Broken by bugs!
I would have given this game an 8.5 (here comes the "but"), but it is a broken bug fest. SHOC, Crysis, COD 4, and Assassins Creed all run fine on my rig. You'd think that being a "prequel sequel" CS would be so much further developed and optimised, it would amaze. Thats where assumptions will get you, in a, well...............swamp! While it has run well for others, there are very wide spread reports of a huge variety of bugs, glitches, artifacting, BSODs, CTDs (you get the drift). The game installed fine for me, as did the 1.5.04 patch, and ran perfectly when I first fired it up. Upon shutting it down and bringing the game back up later, I discovered to my horror; what everyone else had been complaining about in the game forums. Whether I started from the play game button on the load screen, or booted the game off the .exe icon on my desk top, the game might load OK or might load as a small 2 x 3 inch window, or might be offset to the right and low on my screen (making the menu buttons inaccesible on the main menu). The MM might be fine or flickering madly to the point I can't see the menu buttons, the mouse cursor leaves stuttering paint trails all over the screen. If the menu is clear enough to see and use, the game may load without any of my character's HUD mini map or PDA map icons, or they may be flickering madly (or be perfectly OK) making it difficult or impossible to navigate the levels and complete tasks and missions. Or, I may be missing significant portions of my characters HUD info (ammo counts, health status, etc, as well as text information on my PDA screens. It's not unusual for me to have to load, shut down, or use tthe Windows Task manager to shut down, and reload three to five times when I start the game. Once in a while, it works like it's supposed to.
There is no way this game was ready for commercial release, and is a rip off of the gaming public. I'm sure many or most of these issue will be addressed, however, it is still inexcusable any game was released in this state.