Counter-Strike
BANGER · Multiplayer · 2000
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 25.4h
- Value
- $0.39/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Play the world's number 1 online action game. Engage in an incredibly realistic brand of terrorist warfare in this wildly popular team-based game. Ally with teammates to complete strategic missions. Take out enemy sites. Rescue hostages. Your role affects your team's success. Your team's success affects your role.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2018 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 22 in the 14 years tracked, about 20 weeks apart.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 71 percent of its genre, and the best reviewed. Among the games that feel like it, Counter-Strike: Source ($9.99, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Team Fortress Classic ($4.99, scores 71).
The press gave it 88; the people who bought it give it 97 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 14 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2025 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 94 percent of the 29,533 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 17 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 25.4 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 775, 31 times as much.
It came out 26 years ago and 7.3K were still playing it at the last check.
Players
7,323 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
No skins to chase. No battle passes. No unnecessary mechanics. Just pure skill, teamwork, map knowledge, and precise aim. Every round matters, every mistake is punished, and every clutch feels earned.
When CS2 came out I left CS:GO searching for a better game, swapped the good old source engine and now newer source 2 engine for a timeless masterpiece of the ultimate goldsource engine. Switching to this game, I made the best gaming downgrade of my life. The game is purely simple, there are no lineups to overthink, no complex tactical sensory overload. This game genuinely forces me to play much more simpler and...
still fun, a better casual/community experience than cs2, at least there aint no bots farming cases lol
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Counter-Strike scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/10/counter-strikeThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.