe but this is in fact 3D I know shocking right my point is that Counter-Strike has never been in 2D or has it well it actually has been so do those who have never seen this before because I know there are a lot of you who probably have let me introduce you to a game called cs2d This is indeed as the name suggests Counter-Strike but in 2D and at first glance it just looks like your average tap down game but it's not there's actually quite a bit of stuff in this game you'd be surprised first of all there is a lot of history to look at because this game is surprisingly quite old the alpha was first released on March 21st 2004 which is two days before condition zero released making this technically the second oldest Counter-Strike it also means that anything in the game is based on CS 1.6 it's important to know that this wasn't made by a valve though they wouldn't make a game like this this was instead made by unreal software a studio that is kind of obscure because if you try to look them up you instead get results for Unreal Engine instead the studio is also quite old considering that their website still looks like this and if you look closely they have a copyright that started in 2003 did I mention that they use cookies because they're delicious so since Google can't tell you much about them you'll have to look at their about page and according to this page unreal software is actually run by one person named Peter shouse who is also the creator of well-known games like stranded and Stranded 2. there's some AAA quality right here see es2d started out small but quickly grew around the end of 2004 and unlike modern Studios the game got updated fairly frequently and it eventually got on Steam in 2017. according to this and that's about it Yep this isn't some 300 Page history book thankfully now just looking at the main menu it's very simple much like the menu in 1.6 you might also see some very interesting things here but I'll get to those later at the very least there are the usual options like options and finding servers or making your own what's unique though is quickplay which finds a server for you up to this point Counter-Strike has never done this he always had to look for servers yourself well until csgo made matchmaking a thing but that's a bit different the other interesting thing is that this is the only CS game that has its own mods menu now Counter-Strike has always freely allowed custom mods until CS go but none of them have had a convenient button for mods on the menu so this is quite a step up and even on unreal software's website their most recent update to the game mentions improvements to Lua scripting so modding is literally encouraged natural these days and just like CS go there's a friends list however this doesn't show your friends on Steam this is specifically designed for usgn which is unreal software's OWN Network for servers and Friends remember this is mostly made by just one guy when starting a game yourself there are some interesting options here in this menu most of them are the obvious ones like server name password and Port but there are some interesting things to know here like fog of war or recoil influences accuracy and whatever the hell an archon password is there are also different game modes which is something I've never seen in Counter-Strike before and a lot of them are basic except for one called construction but I'll get to that later they did Port over almost all the traditional Counter-Strike Maps but they also included a lot of custom ones like de El Dorado or d e c s 2D which has an odd layout and while scrolling through this list it gets more interesting as you scroll down like oh they have specific maps for Deathmatch that's cool wait capture the flag that was in a game mode same with the domination and assassination and whatever fight yard means there is also a bot support built in which 1.6 doesn't have and you could even change their skill level which ranges from brain dead to average CS go player and all the way up to professional and absolute no life with a minimum of 100 000 hours just like csgo alright this is also kind of neat when you're typing a number and you backspace to delete it the number instead falls out and drops all the way to the bottom of the screen I like that anyway getting into a game is the same as regular Counter-Strike you pick a team and your player model and sometimes the player model sells other stuff as well for some reason and it's intuitive as it gets you have a top-down view move with a walls and you point your mouse to where you want to shoot sounds simple in the settings you can change your movement to be relative to where your mouse is pointed but that's really stupid the only slightly annoying thing is that if you're trying to shoot somewhere far from around the corner it's hard to tell if your shot will be blocked by a wall without moving your eyes to your cursor and back to the middle about 50 times in one second but maybe that's just a skill issue there's this weird reticle around the player you're controlling for some reason it's probably there so you can easily tell what person is you but to me it just feels out of place also the info at the bottom of the screen looks just like 1.6 except way larger the mini map is really good and it's actually usable instead of this green mess oh and almost all the sounds are the same those are probably the things you'll first notice what you may not have noticed is that in the settings there's an experimental option to make everything 3D even though this is a 2d game you can change this while playing without having to restart your game and it surprisingly looks really good although it is definitely experimental because there is sometimes flickering around the edges of blocks now there are a lot of minor things that are different in this game compared to 1.6 the buy menu is very similar except now it includes cool animations and spinning 3D models of supposed 2D objects putting on and taking off the silencer is now instant instead of taking three seconds if there are trees you can kind of hide underneath them which I think is cool just like 1.6 you have to buy ammo separately however unlike 1.6 when you buy a gun you get all the ammo instead of one clip so this is really only necessary when you end up with no ammo in the previous round you can also supposedly buy the riot shield however every time I try to buy it it says that it's not allowed on the server despite the fact that I'm on a server I made and there isn't any setting about it when you try to create a game so it was probably some DLC you can get for a really low price of 15 