Movement Guide: How To Improve Your CS2 Movement
If you’re aiming to reach the top of the ranking spectrum in competitive CS2, having a good aim is crucial. Counter-Strike is all about hitting your enemies’ heads before they can hit yours, which is why you should constantly be focused on refining your aiming capabilities. However, your aim isn’t the only thing that defines you as a CS2 player. In fact, you can be the best aimer in the world and still be hard-stuck at Master Guardian if you don’t work on improving other aspects of your gameplay.
Movement in CS2 is one of the most important game mechanics that you need to learn and master if you’re looking to get good at the shooter. Having good movement will not only enable you to get out of sticky situations in combat, but it’ll also enable you to take better gunfights and win more duels overall.
However, getting good movement in CS2 isn’t an easy task. Chances are that you may have to dedicate hundreds of hours in the game to learning movement mechanics if you’re looking to master this art.
Fortunately, there are a number of shortcuts that you can take to make your road to learning CS2 movement a bit smoother. With these tricks, you’ll be able to perform the most difficult jumps in CS2 while also hitting some perfect bhops that’ll leave your friends jealous.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at some useful tips to improve your movement in CS2.
5 Tips To Improve Your CS2 Movement
Here are five tips and tricks that you can adopt to swiftly improve your movement in CS2.
1. Air Strafing
The concept of air strafing (often simply referred to as ‘strafing’) in CS2 can often seem overwhelming to newer players, but it’s quite simple in practice. Air strafing will enable your character to hit the maximum speed when you’re in mid-air and is also crucial to hit consistent bunny hops - a mechanic we’ll get into later.
To air strafe in CS2, you have to press the appropriate movement key (‘a’ or ‘d’) while simultaneously moving your mouse in the direction you want to strafe in. For instance, you need to move your mouse left when you’re pressing ‘a’ and vice versa. On top of that, you have to let go of your forward key (‘w’) as soon as you hit your jump, otherwise, your velocity will drop and you won’t be able to air strafe.
To cover the maximum distance from a jump in CS2, you need to toggle your air strafes between left and right, but you’ll be needing a lot of practice to pull this off perfectly.
There are a number of video tutorials available online to help you understand air strafing better. We recommend checking out the air strafing guide from Launders.
2. Bunny Hopping
Once you get the hang of air strafing, you may want to start practicing bunny hopping (better known as ‘bhopping’). Bunny hopping is an extremely useful mechanic in CS2 that can also be incredibly fun to perform. It can help you maneuver through maps at great speeds while also enabling you to reach some areas of certain maps that are otherwise unreachable.
Bunny hopping is essentially combining your jumps with your air strafes in order to consistently hit the maximum velocity when in the air. If you’re doing it correctly, your character will be able to maintain the max speed and you can make rotations a lot quicker than usual.
You can check out a video tutorial on bunny hopping by YouTuber MrMaxim.
3. KZ Maps
KZ maps are one of the most convenient ways to refine your movement in CS2. For those who aren’t familiar with KZ maps, they are community-created CS2 maps that put your movement skills to the test.
When playing KZ maps, you have to rely on your movement to get you through some difficult sections that may include long jumps, high jumps, bhops, and other aspects of CS2 movement.
If you start playing KZ maps, your movement in CS2 will almost certainly improve to a great extent. It won’t take long for you to start seeing a noticeable difference in your skills involving CS2 movement.
4. Counter-Strafing
While the aforementioned steps helped you improve your maneuverability on the battlefield, learning how to counter-strafe will enable you to get the upper hand over your enemies during combat. Counter-strafing is an extremely simple albeit useful mechanic in CS2 that you can learn in only a few minutes.
Counter-strafing is essentially stopping your character’s movement almost instantaneously before you fire your weapon. To execute it properly, you need to tap the opposite key to the direction you’re currently moving in. By doing so, you can negate your moving inaccuracy and fire your shots much more accurately than when moving.
For instance, let’s say that you’re strafing to your left when you see an enemy. To counter-strafe, you need to let go of your ‘a’ key while simultaneously tapping the ‘d’ key on your keyboard before you fire your shot. You’ll be surprised to see how precisely your bullets land once you learn this mechanic.
You can find a video tutorial on counter-strafing by ‘fl0m’ here.
5. Practice
As mentioned earlier, mastering your movement in CS2 is not an easy task, and it may take a lot of time for you to be able to hit consistent air strafes and bhops. This is why, you need to practice and work on your movement regularly if you’re looking to master the art.
Hop onto a KZ server, or create a server of your own to practice some bhops. You can also queue for a deathmatch to work on your counter-strafing skills. If you focus on actively improving your movement, you’ll find yourself gliding through the ranking spectrum of the title.
Conclusion
This concludes our list of the best tips and tricks that you can use to improve your movement in CS2. And lastly, remember to have fun and enjoy the process of learning and mastering CS2 movement. Aspects like bunny hopping and surfing can be incredibly fun at times, especially if you’re on an online server with friends. At the end of the day, Counter-Strike is a video game, and if you’re not having fun when learning it, you should consider taking a break and returning at some point in the future.
