Counter Strike is without a doubt, the most played multiplayer modification in the world. For those who have never tried Counter-Strike, it's an online, team-based first-person shooter that pits terrorists against counter terrorists. You fight over hostages, planting bombs, and use a wide variety of weapons. Each team has different ammunition and equipment options at its disposal, with individual players having unique attributes and the ability to upgrade their equipment upon the successful completion of missions that have specific and varied goals such as hostage rescue, assassination and eliminating enemy structures. Even though people could still download and play the original Half-Life mod for free, the retail version of Counter-Strike became a best seller - probably that's why Valve decided to release Condition Zero, a new Counter Strike game which emphasized single player. The development of Counter Strike: Condition Zero started internally at Valve Software, then quickly moved to Gearbox, then to Ritual Entertainment, and finally over to Turtle Rock Studios. Now, after passing through the hands of several different developers, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) is finally here!

Maps, Bots
CS:CZ is essentially an offline botmatch mode of the familiar multiplayer. The bot-match campaign is structured in tiers, each containing three maps (18 maps in total) that must be completed to move on. Most of the maps are drawn from Counter-Strike's classic collection, so you will immediately recognize - Dust, Office, Prodigy, Italy, Inferno, Dust 2, Militia, Chateau, Havana, Cobblestone, Aztec, Airstrip, Piranesi, Torn. The maps are slightly improved (speed, graphics), but the improvements mostly feel more like a patch, not a new take on Counter-Strike (except the Militia map which is now vastly different from CS). There are also some new maps - Tides, Stadium, Downed a Fastline which look fairly good. To make gameplay a bit more enjoyable, each map has a number of additional objectives. For example, kill an enemy with the sniper rifle, rescue hostages, or win a round in less than 75 seconds. Of course, there are also "new" models for weapons, equipment and the player models, however they are all taken directly from CS v1.6. To be honest, the only really new thing in CS:CZ are the bots - all of your enemies and teammates are CPU bots. The bots are quite smart - they follow your orders well, they use voice communication to tell you what's going on in the map (voice and pitch of each bot is unique) and they have different personalities. The personality consists of four attributes (level 1-5): skill, co-op, bravery, and favorite weaponry. The highest level teammate is a level 5 bot. I had quite a bit of fun for a few hours playing against them in the singleplayer missions.

Undeleted "Deleted Scenes" ?
As bonus, CS:CZ also contains the "Deleted Scenes", the single-player campaign that Ritual was working on before game development was handed off to Turtle Rock. Deleted Scenes are 12 levels, the best of 20 or so that Ritual developed. Unfortunately, the Deleted Scenes seem like flashbacks to the shooters of 1999.There are some separate missions, each taking place in a different corner of the world and you play as a member of that particular country's counter-terrorist group.Your job is to take out the terrorists or enemies. If you will try to play, you will immediately understand why Ritual's project was canceled. However, frankly, it totally sucks.

Conclusion
To conclude, CS:CZ is Counter-Strike 1.6 with a few bad additions and one good one, namely the bots which will entertain you if you can't play online. So, is this title worth buying? Nope. Not worth the money. This retail package offers poor value and is a huge disappointment. Paying full price ($39.99) for a bots isn't a very wise decision since the multiplayer component is available for free (if you have a copy of Half-Life).

System requirements: Pentium III 500 MHz (800MHz recommended), 96 MB RAM (128MB recommended), 16 MB Video Card (32MB recommended), 500 MB HD Space, Win-Compatible Sound Card, Mouse, Keyboard