Sem-Realism only
Unlike the other two big realism mods for UT, (Strike Force and Infiltration) Tactical Ops stays on the semi-realism side rather than converting to the extreme realism prevalent in SF and INF. Thus, you don't have to be a huge realism fanatic in order to enjoy what Tactical Ops has to offer.
I'm gonna shoot you!
The weapons in TO have been tweaked once again, this time to make them more balanced. There are a ton of new weapons sounds for almost every single weapon, and as before, they sound superb. This time around, however, the sound a bit more robust. The firing effects has also been improved, and while it's only a superficial improvement, it sure does look nice.
Shotguns have been tweaked so that they have a static accuracy, meaning that your aim is not affected by movement. The Smoke Grenade has been improved. Also, now you can hide your weapons so that you fool your enemies into thinking you are weaker than you really are.
Where are you bot?
For the most part, the bot AI remains the same, which means that they still provide convincingly human-like fights. However, this patch does fix a bug where the bots couldn't find where the C4 was located. Now they will try to defuse the bomb once it is planted.
How do you like your maps
While most of the maps remain relatively the same, there have been a couple of maps that were updated. Monastery, Ransom2, GetAway, IcyBreeze, Titanic, Resurrection, Spynet2, Verdon, and Province have all been tweaked a bit to make them more balanced. The maps remain realistic in nature, and they still provide the same glorious action as they always did.
A bunch of new stuff
There's a lot of other miscellaneous features, but I'll just go over the bigger and more important ones. Starting off small, the bloodtrails code, flashlight, and laser dot have been optimized.
Money amounts has also been changed. The losing team will not earn more money, with up to triple the amount if they lose 3 or more rounds in a row. Rescuing hostages now awards you with $1000 rather than $700, and evidence kept at the end of the round will grant you $500 instead of $300.
These are some additional features. The Skin Detail setting is back, which allows you to set the amount of detail you can see on a gun, pickup, player, etc. Thus, for those of you on lower-end systems, you can get a couple more Frames Per Second by lowering the amount of detail. Lastly, when spectating, alt-fire switches between "behind" and "inside" view. So, you can view to the action from first-person perspective now.
Change that interface!
The Selection menu has been improved as well to allow for more options. There is a new Random Team button so that you can enter a game quickly and start fighting right away. For those of you who choose a team, however, you get the option of choosing the player model. I thought the menu in this version of TO is much better, especially with the random team function.
*Squish* "Nice!"
Since Tactical Ops is such a huge mod, it's impossible to get rid of every bug, but the team manages to crush a whole lot of them. I won't list them all here, but the team fixes bugs such as the C4 timer and counter, not being able to plant C4/buy weapons, clipping bug, unlimited changing team hack, stopping the [TO]Elfbot, etc. As always, there are bugs still left uncrushed, but with a mod as big as this, a couple bugs here and there are acceptable.
A great mod
For me, I enjoyed Tactical Ops thoroughly since it does not require the player to be a fan of extreme realism mods. To me, Tactical Ops presents the right balance between realism and unrealism. Sure this is a realistic mod, but there are some things that the mod does not have to keep it a bit unrealistic, such as few aiming penalties compared to INF. That's probably the main reason why Tactical Ops has such a big community.
-Peter Yu
