Turning Point: Fall of Liberty

Fall of Stevie's sanity...

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Following a year that saw the likes of BioShock, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption all clearly providing a welcome infusion of zest to the otherwise stale first-person shooter genre, you'd perhaps think that subsequent FPS releases would draw upon that wave of much-needed inspiration and strive to reach the newly redefined quality bar.

Yet, it would appear that some developers, such as Turning Point: Fall of Liberty's Spark Unlimited, believe that 2007's efforts are best served, not through the application of imagination, originality and technical brilliance, but by shamelessly using smoke and mirror pre-release tactics to mislead consumers and create enough hype to ensure a fair crack at damage control.

Damage control? Yes, because Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (and the sincerity of its accompanying developer diaries) openly mocks the new FPS standard carved by the aforementioned titles in terms of unquestionable levels of ineptitude. It's also truly hard to accept that Spark (Call of Duty: Finest Hour) was blind to that outside genre evolution and actually believed its own chest beating prior to the game's release.

Before the onrushing diatribe begins in earnest, it's worth outlining that genuine disappointment, not just slack-jawed fury, fuels this review. The alluded disappointment manifests itself through Turning Point: Fall of Liberty being built on a sound narrative platform, a compelling historical twist that supposes how the second world war might have unfolded had Winston Churchill died after a factual car accident during a visit to New York in 1931.

Spark's alternate world sees Britain and its allies folding all-too easily without Churchill's cast iron leadership, which leads to a triumphant Hitler nurturing the technological might of his war machine before stretching a Nazi fist across the Atlantic in 1953 to pull the mighty United States of America to its knees.

Overtly patriotic 911 parallels aside, the game opens with everyman construction worker Dan Carson caught on a half-finished tower block as Hitler's hordes storm the New York skyline with jet blimps and bombers pounding the city from above while paratroopers drift down silently between the ensuing chaos and bring the German occupation to the debris-strewn city streets. Sounds appealing on paper, you'd have to agree.

Sadly however, Turning Point's explosive opening amounts to little more than a thorough encapsulation of everything the player will need to endure in order to reap the game's fairly liberal delivery of Achievement Points - because that's the only motivation the gameplay is ever likely to promote.

For example, an ominous portent of doom emerges from the outset, with the player needing only to peer over the edge of Carson's crumbling skyscraper to see the calm flow of block-restricted city traffic cycling back upon itself at a steady pace, completely oblivious to the swooping jet fighters, burning buildings, and waves of incoming rocket fire. No panic. No collisions. No confusion. No one running for their lives. Nothing. The lack of care and attention displayed here is woven throughout the game and is rarely offset by anything of worth.

In terms of presentation, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty barely qualifies as belonging on the present generation of hardware - and certainly wouldn't have pushed the envelope on the original Xbox. This is due, in part, to the outrageously poor character models and lack of environmental detailing, but also because of the totally weightless and unbelievable animation and an aggressive tumour of ugliness that spreads cancerously from mission to mission through woeful texturing that leads to abrupt popping on an unforgivable level.

BioWare's award-winning Mass Effect may have suffered a similar form of texture popping directly after certain scene loads, but Mass Effect successfully buried its occasional technical hiccup as a forgettable pin lost beneath a haystack of otherwise glowing achievement. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty cannot claim such an allowance from its players.

Mission design, which takes the inexplicably weapon-proficient Carson from New York to Washington and eventually aboard a blimp set to deliver a nuclear payload against American citizens, is unfailingly linear and lacking in imagination from start to (surprisingly wet fart) finish. Plus, focusing on those design failings is made all the worse by the game's pitiful A.I. and weapon coding, which often sees enemies and allies alike ceaselessly shooting at nothing in particular, while the player's equipped weapon will fail to fire at inopportune moments and tossed grenades will roll at the feet of enemies without any resulting explosions.

Regardless of its lacklustre presentation and stilted design, Spark (and publisher Codemasters) clearly chose to forego appropriate levels of testing for Turning Point, because it is far from finished in a technical capacity. Indeed, woolly and unreliable impact detection across its limited array of weaponry sullies the core FPS gameplay component, while stuttering loads, visual chop and frame-rate dips often rear up to compound the player's festering sense of dissatisfaction.

This lack of QA is perhaps never more obvious than when the player peppers a close-quarter Nazi with a stream of hot lead, only to have any sense of immersive reward shattered as the non-humanistic rag-doll corpse topples through a nearby brick wall and lies half in the currently occupied space, and half in an adjoining room. Basic quality control. It's all-but non-existent in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.

As with a glowing game review that offers some form of balance by highlighting any minor shortcomings in the experience, this more than acid appraisal of Spark's deformed bastard child should perhaps do the same regarding fleeting moments of appeal.

Beyond the game's genuinely exciting premise - notwithstanding any failure to explore it beyond the mere nucleus of an idea - Turning Point: Fall of Liberty does offer up a semi-worthwhile grappling mechanic between Carson and any Nazi unlucky enough to be caught in close confines. A little like the grapple aspect employed in Treyarch's Call of Duty 3, the player is able to initiate brief hand-to-hand conflict through a simple button press before then nudging a direction on the D-pad to prompt a finishing move. Depending on where the player is in any given environment, the moves can also deliver devastating effects to opponents.

For example, grab a Nazi next to TV and Carson will slam his head through the screen; grab one on a building and he'll be plunged to his death, and start a grapple near a furnace and the unfortunate victim will be fried to a crisp. Grapple control also enables Carson to use an enemy as a human shield, allowing him to walk into gunfire behind fleshy coverage while shooting at targets with a pistol liberated from the poor bullet cushion gradually dying throughout the advance.

But that's it. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty has no other saving graces. It's ugly, it's poorly executed, it's riddled with technical glitches, its A.I. is laughable, it's boring, unoriginal and thoroughly unrewarding.

More than anything, despite its calamitous faults, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is a stinging slap in the face to videogame creators working tirelessly to better the FPS genre, and also the ever-faithful consumers who are expected to pay the same price for this as they are for the likes of BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

And, by way of a warning to any FPS fans looking further into 2008 for a standout shooter to continue the recent resurgence, Spark are also the team behind the upcoming Legendary: The Box. Forewarned is forearmed.

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By Stevie Smith