Why Counter-Strike Xbox 360 is the best Counter-Strike yet

This is not a game that needs a lot of marketing. "25 million people have played it," says Valve's Chet Faliszek. "The minute we show it anywhere, people are like, 'ah, this is the reason I failed college'. Then they pick it up and they realise it's the same game. We don't have things like aim assists or anything else, it's the same basic question of 'are you better than that guy?' We're kind of a throwback in that way, where people really just jump in and have fun."

Which is not to say that this Xbox Live Arcade "best of" version of the venerable terrorist vs. counter-terrorist shooter - last seen on the original Xbox - is unchanged. Yes, the basics remain the same: one team tries to plant a bomb, the other tries to disarm it, success gives money to spend on weapons, and death means you have to sit out the round shouting at the team camera. The visuals could kindly be described as 'current-generation', too, but updated matchmaking and new modes mean it's more welcoming to all parties.

This should mean we can avoid the brutal Darwinism of earlier versions of the game, when semi-pros stalked the servers and newcomers could expect both their score and seconds spent alive to barely scrape double digits. A skill-tracking system has been added to offer more of a challenge to skilled players, less of one to the noobs, and new barriers to stop the two from ever meeting.

The Arsenal Demolition mode we play does both: it keeps the bomb-planting but ditches the gun-buying system entirely and awards you worse weapons the better you play. Our hopes that this would end with elite players meleeing each other to death with rubber chickens are dashed - the weediest weapon is a still-dangerous knife - but, says Faliszek, it's a great leveller. "It's kind of a cool thing when you're thrown in with people of various skill levels, because even if you're not killing anybody, eventually they're going to be coming at you with a knife, you're still going to have your good gun and be able to kill them."

Striking a balance

Superior players, meanwhile, will be able to benefit from the input of professional Counter-Strike players, who Valve repeatedly consulted with during the game's development. "In Counter-Strike Source we were worried about the complexity," says Faliszek. "So we removed some, and that made the skill ceiling lower, making it harder for the really good players to distinguish themselves." Global Offensive's skill-based matchmaking, meanwhile, has been designed to allow the top dogs to test their skills against worthy adversaries.

If bomb planting seems too much like hard work there's an Arms Race variant that's purely about getting a kill with every gun as quickly as possible. Again, the emphasis here is on quick: some of the maps are so pokey you can see the other team near-instantly and kill them almost as quickly, meaning that it's possible for a round to be over in less than three adrenaline-filled minutes. The stripped-down simplicity, with none of the loadouts, emblems or increasingly elaborate bolt-ons we've come to expect from Call of Duty, brings a refreshing purity to shooting people in the face.

This ensures Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's status as quick five-minute game that you can squeeze in when you've got a bit of downtime, and then still find yourself playing hours later. It's so easy to hit the button for one more game, and so quick to get into, that we can see this becoming a major time-sink - and while Faliszek won't yet comment on any future DLC, the plan is to "keep going" post-release. Given the company's record with Left 4 Dead 2, which is still getting updates on both PC and Xbox 360 nearly three years after it was first released, that's reason enough to expect this game to sit in the Xbox Live most-played list for a very long time.