trillion dollars I'm stupid this record everything I said in the last 10 seconds in 1.6 the elites were two pistols but here it's only one which is kind of disappointing because now you can spam them which was the only reason they were fun sad the prices for pretty much all the weapons are the same except for the elites and the shield specifically for some reason the elites are actually more expensive even though you only get one which makes it infinitely less useful and The Shield is less than half the price making it much more appealing you might have wondered if scoped weapons are useless now because everyone can see the same distance but no they changed how it works to fit the style now when you Scope your review gets restricted to the circle but you also do more damage and if you have a sniper the second level makes the circle smaller and makes you deal more damage that I think is the best way scoping could have been implemented here without it being useless you don't have to scope though so if you have the op you can hear perfectly accurate shots while no scoping so this is probably the perfect game for FaZe but that's kind of it everything else is kind of what you'd expect but as much as I like the novelty of this game there are some downsides not because of how the game was made but due to the nature of it being 2D the main problem is that there are a lot of skill based aspects of Counter-Strike that aren't present things like spray patterns and movement and accuracy don't exist here making this a lot less skill based I'm not saying that's a bad thing though but that does mean that cs2d has a lot less depth than regular Counter-Strike a lot of the appeal of Cs is that the mechanics seem really simple at first but to get good it takes a lot of practice to improve your skills especially with compensating for spray patterns or knowing when to move and stop moving to make your shots more accurate in this game spray patterns aren't a thing and movement doesn't affect terrain at all pretty much all the guns are perfectly accurate they did try to make it as similar to the original as they could like for a lot of guns mainly the automatic ones there is some visible spread you might also remember that one of the settings when you start a server is recoil influences accuracy the most immediate effect of this is that your Crosshair changes into an actual Crosshair so best option ever with this option on your accuracy gets worse and worse the longer you spray just like regular CS however this effect isn't very noticeable and movement still doesn't affect anything in fact for some weapons there is more random spread when the option is turned off than when it's on so it really doesn't matter that much the only reason I turn it on is to make your Crosshair cooler another problem is that there is less of a need to be super aware of your surroundings you can basically see people through walls and so can they so sometimes your encounters become this awkward game of peeking back and forth and seeing who can catch the other first this isn't a problem specifically with cs2d pretty much every 2D game suffers from this but I honestly don't even think this is a problem this game is supposed to be more casual so having super game sends and having to hear people from the other side of a door with five thousand dollar headphones isn't a requirement and I think that kind of gameplay suits this game better but on that note if you want to make the game much more like a regular CS where having better awareness is important you can do that if you go back to the new game menu you can enable the fog of War option and you can enable it in different configurations but the hide everything one is the best or mix it so you have an actual field of view so you can only see what your character would be able to see so you can't see stuff behind you and you can see things behind walls this makes the game much more intense now you actually have to look around you with the mouse and listen for where people are but since the maps are technically made of blocks when moving around it does look kind of funky but it's still really cool with fog of War though there is another item you can use the flare when you throw it it illuminates a small circle or Square that anyone can see even if it's not in their field of view but since it's a small radius I don't see that much of a use for it but you can still use it but regardless I really like fog of War cool name as well better than God of War there are also a few other minor inconveniences because it's a 2d there isn't any z-axis at all so some parts of some maps are messed up like in Just 2 the catwalk has been moved because otherwise your player would be invisible underneath it so it just feels odd now but for some maps they kept this map design in Italy the bridge is still there but if you go underneath it just teleports you to the other side of the bridge you also can jump in this game so in mid and does too you can't jump up to cat which means you'll have to take an extraordinarily long three-hour journey across the mountains and deserts and valleys to walk all the way around you might have not noticed but some of the walls you can shoot through because they're supposed to be like Ledges or Windows you can shoot from but their only distinction is a slightly different shade so it's hard to tell what you can and cannot chew through also night vision is a thing however it is probably the most useless thing in this game because there is no area in this game that's a dark enough to where you would actually use night vision so if you try to use it anywhere else it just makes it harder to see plus it's a thousand two hundred fifty dollars which is even more expensive than armor so even less reason to use it now I know I just talked about the supposed problems this game had but I don't think most of them are that big of a deal the main one that I pointed out was that this game had lesser depth than the other counter-strikes but I would argue that it doesn't need all that depth this game isn't trying to appeal to the hyper competitive players that CS go is this is much more of a casual game or like a party game that you'd play with your friends not something that you would invest a lot of talent and this game is perfect for that since it has a less skill based mechanics someone who just started the game will still have a chance against someone who's played it for a while so there's less of a divide between players of different skill so in that regard the game appeals to the average player really well some of the other smaller complaints I had though still apply