Title Turning Point: Fall of Liberty Date 03.21.2008 Genre FPS Platform PC Developer Spark Unlimited Publisher Codemasters

This review contains minor spoilers. I'm not going to ruin the game for you - all spoilers I mention happen in the first hour or so of the game, or can be found in the manual or the game's trailers.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is one of those games where you go in with low expectations. The thing's about fighting Nazis in New York! It's the kind of game where you just want a good dozen or so hours of fun; else you wouldn't have bought a game about killing Nazis in New York. But it still manages to disappoint even the meager expectations set out for it.

Graphics
I'll start with the thing that hits you hardest, fastest, and most below-the-belt. Graphics have to try really hard to make or break a game; the focus is more on the game-play and, depending on the genre, the story, and this is how things should be. However, Fall of Liberty is bad enough to make you think about re-evaluating this position. This game, by-and-large, looks like it was made two or three years ago. I'm not kidding. I'll take a break for a minute to mention the good, what little of it there is: the backgrounds are passable, and the cities you visit clearly had some decent research put into the art direction behind them. It's good enough to sell the locales. Now the bad: character models, guns, vehicles, and most objects occupying the streets and buildings you're fighting in are just terrible. They're blurry and grainy and boring. Even the guns as you see them in first-person view in your own hands are sub-par, and you'd think this would be the one thing they'd focus on more than anything else. The particle effects, too, are just horrendous. Smoke and dust look incredibly artificial, as do explosions and *shudder* the muzzle-flashes from your own weapons.

Probably the worst part of the game in this area was, unfortunately, the opening sequence. You want to make a good impression on your players, but this was just bad. Invisible shells or missiles - I'm not sure which since they're invisible - blow up random steel girders with unbelievable, unrealistic blasts that make said most of said girder disappear into thin air. Passing fighter jets look grainy and decidedly last-generation, and the ones soaring in the sky above you are flat and unbelievable, not to mention flying in one of the worst cut-and-paste patterns I've ever seen for this kind of thing. It amused me slightly, so I sat there for about ten minutes watching the apparently billion-strong Nazi air armada materialize out of nowhere, then dematerialize into the distance. Then I got on to playing the actual game.

Sound
Sound usually has less importance than graphics, at least to me, but it is just as important to master if you want to immerse your player. Once again, Fall of Liberty falls down on this one. (Tee-hee, bad pun) Gunshots sound canned and far too "snap-crackle-pop"-ey and not nearly enough "BOOM"-ey. There are a couple redeeming weapons, like the American Sub-Machine Gun and the rocket launcher, but they can't save the overall mediocrity of the sound effects. The music constantly tempts you with lead-in bits that sound like they're about to get freakin' EPIC, but they rarely do. Once or twice the music got me, but unfortunately it never really hit in the same way that the roll-over advertisement at the bottom of the page on Gamefaqs got me for the past month or so. Music overall wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. I guess I'll stick it with an "acceptable", and move back to the sound effects. Explosions are "meh", vehicle sounds... wait, there were vehicle sounds? No engine noise stuck with me, and the gunshots, as previously mentioned, are mediocre-at-best.

Story
Story carries less importance in any game centered around Nazis than it usually does for whatever the genre happens to be, mostly because there's little reason to explain the motivation of a Nazi. They're all evil, and you can kill them without feeling bad. In case you hadn't figured it out by this point I'm being sarcastic. Nazis are humans just like anyone else, and yes they may have done some nasty things but that doesn't mean game developers should treat them like cardboard cut-outs. There's little moral discourse in the story and little plot development in general. What is there is rarely given to you through game-play, in favor of short cut-scenes between levels that usually don't even focus on your character, so there's not much development there... ever.

There's a maybe fifteen second long intro sequence, then you're thrust into the thick of a Nazi invasion of new york, and you don't know why. Let's pause for a second and go back to that intro sequence. They set up an alternate-reality universe where Nazi Germany has taken over about a third of the world because Winston Churchill died when he was struck by a taxi cab rather than just being crippled by it as he was in real life. Wait, where did I get that "third of the world" thing? It's in the manual. The designers made the rather puzzling move of quoting verbatim the first half of the plot introduction written in the manual in the usual white-text on black-background opening sequence of the game itself, but they don't tell you the second half, which leaves you in the dark on a few things if you didn't read the manual, and if you had, you're left wondering when the game is going to catch the player character up on the stuff you already learned from the bloody book.

You don't know your character's name, (again, unless you read the manual), and you don't know where you are or what you're doing there. All you know is that there's a bunch of stuff exploding and you should probably start looking for that quintessentially linear pathway off the building. The next thing you know you're being tasked with wiping out German machine gun nests and shooting down blimps by actual soldiers who are acutely aware that you're a civilian, as they mention it several times and you're wearing a bright red shirt rather than the drab uniforms everyone else has. It never really makes any sense why you're doing any of this, and at one point not long into the game, someone says to you something along the lines of "You need to make it to the Subway, you'll be able to get to D.C. from there. What the hell? is what I wanted to scream at the idiot. I've managed to piece together that I'm an average bloke working on some skyscraper in downtown New York from the tidbits of information the game has deemed me worthy to receive, but why the hell would I want to go to D.C.? You don't own me. The main character has no perceivable motivation in the entire thing, not even a cliché one - and it's not like he's just doing what all the cool kids are doing: every other civilian you see in the first half the game is just running away and hiding. Maybe they'll open a door for you if you're lucky, but why you don't just accept their offer, go inside, and stay there while the professional gunslingers outside sort the whole mess out I'll never know.

The phrase of the day is "wasted potential". They could have really focused on the story to show how the world was different without Churchill, or the emotions of Americans as their homes were torn apart, or at the very least let us get to know the main character... but they didn't. The overall lack of a story in a game with a pretty compelling (albeit forced) premise is a punishable offense in my book, and it's my book we're going on here.

