Peculiar; I like the blurring, but it's too unrealistic with it's strength. Only a blind-ish person would see like that, try waning the radial blur.
The strength is variable to an extent. You're right though, but usually in games you play the game as though you we're looking through a video camera (eg. eyes don't lens flare).
This gives the opportunity to emphasise visual effects that normally wouldn't be noticeable from viewing with the eyes. For example, the HDR effect does happen with your eyes but because your eyes are so fast at adapting to changing light the effect is hardly noticeable.
In games, the effects are overdone otherwise it would be pretty pointless as you wouldn't really notice them. So with this effect, your eyes have a pretty large DOF so you don't notice the blurring much except at extremes (staring at a pencil infront of your face, contrasted with the periphial vision). That's why it looks much blurrier than you would think of in real life.
Thanks for raising this, and all of your comments.
hmmm... bit weard... especially cuz its in a top-down game. Ow and btw, those (tank) sprites seem to be comming from close combat (am I right? great game btw). Im giving this a 7/10 cuz its alright.
Here is a simple but cool effect, to emulate depth of field in a 2D game.
