Recent reviews by Blanca

Awesome aim trainer. I've been using Kovaaks for awhile now, but I recently came across Aim Lab and decided to give it a shot. So far I've really liked it, and have found it easier to improve, or at least see my improvement in Aim Lab. I still use Kovaaks for specific exercises, and to benchmark my improvements on specific tasks, but for most of my practice I've switched over to Aim Lab.

Aim Lab Pros:
-Free. Can't beat that.

-Much more detailed feedback. Instead of just showing you accuracy, kills, and score, it shows things like where one the screen you are more/less accurate, as well as time to kill, and precision.

-Practice feels more focused. Exercises are broken up into categories like "speed", "precision" and "tracking", with similar exercises in each category that focus on those specific aspects. I've found this makes it easier for me to spend some time focused on improving my precision with small targets, and other time focused on being faster with larger targets that disappear sooner, while still feeling consistency between the different exercises.

-Much better trend tracking. In Kovaaks the only history it shows you is your previous high score. This makes it difficult to see the improvement unless you are consistently making new high scores, or loading your logs into an external program to track. In Aim Lab, after every exercise it shows you a history of your score, accuracy, and time to kill, which makes it way easier to see that, even if I'm not setting a new high score, even my bad days are better than my old good days, or that I'm improving my accuracy instead. It also helps me to see when I need to take a break if my scores are dropping instead of going up. This feature is huge for me, and has helped me stay more consistent and motivated.

-Built in ranking system, broken up into categories. On the main screen Aim Lab shows an overall score for "Flicking", "Tracking", "Speed", "Precision", "Perception", and "Cognition", as well as an overall rank like "Ruby I". Having these individual areas listed out helps me to know which areas I should focus on to improve my overall aim, and these categories align with the exercise categories to make it easy to find exercises that will help a specific aspect of my aim. Additionally, having all of these helps me see my improvement, and feel more motivated to keep practicing.

-AI Exercises. These exercises tune aspects of the difficulty based on your performance in other exercises, this helps keep you training at the edge, and helps force you to push yourself a little bit and work on specific weaknesses. For example if you are really good at hitting medium targets, it might give you slightly smaller targets, or it might make them disappear faster, or put them in spots you struggle to hit. These are harder to see your improvement on since the difficulty scales, but I think they are an awesome way to be able to push yourself.

-Video Content. Before every exercise, there is a short video describing how to approach each exercise. I found this really helpful to know what I should be focusing on within the exercise.

Aim Lab Cons:
-Much fewer exercises. At this moment Aim Lab has a lot less options for exercises, and some of the areas feel weaker to me, for example there aren't a lot of pure tracking exercises(One of the things I still pull up Kovaaks for) but I also understand they are right now working on a custom content creator, which hopefully should resolve this issue in the future.

-Sometimes it can feel slow to go between exercises, because you have to navigate in an out of menus. I've played with playlists a little bit, but I don't really use them much because I've kept my training fairly dynamic.

General Feedback:
I've really liked what I've seen so far, especially for early access, they are off to a really solid start. I'm really looking forward to seeing where Aim Lab goes in the future. There are some features I would love to see, though I don't know whether they will actually happen.

-Aim Lab offers some recommended trainings, I'm not sure whether these are recommended for me specifically, or just a pre-populated list. I would really love to see a dynamic recommended playlist, tailored to me that helps me maximize my own improvement, and adjusts based on future performance and weaknesses. Something like a personal coach, guiding me through the exercises I should be doing. I don't know how realistic this is, but it would be an awesome feature.

-More variety within some of the categories, especially tracking. Most of the tracking exercises are closer to target switching, and I would love to see some variety like long/short strafes, etc. Maybe even an AI mode that adapts to your specific tracking weaknesses.

Singleplayer is amazing. The story, characters, map. Even after playing over and over again it's still entertaining. I like it way more than the GTA 4's story.

As for online - this is the reason why I don't recommend the game, because I think that most people nowadays buy the game mainly because of the online. Don't get me wrong; I used to love it, played over 400 hours of pure online, everything was awesome, I thought that this is the perfect multiplayer game, they are constantly updating it and there is a lot of stuff - which has become the problem. A year and a half ago, everything was more or less balanced, the prices were reasonable. After the Import/Export things were getting drastically different. Looked like this to me:

"Hey buddy, want to enjoy the content? Well, you should get our brand new garage only for 2M."

