Turning Point: Fall of Liberty review (PC)

Once in a while you read a story or an online blog about a new game coming out and the overall idea piques your curiosity - the main reason I bought Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. The Nazis win WWII and rule Europe before deciding in their infinite wisdom that the good old U S of A should ruddy well bow to the might of the Fuhrer and his snappily dressed buddies. So off they go goose-stepping their way across the ocean and before you know it the rascals have taken New York, Manhattan and Washington before heaving the old leader out on his ear and sliding a puppet of their own into the nice, warm, newly vacated presidential chair.

This, of course, is where you come in to save the day and reap the glorious rewards of freedom. Hmmm. Let’s just say that freedom has looked better in the past and will, without a doubt, look better in the future. The graphics in Turning Point are drab to the point of feeling like your monitor has overheated and the colours and textures have all melted into a stew of brown sludge. There are some moments of sparkle (pardon the pun) like the initial escape from your workplace atop the mighty skyscraper you were in the middle of building with Larry, Curly and Mo or whatever their names might be. Buildings explode and the enemy fly by, zooming to and fro, until the game decides for a few seconds not to play and goes to sulk in the corner while the frame rate becomes a slide show.

Gameplay?

What about the game play I hear you cry? Um, there’s the rub. Shoddy graphics could be forgiven if the underlying game was fun and as you have probably guessed, it’s not. There is something very wrong with Turning Point and it isn’t just the ridiculously bad AI where the Nazis kill themselves with grenades like suicide was part of their combat training. Nor is it the fact that if you wait long enough they will always pop up from cover and make a run for you. It’s the overall forced feel of the game where the idea is one that could have made a good game but no-one had a clue what to do with them so decided just to have a guy running about and shooting some people who were well known baddies in the past. After all, everybody loves to take a few pot shots at the Nazis right? How can it fail? Easily.

A game has to be fun and have atmosphere to suck you in to whatever premise it has for your actions. Turning Point is missing a major part of what makes a game good. It fails to make you care. It fails to make you care about any of the characters you meet in the game because they are just two dimensional puppets in a very flimsy story that never takes off after the initial high of the escape from the skyscraper. In fact you could say that coming down from the skyscraper is the real comedown because you will not succeed in reaping any more enjoyment from the game than those you cherished in the first few minutes.

So, back to an earlier point about frame rate issues, of which there are plenty. The levels in the game are not huge and even though there are loading points the game seems to want to load God knows what at any given time and cripple the game for a couple of very long seconds. I have a PC capable of throwing Crysis about at a very nice pace and here I am cursing at my screen because a game that a Casio calculator could probably run is chugging frames along at a rate of one a century.

Lack of Polish

The sound in the game is your average fare, neither good nor bad. It does what it says on the tin. The weapons sound as you would expect, although don’t expect many weapons. But then that’s hardly surprising since the game is over before you can grapple an enemy to the ground (the one cool thing about the game) and you are left thinking “You’ve got to be kidding me! Already?” Or at least I was.

You can’t help but feel cheated by the lack of polish overall on this game as a PC gamer. Spark has taken the tried and tested graphical powerhouse that is the Unreal III Engine and churned out a straight port of a console game that takes all the power of the modern PC and totally ignores it. Try customising the controls. Is that an X-box controller I see before me? I think so! Is that the Uninstall icon I am clicking on like a man possessed? Jawohl!