5/5 ★ – LukeNobody's review of VALORANT.

Figured I should probably make a review for the game I played the most on 2020. I love competitive online games ever since Call of Duty MW2 on the PS3. I was way more casual back then but that was my first experience with competing on shooters online. It just became a bigger passion when I started PC gaming. At first it was all fun and games. I played on shitty notebooks, shitty mouses and mousepads. I had pretty much no idea on how shooters worked on PC. Until I downloaded Steam and bought my first game: Counter Strike Source. Some of my friends played it, so it became routine for all of us to get together on Skype and play. We had no idea how to actually play the game properly, so we would spend all our hours on things like minigame servers, surf, bunny hopping, deathrun, zombies and jailbreak. I never really played the actual tactical shooter, regular bomb defuse mode. Even though I understood it, from my times playing Search and Destroy on COD. The game had no matchmaking, just dedicated servers, so we just didn't even bother trying. Then we shifted to the second game I ever bought on PC: Team Fortress 2. Now that truly became an addiction. We played every day, as we tried to learn each character and choose our main. How to work as a team, learn the maps, improve strategies and have fun. It was in TF2 where I learned how to play FPS games on PC, and it was a hell of a good time. But still, most of the games were casual, as there was no official matchmaking nor ranked games. Then, years later, the day came: CSGO. I bought it first day of release. Me and my friends logged on just to get disappointed on the lack of custom servers. Where's mg_smashcannonz, jailbreak, surf, bunny-hopping? It just wasn't Source. The ranked matchmaking took our custom games away. So we never played it. Until, years later, when a friend in college convinced me to play with him. The actual tactical shooter. So I did. I was trash. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. But eventually I learned. The maps, the guns, spray control, the strategy, how to use utilities, the feeling of playing a clutch, of winning a close match. I was hooked. We played everyday, we grinded ranks, we tried to get better. It was fun, it was exciting. Until it got stale. Playing hackers, smurfs, trying to play on 3rd party servers and getting more hackers, more toxic teammates. It became stressing and boring. Then there was an announcement. A tactical shooter, very much like CS, but featuring different characters with different skills, like TF2. It was what we were waiting for. We got hyped and waited. We got keys to the beta, and that was it. We were hooked. We wanted to learn, to improve, to find out which characters were ours etc. It was everything CS was, but easier and more straight to the point. It flowed better but still had that competitive atmosphere. It was my most played game of the year, it gave me so much fun moments with friends and it's already one of my favorite games ever. It can only go up from here. A forever evolving masterpiece.