Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – Danger Zone Review

It’s difficult to look at the free-to-play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – Danger Zone without reverse-engineering the business logic that birthed it. After all, game studios have been watching the battle royale genre expand in its reach (and profitability).

It makes sense that Valve would want to tap that market using an intellectual property of their own. But does CS: GO Danger Zone have the capacity to operate on its own terms and come out on top?

Gameplay

From the word go, Danger Zone plays to audience expectations where battle royale games are concerned. Players drop onto an island map littered with abandoned buildings and hiding places, broken up by the odd crate or cache of weapons and other useful items.

The island is surrounded by an life-sapping energy field which shrinks inward in set intervals, further limiting the play space. Over the course of a match, the assembled group of up to 18 players must battle one another until one player — or a team of players — is left standing.

What quickly starts to emerge when getting into the heat of Danger Zone matches is a sense of genre familiarity. The mode pulls the weapon purchasing system from the base Global Offensive experience, carrying over the need to eliminate other players in exchange for currency to attain weapons, ammunition and miscellaneous equipment. Like other works in the genre, Danger Zone’s maps never have precisely the same items stashed away from match to match, thanks to loot randomization.