I've found the game itself to be quite entertaining, when played with friends in balanced teams. Using proper tactics and normal weapons (ie. not sniperfests), it's actually fun to play.
If the aiming code were to be a little more toward quake (right now it takes a full year of play to master aiming any one weapon due to curious & 'realistic' kickback features), it could be a tense and realistic shooter.
The problem with aiming is that the crosshairs don't actually point where you're shooting, unlike the sights on a real gun. As a result, you basically have to guess when to pull the trigger because you can't see when your aim has recovered from recoil. Add in all the extra random conefire and the fact that the crosshair is not even correct for the first shot in crouching position (it always points like an inch low from where the first shot will land) and you have a game that's more or less crap.
The realism genre is legitimate, but CS is not. CS is not really realistic, it's just hollywood counterterorism cliche mixed with a convoluted 'expanding-corsshair-conefire' aiming system. If you want a game that's actually realistic (and fun) there are a hand full of games that handle combat much more realistically than CS. In my opinion
Infiltration for UT99 is the best, but there's also America's Army, SOCOM...even Kill Switch and Far Cry are much more realistic than CS even with all their goofy unrealistic elements. The problem with CS isn't the genre, it's the game itself and the fact that it's so undeservingly popular. Not all realism games have to be that crappy.
