Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (Xbox 360)
I had been watching out for this game ever since a screenshot showing Wehrmacht soldiers marching in front of a White House draped with Nazi flags had appeared on the ‘net from Codemasters to brazenly announce a new title in the works. The result, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, was a welcome twist to a genre saturated with WW2 shooters as it asked what would have happened if the Third Reich never fell. Much like what Resistance: Fall of Man had done on the PS3, it created an eerily familiar world that was different enough to offer its own, unique, stories and could have served as the start of a new franchise. It also looks like Codemasters had pushed this one out before it was ready.
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty asks what would have happened to the world if Winston Churchill had died in 1931 from being hit by a taxi cab while visiting New York instead of being crippled and forced to use a cane for the rest of his life. With his death and without his charismatic leadership, England fell and the Third Reich eventually won the war in Europe, going on to dominate the Middle East and toppling the Soviet Union in successive attacks. The war was over, and the Third Reich with its allies had won. The United States and few other countries had isolated themselves from the war, but in 1953, the Third Reich would reach across the Atlantic to finish the job.
That’s where you come in as Dan Carson, a New York construction worker that witnesses the Nazi blitzkrieg bombard the city in a surprise attack that he barely survives. For a construction worker, he can handle a gun pretty well and is at home with a grenade, but has the personality of a doorknob. Looking at the lavish amount of background material supplied on the web in made up news stories dressed to look as if they had been printed in from the 1950’s, they do a far better job in getting you excited about taking out more Nazis than what is in the game.
Stories aren’t something that most players look for in an action title like this one, but when they work well, they help create a unique experience that immerses the player in more than simply trying to survive into the next area. Freedom Fighters successfully blends the kind of alternate history that Turning Point attempts to do with a Soviet invasion of the United States. Turning Point starts off in almost the same way, but squanders it through a host of issues that dull the initial excitement of what it is trying to accomplish.
Anyone familiar with an FPS will easily pick up on the controls for this game and that’s where most of the problems begin. You can’t adjust the sensitivity of your controls by much as you are forced instead to choose between preset degrees which may irk players used to fine tuning the game, but to its credit, it felt somewhat smoother than what was in the demo. Shooting is as easy as pulling the trigger, you can aim right down the iron sight to get in those precision headshots, and a regenerative health system helps to keep you in the game.
You can only carry two weapons at any one time but don’t get too attached to them since they’ll be swapped out for weapons that the game thinks you will need when you make it to the next stage in a level. If you have full ammo for that MP50 and are lugging an MG42 machine gun to help mow through the Nazi hordes, be prepared to lose both for what will usually be a Colt pistol and a Tommy Gun. Did you simply give up your guns because they were un-American? I have no idea since the gameplay never provides an explanation of why or how you lost them.
Running at an enemy to bash them over the head with a melee attack which many other titles allow you to do is another story because in Turning Point’s bizarro world, you aren’t free to swing your weapon or punch at enemies on your own. You have to wait until a special icon comes up for you to do a “special move” to kill the poor soldier you grapple with or use them as a human shield. This can often be the easiest way to take out your foes as Carson might ram their head through a nearby television, or throw them over the edge of a building to the streets below, saving plenty of ammo for when you really need it.
As satisfying as that can be, it does little to hide the fact that it feels like Call of Duty kept you from using your knife until you meet the game’s random criteria for when you are near an enemy. Don’t be surprised if you reach an enemy and can’t grapple them, or if the enemy bashes you and you can’t do anything, thanks to the fact that the icon occasionally fails to appear. Having the ability to freely swing the butt of your gun would have helped in taking out crouching goosesteppers, but when they’re squatting, they generate some kind of invisible anti-melee field that prevents you from grappling with them until they stand up.
Even after making changes based on the somewhat negative feedback received from the demo, there’s plenty left to make you wonder if they should have done what Sierra did with Timeshift and delayed it for another year instead of earning it the dubious honor of feeling as if the world at large were taped together with digital duct tape. As a shooter, it’s fairly competent, but the controls will prove to be the least of your worries.
Aside from occasionally getting permanently stuck on debris in the game forcing you to exit and then reload a checkpoint just to free yourself, the checkpoint system will also ensure plenty of challenge in repeating most of the level in case you die as many points are poorly spaced. A diverse mix of Nazi elite will hide behind cover and occasionally shoot or walk right into your line of fire, although the game tries to spawn soldiers behind you from empty rooms in order to add that element of “surprise” since the AI is as smart as a rock.
Having the UE3 engine running the show won’t guarantee that the title will look like Gears of War or Bioshock, but with Turning Point, the quality of its scenes vacillate in being somewhat cool to something seen on the first Xbox. Even so, other issues break much of the immersion factor, making it feel as if the world of Turning Point were hanging on by a thread ready to snap. At least you can see your feet to make you feel like less of a floating gun with hands, the Wehrmacht sports new threads in the 1950’s to help them stand out, and the flags in the game don’t try to pretend that you are fighting someone other than the Third Reich.
Blurred textures fill much of the game, alternating between flat, smeared colors to bump mapped plastic. Low poly props create scenes that only look great from a distance in some cases, worse in others. At the start, a few buildings appear as smeared and washed out blocks. Looking down from the edge of a building at the busy street below shows off a string of moving cars crowding each lane with surprising detail, but how many people are going to check that out? Jets fly by in slow motion, and bodies often disappear right before your eyes.
Dying foes tumble as if they were inflated with helium and will occasionally fall through walls, or get stuck on surfaces as if pinned by invisible fly paper. On the other hand, the grapple animations look great, and explosions send billowing smoke and fire everywhere. Weapons sound satisfyingly brutal and loud, the Germans actually speak in German, and Michael Giacchino’s orchestrated score is fantastic as usual. The positives, however, only serve to underline the title’s other shortcomings such as the lack of lip syncing to spoken lines, or the unsatisfying ending for when you make through the brief, rental length, campaign.
Like the music, incredible moments in the game randomly drop in such as stepping onto the Tower Bridge in London for the first time or watching the occupied White House loom over the next hill, at least until the ugly textures and uninspired AI kill the moment. Multiplayer is available for more action if you want a break from the short campaign, but it feels as if it were added as an afterthought with only two modes: Deathmatch, and Team Deathmatch, and a max of eight players on a tiny handful of maps. It might as well have been left out entirely as the lobby seemed to be perpetually vacant, leaving you with little else to look forward to other than the single player achievements.
Codemasters had come out to say that critics had judged their game too harshly, that the “hardcore” didn’t quite get the idea that this was aimed at a casual audience. However, the problems in Turning Point go much further than simple demographics, and most every FPS out there has an “Easy” difficulty mode for casual players. There are moments when it can be a fun, but just as the concept art tantalizingly gives you a glimpse of what could have been, the problems that the game carries with it make such moments rare. Instead of rewriting history or in simply trying to keep up with it, much of Turning Point ultimately feels as if it had been left behind.
Primotech Rating: 
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