To watch a FACEIT demo, open the match page on the FACEIT website (through a player profile and the stats section), click "Watch Demo" and download the archive, unpack the .dem file and run it in the in-game demo player (Shift+F2) or with the playdemo console command. That is how it worked in CS:GO, and the same principle carries over to CS2. Below is a step-by-step walkthrough with CS:GO-era screenshots; the current details for the new game are in the guide on how to watch FACEIT demos in CS2.
FACEIT is a third-party match platform for CS2 (and CS:GO before it) with its own anti-cheat and rating: ELO points and skill levels from 1 to 10.
Thanks to FACEIT you can:
Play in competitive mode in 5x5 format;
Participate in various 1x1, 2x2, 5x5 tournaments;
Raise your skill and level of play to qualify for future leagues such as FPL and FPL Challenger;
Earn platform rewards for your activity.
Basic access to FACEIT is free, but first you need to register:
Go to the official website of the platform;
Register using the link in the upper right corner of the page;
Fill in the necessary data, including nickname, full name, and date of birth;
Choose CS2 as your main game (it used to be CS:GO);
Connect a Steam account, from which all necessary game data will be parsed;
Download and install the FACEIT anti-cheat; on Windows it requires TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot.
With that done, you can move on to demos.
Why you need demos in CS:GO and CS2
To assess the skills of a cyber athlete, just loud words and statements are not enough. High-minded speeches need to be backed up with visuals, and we're not talking about screenshots that mean nothing. Every professional or semi-professional club has at least one analyst who analyzes game replays in detail, looking for mistakes, inaccuracies, and various solutions to situations.
Watching replays allows you to do many things:
Analyze your own mistakes. For example, you are repeatedly killed in the same place on the map, or the “ingenious” point of entry turns out to be maximally disadvantageous. You won’t see it from the first-person view, but if you switch to the enemy’s camera, the picture will immediately change.
Study the strategies of opponents from the enemy team. You can analyze timings, shot points, cohesion, movement paths, positions, formations, and more.
Learn about new spreads for offense and defense. Extremely useful in those cases when out of nowhere comes a smoke or Molotov, and you are left standing there, literally burning.
Identify cheaters. In the demo, you can clearly see how a player's weapon moves. Whether they fired through walls, turned away from a smoke screen in advance, or shot into the void, it is all visible.
All that remains is to figure out how to pull it all off. That’s what you came here for.
How to download and watch any demo from FACEIT
So, you want to carefully study someone’s replay to analyze the game, skills, features of the player, and other technical aspects. To do this, go to the FACEIT website, but don’t forget to pre-register and log in to the platform, otherwise it won’t let you in.
After that, in the search box, enter the nickname of the gamer you're interested in. As an example, let’s take s1mple’s profile.
Go to “Stats” and scroll down until you see the list of uploaded replays.
Click on any replay, and you’ll be redirected to a new tab. Go to “Overview” and click “Watch Demo.”
The system will automatically offer to download the archive with the replay. Save it to any folder on your PC. Note that a full demo takes tens of megabytes, so free up disk space in advance.
Then open the game and press Shift + F2 to open the internal demo player.
If the player does not see the demo, it is still archived (in CS:GO this was the *.gz format). Unpack it with WinRAR or 7-Zip. After that, everything should work.
In the demo player you can rewind, analyze the situation, speed up playback, and stop at any moment to study the details. Learn more in the guide to rewinding demos.
If you want to see only gameplay, without HUD elements or nicknames, open the developer console (~) and type:
cl_draw_only_deathnotices 1
How to record your own demo in the game
If you want to demonstrate your skills on camera, you don’t need to install additional software or a capture card. Just join any server (preferably official), and at the beginning of the match, open the console and type:
record name_demo (your chosen name, in Latin characters)
Avoid spaces in the file name. In CS:GO, recordings were saved to this directory:
Disk:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo\replays
In CS2 the folder structure changed: game files live in the game\csgo subfolder inside the Counter-Strike Global Offensive folder, so look for your recorded demos there. To stop recording, type stop in the console.
We hope these tips help you analyze gameplay, both other players' and your own. The sooner you spot mistakes and improve team coordination, the sooner you'll reach FACEIT level 10 and a high Premier rating.