but enough about the downsides there are some really cool things in this game I mentioned earlier that there are other game modes you can choose like Team Deathmatch and zombies they also have some maps designed for those game loads all the Deathmatch Maps however each have a different Quirk about them most of them have similar layouts but they each have a different unique weapon specific to that map like DM laser has laser gun spread out around the map which are an insta kill DM RPG War has RPGs that you can use same with the DM grenades and DM grenade launcher the fun one is DM snowball which spawns snowballs around the map when you play on this map you're restricted to only having a knife and the Snowballs the Snowballs don't really deal damage however so it's best to just use your knife now despite the name DM does not have gorillas it's just a normal map I guess it's Quirk because it has these towers you can climb which feels kind of dumb if you remember there are also capture the flag and domination Maps there isn't a capture the flag or domination game mode in the settings but regardless of the game mode you choose the maps work the same in Capture the Flag you try to take the other team's flag back tears and in Domination you have to capture all the flags around the map you already know this there's also only one zombie map which is pretty good but not much variety zombies works the same one person is a zombie and you have to infect all the people the main game mode I want to talk about though is construction this game mode is probably my favorite one when you start it up let's say on the cs2d Fortress map for example you might first notice that there are these marble looking things you might also notice that you have an item called the wrench with this wrench you can right click and build something on one of the squares around you select a square and you'll get a menu of different things you can build with different prices you can build a barricade which is a wall you can shoot over barbed wire which hurts you if you walk through it three different types of wall and these walls are destructible with different amounts of durability a gate field which I'm not really sure what it does I guess it acts as a gate you can build a turret a dispenser which gives you money if you stand around it a supply station which you can use to get different items for free and even the entrance and exit for a teleporter so this basically makes everyone the engineer from Team Fortress 2. and since everything is in blocks you get a bit of Minecraft action in there quite the crossover these things you can build at different kinds of strategies like you can build a blockade of walls to cut off an entire route you can put turrets across the hallway making it almost impossible to pass through you can build a fortress around your flag to make it harder to get to you can even build Supply stations around the map so you can get things for free a ton of things you can do but also you're not limited to the default Maps there are two sandbox Maps one tiny and one really big that are wide open so you can build whatever you want so this makes the game kind of like Gmod there's a bit of everything in here honestly if you get some friends you can do all kinds of stuff with construction it's really cool but you know what's better than that can instructing your own Maps yes remember in the beginning when I showed you that there was a button that said editor in the main menu well as it suggests it is indeed a fully fledged map editor inside the game how cool is that there's tons of blocks you can put in including these red ones if you want to make a doom style map and tons of entities just like the hammer editor for real Cs and even for entities they have triggers which you can customize a lot even with Lewis scripting so I can only imagine the kind of stuff you would be able to make I wouldn't be surprised if someone made a whole story type game just within a map I tried to make a small 1v1 type map which looks super basic but oh well it's just really cool that it's built into the game obviously it's still a rather simple editor compared to hammer so that's why they're able to include it but the fact that there even is an editor is amazing testing Maps is also easy because they don't have to compile so you don't have to sit there for hours hoping that there's no errors what's even better is that they set the test map button to F12 so you get a nice screenshot of your map every time you test it but there was something else I noticed if you put down an environment item entity you can change what item it is and obviously it includes all the weapons and utilities but the further you scroll down you see that there are a ton of items that are never mentioned anywhere in the game like there's a machete an airstrike a claw several weird types of armor a chainsaw a portal gun and a Tesla coil what so I had to put down some of those in the map to test them out they're exactly what you'd expect including the airstrike and portal gun and for some reason the electricity from the Tesla coil is unexpectedly Ultra HD compared to the rest of the game also the Tesla coil is overpowered anyway the map editor is overall really cool so I tried to make a proper CS map that I named accordingly and it unintentionally happened to have a layout like dust too God damn that was cool and all until I loaded up and realized the map is absolutely tiny so I went back and made the size a lot bigger and named it accordingly again so now it looks awful but honestly what did you expect and that's about all there is in this game again it's really simple and I like that this is honestly I would say my favorite Counter-Strike spin-off like I think it's better than Nexon studio and especially this pile of it for some reason works perfectly despite being in a completely different genre it's really polished and the one developer that made this did a really good job and the fact that it's been updated consistently for more than 17 years says quite a lot it is very much a change of pace and remember this is free with the no dumb cases and skins to buy even better so I would highly suggest you try this out you might like it more than you expect but anyways bye [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: LamWarp

Views: 1,953,466

Keywords: CS, Counter Strike, 2D, CS2D, 2D Counter Strike, spin off, fan game, top down game, comedy, subtitles, commentary, underrated, kevin macleod, sneaky adventure, opposing force, planet soundtrack, cool game, awesome

Id: RBqWwm2eEq0

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023