Counter-Strike 2

Free-to-play tactical FPS built around competitive team matches

Valve · Released Aug 21, 2012

Reviews: Very Positive; 86% of 9.9M
Recent reviews: Mostly Positive; 79% of 74K in 30 days
Playing now: 741K; right now
Steam Deck: Playable
Last update: 1 week ago; Sep 9, 2026

What is Counter-Strike 2?

A free-to-play, first-person tactical shooter where teams compete in objective-focused online matches. Premier mode tracks player ratings on global and regional leaderboards, while smoke grenades dynamically affect sightlines.

For you if...

+you want competitive, team-based online shooter matches
+you enjoy tactical objectives and first-person gunplay
+you prefer ranked play with ratings and leaderboards

Not for you if...

−you want a single-player or story-driven shooter
−you prefer relaxed play over competitive team coordination

What players say

86% of 9,870,213 reviews are positive · 79% of 73,576 in the last 30 days

Players who remain positive call the core gameplay fun. The dominant complaint is widespread cheating in ranked matchmaking and an anti-cheat system players consider ineffective; some also report bugs and inconsistent hit registration.

Screenshots and trailer

Counter-Strike 2 system requirements

As published by the developer.

Minimum

OS: Windows® 10
Processor: 4 hardware CPU threads - Intel® Core™ i5 750 or higher
Graphics: Video card must be 1 GB or more and should be a DirectX 11-compatible with support for Shader Model 5.0
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Storage: 85 GB available space
DirectX: Version 11

PC version details

DRM, required accounts, controller support and Steam features.

DRM: None declared on Steam
Controller: Keyboard and mouse
Platforms: Windows, Linux
Achievements: 1
Steam features: Workshop, Trading cards, In-app purchases

Steam Deck: Playable

Sometimes shows mouse, keyboard or non-Deck controller icons
Some in-game text is small and may be hard to read
All functionality is accessible with the default controller configuration
Default graphics settings perform well on Steam Deck

Multiplayer and co-op

Languages

Full audio: English. Text only: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese - Portugal, Portuguese - Brazil, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Spain, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Greek, Spanish - Latin America, Vietnamese, Indonesian.