Turning Point: Fall of Liberty

Contemplating alternate dimensions will melt your brain. There are theories which propose that every possibility - from the submolecular to the macroscale - leads to a new dimension. An idea that yields unimaginably huge numbers of realities sitting side by side, some just a molecule different, and others that are radically changed.

Turning Point takes a common change as its inspiration, where the Nazis do somewhat better in World War II and invade the United States. But after playing it, it's not that nightmare dimension that I find myself dwelling on. I'm reassuring myself that somewhere out there in the multiverse there's one where Turning Point isn't complete rubbish.

For much of the five hours you'll take to complete it, you'll find that hard to believe. It manages to take one of the most explored popular genres - the Half-Life/Call of Duty-styled linear shooter - and makes a glorious mess of it at just about every stage.

Turn around...

Animation glitches? Technical errors? Performance problems? Perverse difficulty spikes? Haywire Al? Hey, take your pick. It even manages to find its own novel ways to be terrible. I can't even choose my favorite. The fact it refuses to go to a higher resolution than 1024x768? Its collision frames often being so misshapen that when you're forced to fight on Tower Bridge, you can't shoot between many of the girders? Or how about if you step too close to a button, you can no longer press the thing, forcing you to step back and forth until you find the sweet spot? Such a surfeit of unriches And, above it all, there's the nagging knowledge that if the team were given the months required to hammer out the problems and become all it could be, the resultant game would have climbed to the dizzying heights of mediocrity.

What heady heights it does manage to scale are neatly cribbed from its betters, making a half-hearted attempt at the linear-roller-coaster thrills of Half-Life 2, et al. The closest they get is the opening, where you're disturbed from working on the New York Skyline by the Nazi attack on Manhattan. Planes fly past, blimps fill the sky, people fall to their deaths - and there's a flicker of what the game wanted to be. It emerges occasionally later on - during the arrival at Tower Bridge (don't ask) and the storming of the White House - but it fails due to a lack of the sense of control which Valve and Infinity Ward bring to the gaming table.

A linear game is supposed to concentrate on tricking the player into not realizing it, with subtle pointers making the player naturally do what the designer desired. Developers, Spark Unlimited has managed to fail completely at this, as I found skipping back to the objective screen being the only way to work out where I was meant to go next.

...every now and then

Bar its setting - which takes a Return to Castle Wolfenstein-esque science-fantasy approach to the Germans - Turning Point does manage a couple of more unusual features. For example, you're able to climb obstacles and shimmy along pipes (Sam Fisher style). Also, if you get close to an opponent, you can grab hold of them, and either do an auto-kill or use them as a human shield. In certain (pre-planned) areas, the instant kill can trigger its own animation, like drowning the Hun in a toilet bowl or throwing them off a skyscraper. (An approach last seen in The Punisher). Even here though, it fails. The ability to climb some things when the game blocks passages with small piles of rubble just leaves it looking stupid. The grabbing, like much of the game, is somewhat twitchy - as far as I could work out, it's impossible to get hold of an enemy when they're kneeling.

If it wasn't for the abominable Soldier of Fortune 3 this would have been the worst shooter from a mainstream publisher in recent times. As it is, this is just an astonishingly poor example of the genre. A perfect storm of cynical derivative design and slipshod implementation, the only sensible reaction to Turning Point should be to turn away.