Turning Point: Fall of Liberty/Review

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Contents 1 Gameplay 2 Graphics 3 Sound 4 Conclusion

Gameplay

A game should be fun. Turning Point is usually fun. You run around on a rather straight course, sometimes circling back, but only if you made your way successfully through another area. The maximum on "puzzles" is flip a switch to open a door, which happens about 6 times in the whole game, and mostly is a switch right beside the door. The character moves ok, although sometimes tries to do weird things that make no sense (climb a thing that looks like you can step over it) or gets stuck in a pile of rubble that should normally be simply "walkable". Your weapons handle OK. In most cases you want to crouch and use the iron sights, otherwise you wont hit much. There are two pistols, two submachine guns, a shotgun, a carbine, a rifle, two sniper rifles, a machine gun, the Panzerschrek rocket launcher and one type of grenades. A couple more weapons or at least differences would have been welcome. You find yourself mostly dumping any weapon you start out with (tommy gun often) and grab the German guns, since you can find more ammo for that.

Your character jumps and grapples around, although the later only in designated areas. You can see them flash they make sense and mostly you have to try a few times before your character latches on to them. That can be frustrating at times and also very annoying since you are stuck in an area and hav no idea where to go. Often the way is not obvious. Like in the london bridge, you are at a very high level and come to a corner that has been blown away. There is no obvious way to progress. When you go to that corner and turn to your left, there is a ledge out there you can shimmy along. Now it gets worse, nowhere in the game ever before did you have to execute this maneuver: Shimmy over to the right until you are below a large ledge and hit the action button (E on computer). Now he pulls himself up. Thats the first time you ever use this and nothing tells you to do it or how. The to your right is another ledge (and one to you left that is useless) that you have to use the same thing again, and pull yourself up the second time in the game. Never again and never before you had to do that. So it is confusing at best. Just at the start of that same level part when you exit a drain pipe, you feel trapped. There is nothing to go to the left or right and in front of you is a fence. The ledge to your left is climbable but it has been a while since you had to do anything like that, so why adding it here instead of a ladder or some stairs is beyond me.

Turning Point is clearly made for consoles. The hit detection is abysmal. Often enemies look around corners and you see half their body, or over a car and you can see the head and everything, but a shot at them hits something invisible in the corner or the car. Meanwhile they have no trouble shooting over those obstacles at you. This leaves ou 3 ways to kill them. Long distances with a sniper rifle, flush them out with grenades or come close and around the corner to kill them. The last one is the one you will use the most since you are often in close quarters. And often you run into a whole pack of enemies, which will kill you pretty quickly if you are unlucky. enemies also love to popup out of nowhere and often behind you. That alone is a big minus in the game play since it is rather easy to die.

Dieing happens in stages. You do not have health bars like in other games, but you magically regenerate all the time. If you are close to death, your vision loses colors, gets darker and starts to shimmer at the corners. In such cases find cover and wait. After about 10 seconds you are good as news and can try again. This makes the game more playable but also takes a lot of depth away from it. since you have no other indicator and added to the normal ruckus, the effects are not always clearly distinguishable, you often die simply because you did not notice how bad you are in the health department.

The ammo display goes away, rather frequently, which makes nicer pictures but is annoying. You often run out of ammo and then have to find an enemy gun with enough ammo. Your best bet is to always abandon your hand gun to the first different weapon you come across and your American gun to the German submachine gun which most enemies carry around. Then exchange the other gun with whatever you need, like sometimes you will need the Panzerschrek or a sniper rifle. This whole management is more annoying that it should have to be, since the game focuses on fun.

The schizophrenia of the game, being "real" and focused on fun is causing the majority of these problems. It does not fit in either category well and so does not really excel anywhere.

Graphics

It looks good in most cases. A bit rocky sometimes, and when you get too close to characters they look odd, sort of plastic covered and then illuminated from within. A big plus on the variety of locations. You start out on a skyscraper, fight your way through subways, train stations, sewers, the white house, London bridge and a gigantic zeppelin. Each location looks great and has some nice details in it. Seeing it was made for Xbox 360 and PS3 you can guess that it just doesn't look as good on a PC with higher resolution. A little more polish around the edges would have done it a lot of good.

Sound

To my surprise you can hear the Germans talk German and it is really, not some faked stuff. Their voices sound authentic and give you a much better feeling of being in there, than the German flavored English some games like to portray. You don't loose much of the content though if you don't understand it, as the conversations tones are usually indicator enough of what happens. Most talking is done by your allies, in clear voices and rather good voice acting. The script is nothing stellar and your character is quiet all the time.

Your surroundings sound also pretty good. You hear a tank coming around the corner, weapons fire always is a good indicator of something happening nearby and explosions as well as rubble coming down sounds very good.

The music in the Turning Point is good. It does not interrupt, but in a sublime way carries scenes where it plays. There are games with better music, but not many and just as little where music does not hurt the rest of the game play.

Conclusion

If the PC version would have received some more polish this would be a game that ranks above the medium pack in terms of graphics. The world looks very good mostly, although small, with a bit more effort it would have seemed a lot more real. Which brings me to the two major minus points of the game.

Number one is the length. It is abysmally short. The shortness is not just a couple of things are short, but every single thing you do in the game appears to be "cut short". Many levels are so small that they make them appear larger by having you run around one side of the facade up some stairs and then drop down on the other side of the building, just so the level is not so small. You learn some tricks and get to use them a couple of times, and then all of a sudden you are to do something totally different with the same trick, never shown before. What a major drawback.

Second is the view changing. When you climb ladders, shimmy on ledges or pull yourself over a wall, the view changes from first person to third person and everything artificially seems to be pulled closer that was in the distance. That effect is so bad that one, it makes you nauseated if you have to see it often and secondly pulls you away from the game totally. These view changes are unnecessary and just make the game a lot less like able.

Overall a nice game. It clearly is made for consoles, so the more serious type shooters should stay away.

Written by Christian Riesen March 1, 2008