I will say that I enjoy this game at the moment but I can see it getting stale for the reasons outlined below. If you really like CS then it's worth the $16.
This game is trying too hard to be like other sports simulators when Counter Strike is fundamentally different from other sports. Unlike in F1 Manager or Football Manager, you're not watching the actual thing. You are watching a top-down view of a CS match, which is different from watching a CS match. The things that make CS exciting to play and watch just don't come across in the match thing. You're not watching insane flicks or 3k lurks, you're watching dots move around on the map and are relying on the killfeed to communicate that excitement, which just isn't the same.
The players don't move or react like actual pros -- there's no slow creep of map control or targeted risks, the dots just mill about near chokepoints until everyone rushes something. Because of this, you never really feel like the strats you choose actually have any bearing on the game -- they're just buttons you click and then the round plays out how it was going to anyway. Modern CS is all default-based anyway. And the fact that in the base game the skip button basically turns everything into a 50/50 is annoying -- if I'm world #2, I really don't want to spend five minutes watching the dots jiggle for a group stage match against Lynn Vision or something. I'm not going to say that it's not worth it per se, because it is pretty neat to watch happen, and what's the point of signing donk and zywoo if you can't watch them in-game? But it has a very very long way to go before it becomes really compelling.
The game has enough outside of that to have real potential. The allure of a game where you can have donk and ZyWoo transfer to an Algerian team called "sippy cup esports" is obvious. But the parts outside of the match viewer are underdeveloped. The real-life nuances that would be most interesting to explore -- things like scene politics, scouting for detailed in-game tendencies, finding a coach whose in-game philosophy matches your IGL's -- are boiled down to "what is the biggest number you can afford?" I hardly have any incentive to scout players once I have a good lineup because we can just win things.
Those parts of the game -- scouting, roster management, negotiation transfer -- badly needs to be more developed because those are the parts of the game where you are actually in control. Your judgement matters. And once you have a good team, they are rendered basically irrelevant because there's no reason to change a roster that's winning.
So, yes, an academy system would be very nice, because then you could keep scouting and trading while your main team tears it up on the big stages. There also need to be more tiers of tournaments to support having two or three teams. (For that matter, being able to sign players as streamers would be pretty cool to.)
The scouting system also needs to be made deeper than, "this player has bigger numbers than my guy, but sometimes I can't see them because I don't pay my scout enough." I want there to be a reason to pick a guy with worse numbers than someone with better numbers, because if there's not, then it's not an exercise in savvy roster construction, it's just an exercise in waiting until you have enough money to buy the big number guy -- perhaps by giving the non-tangible stats a more transparent in-game outcome. Personally, I think it would be better if we were given the real-life stats available to teams to make decisions -- ADR vs top 10 teams, HS%, clawback kills and bozo deaths -- and then the intangibles learned through conversations with their teammates and coaches so it's not just "click on person, see the numbers."
There are also a number of QoL things to fix as well. You can only delete one item in your inbox at a time or all of them, so if you want to keep some emails but not others you have to manually go into each one and delete it. You can either see prospective sponsors or the ones you currently have, and when you are looking for new ones when you go back it forgets what tier sponsor you were looking at, so every time you want to check out a new sponsor you have to click back into the menu entirely. The HLTV Top 20 (in addition to being emailed to you one at a time with no recap, so if you want to view the whole thing it runs into the email thing above) is really weird. Karrigan top 10 over donk and zywoo? In the news, every single player is referred to as "she" or "her," which is funny but not accurate. How the hell is the world #2 squad a 27% chance to win against BC game with four players and no IGL? Some players you don't care about consistently reject their team's (their team, not yours) extension offers and you get an email every time.
It has good bones and if you are looking for a silly CS-themed management game then sure, throw a few bucks at it. But right now it sems to have its focus in the wrong place and too little development has yet been spent on making the management part of the game thorough.
