Oh Counter-Strike, what can I say about this kick ass game series? It is the first tactical shooter I have ever played, I’ve played each Counter-Strike entry and loved each one. Now what we have here is Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies. CSNZ is a new free to play Counter-Strike game on Steam which is pretty much a zombie version of Counter-Strike Online, which is also a free to play Counter-Strike made by the same team.

Counter-Strike zombies was first released on September 23 as a beta and lets just say the beta was a complete failure. The game’s servers would not let people log in and the hack shield program that comes with the game was keeping people from playing, which this issue was happening to me. The developers saw this issue and later patched it, which is good I praise them for responding to my complaint as quick as they did. After the beta the game was finally released on October 7 to mixed reviews, mostly negative. Now are these negative reviews accurate of the game? Some are but most negative reviews are from people who barely touched the game and hate on it for the simple fact that it had a bad beta. So now I will go on and talk about this game and what I personally think.

The game’s requirements are great, anyone can play this game on any computer, which of course is common because pretty much all Counter-Strike games don’t require much so the download of the game and requirements won’t be much. When you load the game you’ll noticed that the menu is locked at a certain resolution and you cannot change it. You can however change it to widescreen in the options but this only takes effect if you are in a server playing. Hopefully they will patch this later on. When you search for a game you are met with four different game modes; Zombie Hero, Zombie Scenario, Zombie Escape, and Zombie Shelter. Each mode has different variations and even includes basic Counter-Strike game modes like hostage rescue, bomb defusing etc. As for right now I cannot recommend the zombie pvp game modes like zombie hero. It can be completely one sided and what I mean by this is if you are on the zombies team then good luck on winning because for humans, their team can just buy a machine gun, a bunch of ammo and just hold off in a corner. Reason for this is because if you are a zombie and you get shot at, you are immediately stopped in your tracks. So say if the humans are all using machine guns then you will not be going any where and lose. So for right now I would stay away from the pvp modes and move on to the pve modes which are more fun, like Zombie scenario which is my personal favorite. In zombie scenario you are grouped with a team of humans and you must fight through waves of zombies to reach different locations and eventually the boss. This game mode gets very chaotic and very fun, especially if your playing with friends.

Each game mode rewards players with points and loot crates which all can be used to craft weapons, ammo, or special items and even purchase weapons in the store. Now most people who can complain about this game always bring up a ”pay-to-win” excuse for saying the game is bad, which this isn’t true. After hours of playing I have noticed that the game does not try to force you to pay real money for things. In the store there are weapon packs you can buy for $1.99 each, but why is this an issue? You have all these game modes that offer both pvp and pve, so I don’t see the reason in the ”pay-to-win” argument. Not to mention this is again a free-to-play game, so the developers have to make money off it some how correct? Now for performance wise, the game has a few problems. So far I haven’t noticed any crashes or anything but I have noticed small glitches like invisible zombies attacking you out of no where, and some minor lag during games but nothing big.

Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies is a unique game and I had fun playing it so my rating for it has to be a middle 6/10. It’s a quite decent and very fun free to play game which I think is worth checking out. So you are on Steam and your bored or broke then go ahead and give it a try.