Turning Point: Fall of Liberty Review
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is looking to be a World War Two style shooter with a difference, but is an alternate reality plotline, a fantastic musical score by Michael Giacchino and the chance to fight Nazi hordes invading America enough to make it stand out?
Turning Point certainly starts out with a great idea, presenting us with an alternate history world in which Winston Churchill died in a cab accident in New York before World War Two. (Like all the best stories, this one has a basis in truth, as Churchill was actually hit by a New York cabbie in 1931. He lived to tell the tale, but walked with a cane for the rest of his life-Ed.) Lacking his leadership Britain surrenders to Germany early in the war, allowing the Nazi War machine time to gear itself up for the conquest of the United States. Turning Point starts as the Germans make their move on an isolationist and unprepared America.
It sees you playing as Dan Carson, a New York construction worker in 1953, who looks up and see’s the sky filled with hordes of war planes, blimps and paratroopers as Germany launches a huge sneak attack to put America under the iron heel of the Nazi regime. Yes, you heard right, with the extra years of development they had to prepare, the Nazi’s made battle blimps. (Who doesn’t love that idea?-Ed) Not being one to take kindly to Germans in massive Assault blimps trying to rain terror on your neighbourhood, you throw the nearest paratrooper off the building, grab his gun and head off to counter the Nazi threat, joining the Resistance to restore liberty from sea to shining sea.
It all sounds like a promising backdrop but despite its lofty ambitions Turning Point never really takes advantage of this premise and technical problems leave the game a hugely missed opportunity. The massive set piece opening is a case in point. It gives you the feeling of frantic panic you’d expect, as you have to scramble your way down from a New York skyscraper construction site with the sky erupting in battle around you, but even as you do you’ll start to notice that Turning Point has a serious bunch of problems. Let’s start with the basics. As the skies above you fill with the various planes and blimps attacking New York, you’ll notice that the game starts to struggle graphically, with some pretty jagged edges on everything, stuttering frame rates and some of the ugliest textures since the Quake era on the walls, floors and buildings. Things look fine in the distance, but get messy as you get closer or they move too fast. It’s like the game has bitten off more than it can chew, but you’re left wondering why when you remember that it’s powered by the Unreal Engine, the same one that Gears of War uses. This kind of slow down happens every time there’s a major scripted event like an explosion or a wall falling down. At times Turning Point feels like you’re playing a last generation game.
The first level sets the tone for the game, and once you’ve made your way down to the ground things don’t get any better, with level after level of repetitive linear corridors and drab buildings. The environments are correct for the period, but just seem lifeless up close. You only get inspiration from the occasonal cool backdrop, like the collapsed top half of the Chysler building, or the Nazi occupied Whitehouse lawn.Beyond that there are things either broken or obviously incomplete in Turning Point, like bombs that hit the ground with explosions but leave no visible damage, subway train windows that are partially smashed and don’t break when you shoot them, ladders that are suspended in mid -air without proper support and frustrating buttons to open doors requiring pin point centring before the hand icon to use them appears. When you climb ladders or scale things the game briefly moves back into third person view to show you clambering around, but the animation on Dan is jerky and unconvincing for the most part.
Some of this might be excusable if the games combat was up to standard, graphics aren’t everything, but it isn’t. There’s an inexcusably unpolished level of game play in Turning Point. You have two weapons to switch between and a couple of grenades to toss as you run through the repetitive linear levels, with most of the combat focused around your struggle to overcome the games janky hit detection. Zooming in to shoot doesn’t help as the iron sights on the guns fill up nearly half the screen making it hard to even see enemies. It’s all just a buggy version of what you’ve seen in games like Call of Duty. The weapons are fairly uninspiring in their design, through at least they’re authentic and some are prototypes of guns the Germans were actually developing. But massive sights you can’t see through and the inability to hit the broadside of a barn make most of that a moot point. Turning Points one slight combat innovation is its melee system. Pressing B has you grabbing onto enemies and despatching them in an occasionally funny context based way, like pitching them off a building, drowning them in a toilet bowl or using them as human shields. But even this mechanic gets old after a while and it’s only really at the end of the game, when the game just throws loads of bad guys at you that you even need to bother with the human shield.
The enemies you fight are nothing to write home about either. German troops with some pretty ridiculous googles and non-descript grey or brown uniforms glide across the ground, running at you with unconvincing jerky movements. Their death animations are just as bad, with them mostly falling to the ground like puppets with their strings cut. There isn’t even any blood when you kill enemies and they feel really plastic. Their AI doesn’t do them any favours either, they never try to flank you, never use any tactics but just come running at you. The only time they present a threat is when the game throws hordes of them at you in an attempt to over whelm you. Or when the game uses things like Assault blimps with searchlights that ignore the crowds of fleeing people or other troops to only target you.
Add to this the abundant glitches and annoyances like weapons that drop out of enemies hands and float in the air, enemies that don’t notice you as you come up to them and some of the most unbalanced check points we’ve seen in a while, and you’ll see why Turning Point is such a difficult game to enjoy, despite our love of the alt-world premise.
You take the fight across the States right into the Whitehouse to remove a Nazi quisling President and travel all the way to London and back, and this should have made a roller coaster of a game, but uninspired combat and bland graphics make it hard to care or get a real sense of place. There are cut scenes between each level, and while some actually raise some interesting questions about why we fight for liberty in these kinds of situations, they have little connection to actual game play and end up quite forgettable. It’s a shame, because some of them are quite iconic, like the collapsing buildings in New York with crowds of people running through dust clouds - clearly inspired by 9/11, or the sight of the Whitehouse flying a Nazi flag. It doesn’t help that Dan Carson himself is pretty much a cipher, and while you’ll feel suitably heroic in your actions at the end of the game, you never feel like he’s a real person.
Soaring above all this however is an amazing 1940’s style musical score by composer Michael Giacchino. It’s a grand orchestral score that gives the game what little epic feel it has, with rousing action music and subtle quiet pieces where appropriate. It’s so good that we’d quite like to own it separately from the game. Sadly, the games lacking visuals and boring game play cancel out much of the music’s effect as you play.
Multiplayer in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty feels very much like an after thought and has just two modes: deathmatch and team deathmatch. You can to play as Nazi soldiers or as the American Resistance but as multi-player is plagued by the same problems as the main game and there was little reason for us to return to it after a few matches.
There are times when a good concept just isn’t enough, when it can only carry a game so far and without the game play chops to carry it off, all that’s left is a sad echo of what might have been or worse yet a bad game. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is a perfect example of that. There are some great ideas in it, and a couple of nice set pieces but they aren’t enough to save the game from some of its basic failings. It left us with a wistful feeling of ‘what could have been’, which is kind of ironic given the cool ‘What if’ premise of the game. Perhaps it just needed a few months more development time, but as it is Turning Point is best avoided.
UKMusic.com rating: 1.5/ 5- A promising idea marred by poor execution on all fronts
Written by Sam Bandah
