I finished the game today and now I’m typing my review on it. There is only a couple of small spoilers by the end of this post.
For those who hadn’t seen it yet, CS:CZ is a single player campaign patch for Half-Life. It is based on Counter Strike.
Just like in CS, weapons are divided into primary (rifles, shotguns, chainguns and all), secondary (pistols), knife, grenades (HE, smoke and flashbang) and now you have actually useful equipment (radio-controlled bombs, optic-fiber camera). You may carry more than one weapon of each kind, though, making it feel rather like another military based patch for HL, Opposing Force.
The game has 10 stages, or 11 if you count the training room. The plot is pesudo-complex - despite all the minor details, all you need to know is that you are thrown into places that contain crowds of cannon-foddery terrorists and you have to kill all those who stand on your way. Sometimes you have to defuse a bomb, sometimes you have to rescue a couple of hostages, but doing these things still involves more deathmatch skills than actually thinking.
The gameplay feels like a mix of Quake 1 and Unreal 1. You have to kill your enemies while not being killed, and you have to go through a map that will require you to jump, climb, crawl, hide and activate hidden switches. There are items scattered in your way to help you, but asides from the health recovery ones and ocasional ammo, most gear is hidden. You have to pay a lot of attention to your surroundings to find secret areas.
Tha A.I. is much the same of HL. The terrorists act exactly like the military agents in the Half-Life campaign game. They’ll hide and ambush, or go directly towards you, and if they have grenades you won’t be safe by just hiding in a corner. There are a few new things, though. Terrorism implies giving your life for whatever wicked cause there is, and by giving life I mean men wearing dynamite shafts as shirts and running after you with a trigger on their hands. One big advise: be stealthy. Most times they will be expecting you.
The architecture of the maps is fine. If it weren’t for ocasional medicine dispensers built in unconventional places (who would build a medicine dispenser on the wall of an elevator shaft?) and the like, the maps could be considered fully realistic. Weather effects, when activated, are simply beautiful - though it takes a powerful video card to play with the weather on.
The audio part is ok for the sound effects. It lacks in game music, though. This is a big negative.
I have found the following bugs during gameplay:
1-) Sometimes terrorists can see through walls. They can only do so after they have actually seen you through the normal means, but after that they’ll get X-ray eyes. If you hide you can hear them shooting and throwing grenades towards you.
2-) There are places in which the flashbang grenade does not work. This pratically has no effect on the gameplay, since these places are really rare.
3-) Bulletproof glasses may be trespassed by one kind of gun as if the bullets were ghosts. They leave no marks on the glass. I’ll leave you to guess which weapon is it.
4-) In one of the missions, I found ammo boxes that read on the cover one kind of ammo, but had other kind in them. They’d fill the wrong weapon.
Measuring the good and the bad parts of the game, I’d say it is good for a distraction, but don’t expect it to last much. It took me four days to finish CZ, and I did so in a slow pace (I miss the old times in which I’d take 2-3 months to finish Unreal 1). Worthy a try if you have nothing else better to do, but not worthy the money you would spend on it if you need something that takes long to finish.
The last mission is on a scryscrapper. If you fall from it, a stat screen will say that the mission was a failure, and will add ‘motive: operative tried to fly’. Also, there is a mission in Argentina in which you eventually get into a room where there are two computers that the terrorists were using. One of the computers is running Condition Zero (you can see the intro screen). Last but not least, in the training base there is an elevator that has a poster pasted on a wall. The poster displays the faces of the 50 most wanted terrorists. Osama Bin Laden is there. If I remember well, they put Saddam in the poster too.
