Visually, one of the interesting effects you’ll notice comes in the form of the focus effect that a player gets when in ironsight mode on a DirectX 9 videocard. In this, the player’s point-of-aim is in crisp focus, while everything else on the screen is blurred out, with the blur becoming progressively heavier the further from the point-of-aim. While it isn’t exactly how things work in the real world, it is an interesting feature and will hopefully find its way into future Half-Life 2-engine realism mods like Insurgency.

All in all, SMOD: Tactical is a good example of how a solid gaming engine like Half-Life 2’s can be wrangled into a satisfying tactical experience with a little bit of time and effort. For the relatively small download size, and considering that it is only in alpha status currently, it offers a good amount of fun and is worth checking out for anyone who owns Half-Life 2. While it isn’t trying to compete with games like Operation Flashpoint, Red Orchestra, or Raven Shield in the tactical arena, the simple fact that you get to run around the Half-Life 2 world with high-quality ironsights, nifty new visual effects,

and more challenging tactical gameplay makes it worth checking out. For a fairly simple singleplayer mod-of-a-mod, it’s quite a bit of fun.

As far as the future is concerned, the author of the mod, Jason “phatcat” Castillo, continues to update his Tactical mod for HL 2. He also plans to work on a from-scratch mod in the future that will take the lessons learned from this and other tactical games and make something “more” than just what the Tactical mod is. There’s no ETA, of course, but based upon what we’ve seen so far the wait is bound to be worth it.

Download this mod from Filefront, read about SMOD, and about the Tactical mod, by Jason "phatcat" Castillo and Tan “Shakken” Shan-Wen at its official site.

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Dslyecxi is the author of “Tactical Gaming Done Right,” “The Best of Tactical Gaming: Infiltration,” and runs a large Operation Flashpoin/Armed Assault tactical gaming group that has spawned many in-depth after-action reports (AAR’s) that can be found on his site.