Turning Point: Fall of Liberty

"A New Take"

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is a game with either really high or very low expectations - after all, you only bought this game because of the alternate history take with Winston Churchill dying. You damn sure didn't buy it to fight Nazis in New York. So to get your money's worth, you need one or two of three things: 1.) great/unique presentation (graphics and sound), 2.) great/unique story, 3.) great/unique gameplay. Seeing as how this is a FPS, 3 is already out, and as you progress through Turning Point, you realize there is next to no story. You're a freedom fighter (oh, if only..) running up and down ladders to kill off what feels like the entire Nazi army by yourself while innocent civilians run by stupidly and get shot. Well, story and gameplay are hard-coded, but graphics are something that can be helped.

PRESENTATION

Using graphical tweaks, Turning Point can actually turn out to look quite amazing. Running at resolutions higher than 1024x768 with forced anti-alias and antistrophic shows off Turning Point's graphics as being considerably higher than most critics' perceived views by removing a ton of the jagged lines and upping the texture qualities significantly. The game is no Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, Crysis, FEAR, or any other mega block buster games, but you should have known that just by watching the low quality intro cutscene with absolutely no substance or plot besides the "Churchill is dead" bit. Its like the game devs just brainstormed ideas one day, came up with that one sentence, and based a game off of it. While graphics are not an outstanding plus by themselves, combined with a decent soundscore, presentation is this game's main focal point.

Graphics & Music: 8/10

STORY

Story can make the most abominable piece of garbage standable, and boost critics score by several points, therefore appealing to a much wider audience. In Turning Point, you're some construction worker in New York working on top of a developing skyscraper when the Nazis hit. You take the somewhat obvious linear paths and slowly make your way down to ground level, killing several Nazis with rifles and submachine guns along the way. The visuals and explosions that you see along the way look great enough, the textures look decent even, but there's no story or plot to be seen. Upon reaching the bottom, you cue a low-res cutscene where you join a resistance group after being barked at by some military guy recruiting a civilian army. In the next level, you grab some guns and start shooting Nazis. After shooting the Nazis, you go up on a roof to shoot some Nazis. After you're on the roof, you head down to the street again to - make a guess - shoot more Nazis. And blow up a tank. Then you head back to the place you started from to shoot more Nazis.

The game definitely lacks in the story department. But realistically, does it need very much story? Were you expecting some love story to be mixed up in the fright of a Nazi invasion? Certainly its no Freedom Fighters, you never get to know the main character, conversations are entirely geared towards combat, and there are no memorable characters or even enemies. I would almost argue that the game doesn't need it, however; even on Normal difficulty, the fighting with Nazis was intense and looked presentable. I was always moving from shooting one Nazi to the next two or three that were sneaking up on me (relatively speaking; the AI isn't that intelligent). I would argue that Turning Point doesn't need much story if it keeps up the intense combat.

PLOT: (4/10)

GAMEPLAY

To borrow from another review, "You shoot stuff, you hide to regenerate health, you shoot stuff again." Its your basic run-of-the-mill solo FPS. I'll keep this section short and sweet. The game has auto-aim enabled, which suggests that either the AI is ridiculously hard and you need it, or the combat is not the focus and you're being helped to move into more story. Neither is the case in Turning Point, so it all boils down to intense gunplay. You have an unusually wide variety of weapons to choose from throughout the game, and on occasion you will run out of ammo. This is perfectly alright, however, because you can use the somewhat buggy grappling system to either instant-kill an enemy or use them as a human shield, leaving you practically invincible for the duration.

Unlike many other critics, I thought level design was enjoyable and, albeit linear, very unique. Everyone has played games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein where you run through numerous halls and passages to get from one location to another, but in Turning Point, with proper optimizations to graphics, the levels look decent and well put together. You'll find yourself climbing ladders and shimmying along pipes to get from place to another, sure, but there is a sense of some atmosphere when you walk into a dimly lit room only to find that what you thought was an empty room was teeming with enemies, and not just because they were suddenly spawned there. Just when I thought the monotony of those blond open-mouthed Germans would never end, once nighttime sets in and you're venturing through a destroyed train system, here are these new Germans in gas masks with eerily glowing eyes. I thought I might have been playing FEAR for a second as these creepy Germans lobbed grenades at me and ducked behind wreckage. You could just run in and kill the two lonely guardsmen in a blaze of gunfire, but you'd be exposed for the multiple Germans waiting to kill you on an upper landing.

When it comes to gameplay, you either shoot, lob, or grapple, but because the fighting is so intense, it becomes perfectly acceptable and maybe even slightly challenging.

GAMEPLAY: (6/10)

OVERALL SCORE: (6/10)

With the right graphics optimizations, Turning Point can be somewhat enjoyable. Is it the best game? Is it the worst game? Certainly neither, but if you like the idea of fighting off hordes of intense Nazis in New York by yourself, by all means.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/02/08

Game Release: Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (US, 02/26/08)