Title: Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
Platform: PC (review platform), PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: Spark Unlimited
ESRB Rating: T for Teen
I'm going to leave little room for interpretation here: This is a bad game.
Spark Unlimited's Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is also a curious invention for two reasons. First, the game is an attempt to shake up the World War II shooter genre, which has grown stale and tiresome in recent years. Few people would understand that fact better than the staff of Spark Unlimited, which was created by former Medal of Honor designers and cut its teeth on the respectable console title Call of Duty: Finest Hour. But to their credit, Spark and Codemasters have tried something different with Turning Point by presenting an alternate timeline where Winston Churchill is hit by a taxi and killed eight years before the start of WWII. As a result, Nazi Germany takes down Europe with ease and then launches an invasion of the East Coast of the United States.
Turning Point succeeds in piquing the curiosity, of course. But then the game starts and that's when terrible things begin to happen. After latching on to me, Turning Point descended into a kind of obscene death roll, spinning me around with inconceivably poor design and drowning me with ugly graphics, performance issues, and weak gameplay. The game appears to specifically target gamers who enjoy their WWII shooters but want something fresh.
And that's the second reason Turning Point is so interesting. In a recent interview with Videogamer.com, Spark Unlimited CEO Craig Allen responded to Turning Point's generally poor reviews by saying the title was a "high concept idea" that wasn't made for the "core gamer." Allen added that the developer did the best they could with the time and money they had available. These statements seem at best entirely misguided (if a WWII FPS isn't for the core gamer, I'm not sure what is) and at worst slightly disingenuous (a "high concept" game should have more of a story than Turning Point's thin plot).
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty has interesting vehicles like the patrol zeppelins, but limited gameplay keeps you from taking down the mighty aircraft.
I suspect - but, of course, cannot prove - that Spark Unlimited sacrificed a significant amount of work and effort on Turning Point in favor of Legendary: The Box, the developer's buzz-worthy supernatural shooter scheduled for release later this year. How you release two next-gen titles in one year, I have no idea. I'm also puzzled how an experienced developer/publisher like Codemasters would let a major title like Turning Point go to market feeling unfinished and half-baked.
The game didn't take long to disappoint me. In fact, it started before I even began the first level. I knew there were going to be problems when the title screen loaded with the words "Press ENTER to Continue..." and I sadly discovered I couldn't use the mouse. That's right; you have to navigate all of the game's menu screens using the directional keypad arrows instead of the simple, tried and true point-and-click method that has served PC gamers so well for years. That minor annoyance was a sign of things to come.
After brief introduction that sets up the alternate history, Turning Point begins with the playable character - a blue collar construction worker named Dan Carson - working atop a larger skyscraper in Manhattan. Suddenly, a massive Nazi aerial assault appears on the horizon and begins bombing and shooting everything in sight. It sounds like a thrilling opening, but the game simply doesn't do the premise justice. For starters, you have to escape the attacking zeppelins and fighter planes by navigating your way through a silly maze of steel girders, sans weapons, and hopping around ledges like you're in a platformer instead of action game.
After a few minutes, players begin to tangle with descending Nazi paratroopers and can pick up a machine gun. But then another flaw in Turning Point rears its ugly head: poor level design. The game feels like a rail shooter, with little room within the war-torn New York City to explore. Players are boxed into narrow maps with artificial boundaries and forced to fight enemy Nazi soldiers who engage in scripted and unfortunately brainless assaults on Carson, his fellow citizens and members of the U.S. National Guard.
It occurred to me recently that the original Call of Duty, one of my all-time favorite shooters, is an extremely simple game. It has no discernable characters. It has no discernable story, either. There is no cohesive narration, and there is no plot twist or fresh angle. It's just a WWII shooter. But what Call of Duty did better than any WWII shooter before or after it was create tightly-wound, meticulously designed battles full of tension that are pulled straight out of war movies like "Saving Private Ryan," "The Longest Day," and "Enemy at the Gates," not to mention the TV mini-series "Band of Brothers." Infinity Ward then filled those battles with brilliant combat scenarios, expertly-designed gameplay and superb enemy AI. In short, there was nothing original at all about Call of Duty. It was just a masterpiece of game development.
The opposite can be said of Turning Point. It feels like Spark Unlimited and Codemasters used nearly all of the contents of their metaphorical talent jar to come up with the premise and some interesting conceptual designs of what the Nazi War Machine would look like in an alternate timeline, with giant aircraft carrier zeppelins hovering over Manhattan and prototype Super-Heavy tanks rolling down the streets. But you can rarely interact with these spectacles, and the game's animation and graphics engine (Unreal Engine 3 in another less-than-flattering display) don't deliver the kind of exciting visuals you'd expect. In fact, the graphics are a mess, and the animation is rife with bizarre physics glitches and rag doll effects that make Nazi soldiers look like Regan McNeil.
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