Honest review compared to csgo:
pros
- it's still cs, its still fun sometimes albeit a shell of it's formal self
- quality of life stuff such as automatic grenade reticle, native radar zoom bind, etc.
- graphically a lot better, game is gorgeous
- New smoke mechanics are nice, less one ways compared to csgo
- new hammer editor is fun to play around with
- Some skins got nerfed, such as the print streams as an example, though it's far from the only one.

neutral
- Some skins got nerfed, such as the print streams as an example, though it's far from the only one. But some also got an upgrade in my opinion.

cons
- VAC sucks, and the Overwatch system was removed, cheaters run rampant in MM and Premier especially in high elo (usually spinbotters) and you will still get them in high trust factor. Other issues in this regard are these bot farms, usually from China that flood both Valve Official Deathmatch and Arms Race servers to farm cases on mass.
- game is poorly optimized. Frame times (which is what subtick uses to timestamp your actions in between ticks) particularly 1% lows can spike even in an offline server with nothing going on. It doesn't feel good when you are in a middle of a fire fight and your input delay jumps from 5 ms to 15ms (and sometimes even 48 ms in some cases.) Even newer games such as BF6 despite having a lower average fps, has much better frame pacing.
- net code and/or subtick feels really inconsistent. Some games it feels great, the next game it could feel like crap. Issues include noregs, delayed hitreg, dying behind corners, extremely ridiculous peeker's advantage etc. and no their "damage prediction" feature doesn't help, it just shows you what should've hit. But sometiesm you hits stuff that should'e counted as a miss. There have been cases where i whiffed on my screen and the enemy is behind wall completely, but on my screen i shot the air nest to him but counts as a headshot. It seems to rely on too many factors to consistently work properly. And with how strong peeker's advantages is, it encourages a run and gun playstyle that is often associated with COD instead of learning counter-strafing which is a fundamental skill to the franchise historically.
- removal of 128 tick. CSGO used to have the option of 128 tick servers instead of using the default 64 tick. Valve wanted all the servers to be uniform, instead of being split, especially since they wanted everyone to be on Premier. And added subtick instead of upgrading to 128. Yet the player base is still split between Valve servers and FACEIT mostly as it was in CSGO. So it really solved nothing. Having the OPTION of using non-subtick and 128 tick servers back would be amazing. Though subtick conceptually is technically more accurate (it works by timestamping your actions between ticks), it doesn't make the game more responsive. You are still only receiving server updates at 64 times/sec. Other community serves back in csgo that were either surfing or bhop also had their own tickrate, usually 80 or 128. Every portion of the player base had their own tickrate for their needs. Casual had 64, Ultra competitive players had 128, bhop/surf had 80-128. Everyone was happy until Valve tried to "unify" the player base using the least common denominator. They also did all of this to make low elo and pro play feel the same. Except even to this day both levels play the game completely differently, not just mechanically, but tactically as well.
- missing content from CSGO such as maps and game modes. Some missing game modes include Danger Zone, Flying Scoutsman, Demolition, etc. Some of the maps have been slowly readded.
- community server browser, instead of having its own, the game will tab you out and take you to Steams server browser instead. The problems with the Steam client server browser is that it won't show everything and there's a lack of filters you can use to narrow down to what you want to play on. A fix for this is to make it more in line with the in game server browser form csgo, and it doesn't force you to alt tab out of the game.
- New terminal cases are far inferior to the old cases you are essentially gambling to pay full price, it's incredibly predatory. Same applies to new sticker capsules from majors. Esports teams also get less of a cut.
- the pick 5 inventory system is nice for having both M4s in your loadout, but you have less overall weapons you can use in a game. Which sucks in some cases cause if the match was easy enough to meme on, unless you have certain weapons such as the M249 or R8 equipped for that purpose you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Only real upside to it is being able to have both m4s equipped. You also have the issue where you can't use situational weapons if they aren't equipped in general. Say if you wanted to use one of the autos in a certain situation, you can't if it's not on of the 5 rifles. So you actually have variety in play.
- Initially I was neutral to this idea, but in the end it caused more harm than good. What I'm referring to is the jump throw skill check. The removed possibility of jump throw binds from the game for this mechanic. (among certain exploits that subtick and the net code in generally has made possible) Essentially when throwing utility, it leaves you hand an the end of the animation. This is different than csgo where it left as soon as you let go of you mouse click. The game does this to see if you did the jump throw skill check correctly. On paper it sounds like great idea, in practice it has caused some issues. Because of this new mechanic, there's a huge delay for when the nade is thrown. It causes more issues than just simply feeling sluggish, if you are trying to make a decisive play that requires speed you get punished for it entirely. Let me give you an example scenario: Say you are retaking B site on Dust 2, you throw a HE through the double doors to then immediately run to window to peek it or to drop through it. And you do so swiftly. There's just one problem. A) there's a delay for when you he leaves your hand and B) your momentum affects the trajectory as well as you you have your crosshair pointed upon the release. In csgo, it's not an issue since the grenade release is as soon as you let go of your mouse input. But in CS2 it's a different story. Because the releases is inherently delayed. Because you start looking to the right and moving close to the window before the animation finishes playing, your HE goes to the right bunces of the wall, and hits you and your teammates. Congrats, the game has punished you for being fluid. You might be asking why Valve did this. Creating a jump throw bind was not something that was in the native game options. You had to create on in an autoexec or via the console. Valve claimed it was to make it easier for new players to be able to jump in everything you needed without having to create a file for it. Which is ironic because during the CS2 limited test, they created a dedicated bind for it natively in game. They also did this for radar zoom as an example and kept it.
- The readability in certain aspects is lacking in certain areas, particularly when hitting body shots or keeping track of a spray. Though with the Aningraph2 update it made reading player model animations easier to read (it also helped with some of the hitreg since the severs weren't bottlenecking nearly as much with animation data but it didn't completely fix the hitreg issue.) In csgo blood splatter came out exactly where you hit them, it was also darker and lingered longer. Because of this it was easier to tell where and if you hit someone in csgo. and you could here when you did hit them. Spraying generally was also easier to track bc of 2 reason in csgo. Whene you sprayed in csgo, where your last bullet hit would show up as this gray circle. The gray circle would last until the next shot in the spray. this grey circle was also consistent in shape and size. Tracers were also bright compared to the map in csgo.