This passes for journalism nowadays? From a game preview article:

Before each session, players will choose to fight with one of two factions: Special Forces or Mercenaries – basically the equivalent of Red or Blue team. As you begin you’ll be given $2400, which you can use to buy various weapons for your loadout. Your default weapon is a pretty weak pistol and everything beyond that will cost you. An interesting twist is that you’ll be able to go through this process after every time you die. If you’re good enough you can just play with the pistol for a few lives and build up some cash to unlock the really powerful weapons. The penalty is that you lose the weapon you’ve bought each time you die.

Okay, not only does that sound exactly like Counterstrike, but Counterstrike also came out in 1999- a full 11 years before this game.

From the Wiki on Counterstrike:

A player can choose to play as one of eight different default character models (four for each side, although Counter-Strike: Condition Zero added two extra models, bringing the total to ten). Players are generally given a few seconds before the round begins (known as “freeze time”) to prepare and buy equipment, during which they cannot attack or walk/move (a player can still take damage, having the player drop from a certain height during freeze time was the only way a map designer could control the players starting “HP”). They can return to the buy area within a set amount of time to buy more equipment (some custom maps included neutral “buy zones” that could be used by both teams). Once the round has ended, surviving players retain their equipment for use in the next round; players who were killed begin the next round with the basic default starting equipment.

Sounds almost like the exact same game. This is why I don’t play Call of Duty style games, because the genre has been done to death by Counterstrike years before. These new games are stolen ideas with pretty graphics, and that’s not enough to get $60 out of me (hey, Counterstrike was free too, and Counterstrike Source was only $20.).