Contributing writer
Focuses on tactical shooters and battle royales — team strategy, weapon balance and player improvement.
Daniel Kim is an FPS enthusiast and gaming writer who enjoys covering tactical shooters, battle royales, and action-packed multiplayer games. He has a particular interest in team strategies, weapon balance, and helping players improve their performance.
When he is away from his keyboard, Daniel is usually queuing for ranked matches, testing sensitivity settings, or trying to pull off the perfect clutch.
Valve's 9 September update encrypted the chat stored inside Counter-Strike 2 demo files. Team chat cannot be read back at all, and global chat survives only inside the in-game watch UI. Nothing about playing changed — what changed is what a demo is worth as a record once the match is over.
Valve's 3 August update gave Counter-Strike 2 map scripting direct access to the planted bomb's state and to grenade projectiles in flight. Nothing changes in your Premier queue — but the ceiling on what a Workshop retake or utility map can do just moved, and the update notes say where.
Respawn removed energy ammo from the floor entirely and gave seven weapons a regenerating stockpile. That turns a Volt into a gun you can fight with on a hot drop, and it frees the inventory slots you used to spend on bullets.
Embark has dated its biggest update since launch and confirmed it is running fewer, larger releases. That makes the next eight weeks the longest stable stretch the game has had — which changes what is worth investing in now.
Season 05's new Survival map is not a new place. It is a fenced-off slice of the Totenreich round-based map, with no Main Quest and milestone rewards at rounds 10, 25 and 50. The small footprint is the whole point, and it changes how you should practise.
Live Update 1.39.0 removed defensive PvP from the playstyle estimate that shapes your lobbies. Fighting back no longer pushes you toward more aggressive matches — but starting fights and third-partying still do.
A beginner plan for extraction shooters that does not depend on map knowledge you have not built yet — what to bring, what to ignore, and how to turn early runs into information instead of losses.
Running alone is not the same run with fewer people. It changes what a fight costs, what a loadout is worth and which extracts are realistic — here is how to adjust rather than just play more carefully.
Most runs are lost in the last five minutes, not the first twenty. The signals worth leaving on, why a full bag changes the maths, and how to pick an extract before you need one.
Crosshair placement is the highest-return habit in Counter-Strike 2 and the one players skip in favour of aim training. Here is what good placement looks like and how to practise it deliberately.
Running solo changes the maths on every item you bring down. A framework for valuing a loadout by what it costs you to lose it, why the expensive kit often performs worse alone, and where to look up the current item data.
The three skills that transfer between every first-person shooter, why positioning beats raw aim more often than players expect, and how to practise each one deliberately instead of hoping games make you better.
Battle royales ask whether you can win a fight. Extraction shooters ask whether you should take one — and that single change reshapes everything from loadout choice to how the genre handles losing.
