10 Features Of Valorant That Set It Apart From Counter-Strike

If Riot Games is good at anything, it's taking an already-working formula and putting their own twist on it. They did this with League of Legends where they did away with DotA's turn rates and creep denying and added 'Summoner Spells' and jungle buffs among other things. Some would say that they lowered the skill floor to make their game more accessible to new players while still maintaining a high skill ceiling for veterans of the genre.

With Valorant, they have done the same thing to equally great effect by using what served them from Counter-Strike and discarding or altering what did not. As a result, Valorant is in some ways an improvement upon its precursor, offering 128-tick servers and fixing issues that were largely overlooked in Counter-Strike due to simply having been in the game for so long.

In my previous article, we looked at the many similarities between the two games and so it is only appropriate that we also look at the differences. Therefore, without further ado, let's examine some of the defining attributes that separate Valorant from Counter-Strike.

Although Valorant is a tactical shooter in essence, it incorporates elements from MOBA games, namely characters and abilities, which in some ways make it more akin to Blizzard's hero shooter Overwatch than Counter-Strike.

There are a total of 10 characters or 'agents' so far, each with four abilities including an ultimate, which can be charged up by getting kills or gathering orbs on the map. Instead of the need to gain levels in order to unlock abilities, they are purchased in the same way as guns with 'creds'.

The addition of these characters and abilities naturally adds a whole new dimension to the game that is absent in Counter-Strike.