Gameplay
The meat of any review, so let's get to it. You shoot stuff, you hide to regenerate health, and you shoot stuff again. Sometimes you need to sneak around and shoot stuff from a different direction, sometimes you need to blow up a tank in one of a few ways - one of which involves a strange and annoying mini-game that you can't fail, and is more of a time-sink than anything. If they'd given failure a real consequence, like blowing yourself up, I might have taken it a little more seriously. I'm going to give it to you guys straight: the only times I had fun in this game were right after I found a new gun. Let's be fair here - there are more weapons than your average game here, but they're rarely anything exciting. There are five or six rifles, for instance, whose differences lie wholly in whether they're truly semi-automatic, have a half-second delay between shots, a full-second delay between shots, and what kind of scope they have on them. One of them is, interestingly enough, magic, as it possesses an infra-red scope that lets you see where enemies with the same gun are aiming via the laser-beam emanating from their infra-red scope, yet yours emits no such laser. Oh, also, you don't actually have to look through the scope to use it - you just have to have the gun in your hands and your eyes magically turn everything into red-scale and you can see the lasers. There are a bunch of little annoyances like this with the guns that will irk shooter fans. Some guns are way to accurate to believe, and distance seems to do very little to change this. The pistols, for instance (In particular the Colt 1911) can hit a pin on the head at 100 yards. Also, weapons with detachable magazines don't let you load an extra round by reloading in the middle of a mag. A small detail like that eat away at the experience. Conversely, I like the iron-sights. They did a good job on that - for the most part, they're easy-to-use and very helpful. (Side-note: What the hell is with the Rocket launcher's sight?)

Enough about the guns, though. The actual game-play is repetitive and pretty boring. It's not the worse case of this, but it's far from perfect. Most enemies take a reasonable number of bullets to bring down, and they attack and take cover in somewhat convincing ways. Close-encounters actually can be pretty exciting. But chuck a grenade and watch the AI freeze up. Running away from frags has become a pretty well-nailed-down function of enemy AI by this point, but Fall of Liberty drops the ball. If they do run away, they don't run away far enough, so it's more a joke than anything. I swear, I've seen them spot the grenade, scream, run three feet, then crouch down and stay put. Geniuses, the Nazis be. You sometimes have allied soldiers, though they don't do much, and it is, of course, up to you to save them the minute they run into anything other than the lightest of resistance. They also rarely leave the area you met them in, and when they do they sometimes like to vanish and never be seen or heard from again, even though they were supposedly going with you.

The one thing that I liked about the game-play was the grapple system. It's nothing new or special, but it's executed competently. If you run up to an enemy and hit the "use" button you'll grab him and either try and subdue him or use him as a human shield. Human shield is almost always the better option, as it can make you nearly invincible until the guy dies, and it gives you a few freebie pistol shots while you're holding onto him. The "Kill him" option is good sometimes, too - if only to see the contextual actions it sometimes triggers. I've only seen one or two of these, though, so it's nothing to write home about. It's not a perfect system, either - sometimes (especially when the enemy is crouching) for reasons unknown you cannot initiate the grapple move, and you'll end up getting a point-blank serving of lead for you trouble.

There's also a lot of contextual stuff like climbing, shimmying, hand-over-handing, ect... (Or wait... I think that's it) that always takes you out into third-person view. Why do games do this? I have no idea. I think the first time I ever saw it was in Project: IGI way back when, but it's never really made sense why they insist on making you take up position hovering around your character while he climbs. Anyways, the game is linear, linear, linear. Like the "l" in linear. The aforementioned climbing bits give a little illusion of non-linearity, but it's never enough to take you out of the "okay, where's the one path I need to find to move forward?" mentality. Seeing as the last game I played was Crysis, this was a big deal for me.

Swing
Usually I kind of scoff at the swing section in other people's reviews, as it's usually either something to do with the hype for the game or something that clearly belongs in another category, (About the hype - I despise over-hyped games as much as anyone else, but I feel I should judge the game on its own merits, rather than those of the buggers in the advertising department at whatever corporate giant machine-pressed the "art" I've just consumed.) but Fall of Liberty has something that truly belongs in this category. The designers rushed the PC, and didn't fine-tune it. Specifically, you will find nothing in either the manual or the game itself that tells you how to do 90% of the things in the game. The "tutorial mission" at the beginning doesn't tell you how to do anything, it just gives you an easy run-through mission where you're apparently expected to figure it all out for yourself by hitting random keys until you've got it all figured out. Even more of a slap in the face is when you go into "options -> controls -> input" and you're greeted with a big white "W" of an Xbox 360 controller with all its colorful buttons labeled nice and simple-like. It's really quite insulting. Here I am trying to figure out how to throw a grenade, and the stupid game taunts me with "well if you were playing it on the 360 you could just hit RB. Well I'm sorry MS, my computer, (something which you ostensibly are still supposed to be making products for) doesn't have an "RB" key. It has an "R" key, and a "B" key, and neither of these throws grenades. (It turns out to be "T", by the way) The manual shows the same thing, and makes you wonder why they bothered to put installation instructions in the booklet and stamp "Games for Windows" across the top when they're not going to show you how to play the damned game in that most lovable of all operating systems.

Lastly, and this bit really belongs in "game-play", but I'm already on the subject here, you can't change the damned controls - you can switch between different 360 controller configs, but there's no manual mapping of commands to the buttons on the controller, so even once you figure out which keyboard keys correspond to their big white "W" counterparts, you can only choose between a few select configs, something that is extremely annoying for a PC gamer like myself.

Game Score

D

Reviewed By: Contributed