People often complain that the stories featured in video games are, for the most part, utter dross, with even the most celebrated of game plots barely holding a candle to what books and films have to offer. Once in a while, you will have a game come along with a really awesome premise. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is one of those games – in its initial stages, it offers a really thought provoking plot. Modern history fans will be able to tell you that Winston Churchill was struck by a taxi while in New York in 1931. At this time he was a diplomat, but he would become the Prime Minister of Britain, and a chief force behind the defeat of the Nazis. Turning Point proposes an alternate reality in which Churchill doesn't survive, thus never rising to power nor rallying the British people to counter the Nazi threat.

Something we come across all too often in gaming are those games which have awesome concepts, but just cannot execute them – Turning Point is the latest addition to the list. Spark Unlimited has this excellent premise with the alternate history thing, but they quickly ditch it for what's essentially a by-the-numbers World War II shooter, but with more problems than the cast of Diff'rent Strokes. The whole Churchill thing gets left by the wayside for a bog-standard Nazi invasion plot. The game opens with the invasion of New York City; your character, Carson, is hard at work on a high rise construction site when the Nazi Zeppelins appear. This triggers a pretty awesome, though highly unoriginal, set piece (see Freedom Fighters) where your average blue-collar Joe takes up arms and fights his way to the streets while the Nazi forces fill the Manhattan skyline. Zeppelins and paratroopers blacken the sky, buildings are collapsing around you, and the Nazis are killing your fellow workers.

From this point, the quality of the game hits rock bottom faster than the unfortunate soldier you throw off the construction site in the opening scene. Turning Point suddenly goes from awe inspiring set pieces to run-of-the-mill shooter faster than you can say "Die, Allied schweinhundt!" The problem is that Turning Point does not stop at just being average; terribly uninspired level design and painfully dull gunplay have you reaching for the power button by the time you reach ground level. After this point, the game seldom provides players with any real sense of structure – a random soldier will bark orders, and players have to follow them. It never really feels like the Americans are working towards a particular objective; in fact, the game plays out more as though the player is acting out on his own. Essentially, Carson goes from a construction worker to super soldier with little explanation. When you reach the game's totally unsatisfying ending, you can't help but wonder how they managed to mess up such a neat premise.

Chances are most people won't stick around to see Turning Point's ending; despite the game's short length, it is one of the dullest, bug-ridden games available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Most of the game is spent running from room to room through non-descript buildings, shooting Nazis with your typical range of World War II era weaponry. In typical modern first person shooter style, players can only hold two weapons at a time, and will heal automatically. Basic gunplay is totally unfulfilling; the weight and power of the guns is unsatisfying – such feelings are not helped by the fact that there are major issues with hit detection. A shot to the leg can often be as deadly as a head shot, and vice-versa, but never consistently, of course. Turning Point also attempts to incorporate a melee system which allows players to use enemies as human shields, throw them from atop buildings, and occasionally ram their head through a television set or drown them in a toilet. Apart from a single encounter at the start of the game, melee combat is best untouched, as it's mostly useless.

Turning Point's issues cannot all be blamed on a lack of testing, because there is a number of glaring design issues that also pull the game down. The guns featured in the game do not act in a believable fashion; the balance between weapons is completely off. The shotgun, for example, is ridiculously overpowered and stupidly accurate. The level design is often tedious and straightforward, and the only way the game can ever summon any sort of challenge is by throwing legions of soldiers against you and spread the checkpoints out so thinly across the level that you often have to repeat lengthy sections of the game if you do fall in battle. Turning Point's AI is laughable; your compatriots are constantly getting stuck in the environment or walking straight into a bevy of enemy fire, while your opponents run around blindly, and often times don't even react to your presence.

Our blue-collar friend's adventure through the Nazi-ridden American East Coast will last most players six hours at best, with absolutely no replay incentive beyond unlocking a few achievements. Turning Point offers a multiplayer mode, but it seems like Spark Unlimited has done this out of obligation, rather than putting any real thought and effort in. Multiplayer is pathetically basic, offering only Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and a handful of maps. The mechanics of the multiplayer mode are just as poorly executed as they are in single player, although the latency is surprisingly good. Actually getting a multiplayer game of Turning Point going is a difficult task in and of itself; most people are aware of the game's sheer awfulness and are staying away in droves.

From a visual perspective, Turning Point is awful, and not your regular "would look okay after ten beers" ugly; this game is horribly deformed, like a mutant freak you'd expect to see in a Troma film. The textures are blurry, suffering from a pop-in delay at the best of times. The frame rate is consistently struggling throughout the entire game, even during the cut scenes and scripted events, and gets bogged when there is a reasonable amount of action on screen. The player models are a little too blocky, and their animation is very stiff, as though they're being animated in a manner reminiscent of Weekend at Bernie's. On a slightly more positive note, Turning Point features a very stirring soundtrack, with many powerful orchestral themes playing in the game's more dramatic sequences.


Turning Point: Fall of Liberty should be in game design textbooks as an example of how one can fail to make the most of an interesting premise. The game fails on every level: it transforms an interesting 'what if?' scenario into a straightforward war tale, delivers painfully low quality gameplay with little regard for quality assurance, and looks like a monkey's breakfast. With some extra time in the oven and a few tweaks to its design and story, the game could have been something special. Instead, Turning Point ranks at the bottom of the ladder of modern first person shooter titles, and you would only waste valuable moments of your life by playing it.