Then Gunrunning. Again, my overall feelings:

"Look at this cool update! The players will be able to get their bunkers only for 1.5M. Also, don't forget to upgrade your equipment for another 1M. Did we forget to mention that getting additional people working for you will only cost you half a million? By the way, you will time from time get raided and lose everything, unless you buy another cameras for 400K! All the raids will magically disappear! Want to modify your weapons in your Workshop? Well, too bad, you need a trailer for that, but don't worry, it's only 1 to 2 and a half millions. Do you want to train your shooting? There you go, only for 700K! Do you prefer white over black? The paint costs 105K, so... Did we mention that you can take a nap there? The key for that room costs 265K. Do you want a Gun Locker which you will probably never use? That will be 175K. You want some caddies? 85K or 120K if you want to have them larger. Don't forget to check out the new cars! Get yourself a car that shoots a couple of missiles only for 4-5M!"

How I felt about Smuggler's Run:

Hello there! This update will be about planes. Want a hangar? 1 to 5M. Which style would you prefer? The one for 100k or the one for 320k? Want different lights? No problem - the more expensive style you chose the more expensive lights you'll get! Isn't that cool? Want some nice 'art' on the floor? Sure, we'll paint it for you, costs only up to 200k, just like your apartment you bought last year to do heists! Furniture? You mean another wall? That's another 280k for you. Again, want the keys to access your bed? 235k-375k. You want to customize your 500k glider? One word - WORKSHOP! And guess what this number, 1,150,000 means... Correct! It's the price!"

The prices of the content added were skyrocketing, if you wanted to truly enjoy the game, you had to either make money all day long if you wanted to be a fair dude that doesn't hack, which is by the way, another big problem with this game, or buy some cards that are horribly overpriced. At this point I didn't have time to play all day long, I didn't want to hack and I totally didn't want to spend twice the price of the game on some cards, so I stopped playing. Since then, I've been ignoring the game, not watching any videos and not paying attention to the updates. Sometimes, when I notice that there's an update, I come back for a couple of minutes and look how a vehicle with a couple of missiles costs over 4 millions. Now another heist update, you might think this:

"Oh, finally another heist, things are getting back to the state when you could buy a house for 200k and get full content."

The reality, however, looks like this:

"Hey, it's nice to see you back in the game, look at this brand new heist room only for 2 millions, the same idea, only way more expensive."

And as a person who doesn't have that much time to play anymore, I can't enjoy the content anymore. Another problem with this game are the hackers. I finally am thrown into a lobby after 10 minutes of loading, I see that I am immediately teleported to an airport from my house with a couple of other people and I am stuck doing some rather strange animations. I always report the guy when I find out who it is, but it doesn't seem to help. I've heard some heartbreaking stories of people getting banned for no reason, this luckily hasn't happened to me yet.

I was very young when I first got to know Counter-Strike back in the early days of Counter-Strike 1.5.
It was in an Internet-Café during Holidays where I even got to play the game for the first time.

Some years later some friends from the area were playing CS 1.6 and thats where I joined the Steam and Counterstrike-Community on 2003.

We formed a team, trained about two years and climbed up the ladder of our local CS-League here in Switzerland.
However, due to insufficient capacity (private life) of some members and a lack of Morale we split up.

I've seen Counter-Strike in all of its states from 1.5 on, 1.6, Condition Zero, Source, I even had my hands on the old mod called "CS Promod" where people tried to get the gameplay from 1.6 with the graphics of Source. Which was something I really liked.

After a long break I decided to reroll in CS:GO and check out how the game had evolved. It took a while but the more I played and did matchmakings (good mm's ^^) the more I wanted to set foot in E-Sports again.

CS:GO is the perfect balance between the gameplay of 1.6 and the graphics of source (while its not source, definitely and luckily not.), to most efficient CS players ive talked to graphics dont matter and it explains why many Pro's do play with low resolutions and stuff like that because it reminds them of the good ol' days (from what i've read).

Though it still has its harsh and sometimes frustrating learning-curve, it is worth the effort because if you truly stick to it and learn about it each time you play and try to learn from your mistakes the better you get.

Since all those years i've tried out almost all other game titles in the FPS genre, nothing could ever stand up against the simplicity and competitiveness of Counter-Strike for me.

If you're looking for a great team-experience (which you first need to create or join) in where every man counts, every round counts and has a big community involved with tournaments and stuff, this game is for you.

However if you're looking for a realistic shooter that compares guns 1:1 like in real life, with bulletdrop and things like that, this game is definitely not for you.

I hope my shared thoughts on the game where helpful and gave you a bit of insight whether you want to join our community.

Best Regards