A few weeks ago Counter Strike: Global Offensive released a battle royale game mode while also making the game free to play on Steam. Since the update has been out for a while I’ve gotten a chance to play a few games of the battle royale mode as well as normal matchmaking.
The new battle royale mode called Danger Zone is a completely separate part of the game with its own queues. It takes place on an island called Blacksite. The map is quite small since there are only 16 players in games of solos or 18 players in duos and trios.
Danger Zone also includes a few new items and weapons in the game. Instead of a buy menu and mini map you get a tablet that’s pretty much an iPad that allows you to buy things using money you find. Items you buy are delivered by drones that drop a box of your purchase wherever your tablet is. This allows other players to track your location by following the drone or just shoot the drone down and steal your purchase. However, you can come up some pretty clever strategies by dropping your tablet and wait to see if anyone tried to follow your drone. The tablet also serves as a map. It lets you see where the “danger zone” is and where it’s heading. Hexagons that the map is divided in light up if there are players in that area which can let you see where other players are. You can buy or find upgrades for your tablet such as radar jamming for surrounding players and drone tracking for all drones on the map.
Danger Zone has lots of different melee weapons that aren’t available in standard play such as hammers and wrenches. Normally you’ll use them for opening weapon crates, but they can be used as throwable weapons. Weapons aren’t hard to find in the game mode although most of the times you’ll only have an SMG, shotgun, or pistol. In order to find the better weapons, you’ll have to find Paradrop supplies later on in the game. However I’d say that the ammunition is difficult to find. You only get a little bit of ammo when you first pickup the gun, any other ammo you’ll find in ammo boxes that you find or buy. Even then, the amount of ammo you get from those boxes is little. Armour can be found or bought quite easily, but your health can only be replenished through MediShots that can also be found or bought although you start with one or two if I remember correctly.
To be honest I haven’t really played much of Danger Zone, but I have won a few times with some friends. There aren’t really any strategies I use besides using the tablet to it’s fullest, but you can probably find good strategies on the internet if you looked for them.
At first I was a bit concerned when I heard that CS:GO went full free to play. The game has been known to be a popular game for cheaters and the anti-cheat system in place had a reputation of not really working all that well. However, the game did have Prime matchmaking in place for people that associated their accounts with a valid phone number. In my experience this system worked a lot better than standard matchmaking monitored by VAC. A few months after Prime was added another anti-cheat measure was implemented for non-Prime players called Trust Factor. I’m not really sure how it works, but it’s said that it uses an algorithm to put more trust worthy players into matches together and players more likely to cheat matches together. The price of the game was one of the things that supposedly stopped people from cheating since if a cheater got banned they’d have to buy the game again to continue cheating. However, even after the free to play movement games in Prime still seem to be normal with the occasional fishy person, but that was normal even before the update.
Overall, I think that Danger Zone is a pretty cool thing for people that are into that kind of gameplay. I also think that so far the free to play thing that’s going on is good to get more players into the game as long as there’s an efficient way to make sure people don’t cheat.