Valve officially releases Counter-Strike 2, it's now available on Steam

Arguably one of the most anticipated game titles this year is Counter-Strike 2. Valve, the studio behind the famous competitive shooter, announced the update to the existing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in March this year, but limited the beta testing to select high-ranking players, streamers and content creators.

Counter-Strike 2 doesn't feel like an upgrade, but like a totally different game. While most of the mechanics for which we love Counter-Strike are in place, CS2 is an improvement in many aspects and fixes a slew of issues, for which the community was complaining about for years.

Most of the improvements are thanks to Valve's Source 2 engine. That's been serving as a foundation of Dota 2 for years, so Valve took its sweet time with Counter-Strike.

The new engine allows for volumetric smokes with more advanced behavior to the changing environment, new graphics, refreshed maps, new sub-tick rate for more precise tracking of players' actions and plenty of other gameplay improvements.

And as promised, today Valve makes the Counter-Strike 2 title available for everyone and can be downloaded from Steam. It remains free to play and in case you have a big inventory with skins, you will be delighted to know that Valve is porting every single skin from CSGO to CS2.

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