Turning Point: Fall of Liberty from Spark Unlimited asks the question of what would have happened if Winston Churchill was killed in a car accident before WWII. Well, for starters Great Britain would have fallen to Nazi Germany. Secondly, for some apparent reason Dewey actually would have defeated Truman in 1948, and by the early 1950s the Germans would have begun an all-out offensive against the United States. It’s a unique concept and an interesting twist to the otherwise bland and played out WWII shooter.

The game has you playing as a construction worker named “Carson”. You get caught high in the skies of New York City just as the Nazis begin their offensive against the United States. You quickly meet up with a Sergeant from the New York National Guard, and from there you join in their actions as they rage a guerrilla war against the occupying German forces. The story, which is rather thin, is told through a series of news reports and poorly-animated cutscenes of your other characters as Carson, like oh so many First-Person Shooter Protagonists, simply stands there in a dumbfounded silence. The voice work is passable, for the most part. The news reporter, who tells the story of the resistance fighters continued attempts to fend off the German invaders, is performed especially well. Unfortunately, outside of the news reports and occasional cutscenes that only work as a set-up to explain your next mission, there is no real story.

You fight through New York City, Washington D.C., and London, though you never really feel like you’re progressing towards any of those locations. After you complete one mission, the game simply throws you into the next. When I completed the New York portion of the game and realized I was in Washington D.C., I literally exclaimed “Wait, I’m in Washington now?”. The sudden realization that you are in a different city than you were just last mission can be a bit disorienting, and take you out of the game experience.

Turning Point was developed by Spark Unlimited, who should be ashamed of themselves. The controls are simply horrendous, with bland and at times frustrating combat and seemingly tacked-on environment interaction portions that try to break up the monotony of “shoot the Nazis”. The combat is especially awful as aiming is next to impossible without the aim assist that can be activated in the menu. This is because there are only three sensitivity settings for the right thumbstick, and the discrepancy between them is a little jarring. The lowest setting makes your character handle like a tank, the medium setting makes aiming a herculean effort, and the high setting is just plain unfair. In fact, to properly describe how unusable the highest sensitivity setting is, just imagine using an optical mouse to play Counter-Strike, with the mouse sensitivity set to maximum, and your mouse pad is made of ice and covered in grease. It’s a little something like that. Thankfully most of the time you don’t have to worry about aiming as the Nazis are more than happy to run directly into your line of fire. The enemy AI is practically non-existent. Often times they will take cover in front of an object (instead of, you know, behind), or simply stand in the middle of the hallway as they fire their magical sub-machine guns that never need to be reloaded. With AI like this, it sounds like this game would be a cakewalk, right? Hardly. You see, the game will counteract the bad enemy AI by simply cheating.

Yes, cheating.

I can count more than a handful of times where I will have cleared out a room, only to be shot in the back at point blank range by an enemy that has somehow magically materialized in the room I have just cleared. In fact, there was more than one instance of the enemies popping onto the screen right in front of me, shouting German obscenities as they lay waste to you. This downright cheap way of killing you, as well as a checkpoint system that can be described as simply “unforgiving” artificially inflates the time you would otherwise spend blowing through Turning Point. Even with the computer cheaply knocking you off, I completed the game in just over four hours. If not for the fact that I had to repeat one bastard section on the final stage (a zeppelin) about a dozen times, I could have blown through this game in three hours.

The presentation is, at best, lackluster. As mentioned above the voice work is decent, but outside of that the sound is very average. The weapons in Turning Point sound very weak, many of them only emitting soft pops when fired. In fact, all the combat noises, from SMG fire to grenade explosions to even tanks firing their cannons sound like they’re toys. The fact that the weapons don’t particularly have much recoil doesn’t help to offset this issue. Another issue with the sound is the quality of the sound itself – everything sounds very muffled. None of the sounds are all that clear, and many of the sounds either sound muffled or staticky.

As far as graphics are concerned, to call Turning Point “atrocious” would be an understatement. Turning point looks like a first generation GameCube game, with bland and muddy textures, and almost zero anti aliasing that make everything look very rigid and jagged. There are also a substantial number of graphical hiccups and glitches that, at times, make the game virtually unplayable. More than once a character’s textures will pop in and out, and there are countless clipping issues that not only prevent you from moving on, but can actually kill you if you get caught in a swinging door. What makes these graphical issues even more unforgivable is that the game supposedly runs on the Unreal III engine. I mean, it’s in the opening credits when you boot the game.

Overall, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is an interesting concept that, in practice, was bungled, bobbled and otherwise ruined with sloppy game design, poor enemy AI, lousy controls, pathetic storytelling, sub-par sound, disgustingly bland graphics and an ending that has to be one of the biggest cop outs in recent gaming memory. 2008 is only a couple of months old, but there is already a lead contender for “Worst Game of the Year”.

NOTE: Multiplayer was not discussed in this review for a simple reason: It didn’t work.

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