Turning Point: Fall of Liberty Review

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Compared to the deceptive linearity of Half-Life 2, for example, it's like potholing while drunk. Movement is laboured, and interacting with things like pipes, ledges and ladders is clumsy. The only puzzle I can remember involved pressing the action button on three valves in a row and then backing off, and the puzzling element was going around the room until the action icon actually appeared over something.

Sometimes you meet up with other people on your side, who seem unimpressed with your accomplishments to begin with, remarking that you're only a civilian but you've come in pretty handy - presumably referring to the occasion when you climbed under gigantic German tanks and wired up explosives (a dull mini-game involving matching wire colours and twisting the left stick to tighten screws), before single-handedly dispatching an entire Nazi platoon and then taking down an airship in the dark while dodging automatic weapons-fire. Later they send you alone to assassinate the President and dismantle nuclear bombs, so there's a definitely tipping point. There's lots of time to sit and contemplate this sort of thing as you auto-pilot your way through another series of unsurprising firefights, all the more unsurprising for the fact that the tougher ones where the difficulty spikes have to be replayed over and over, in-game cut-scenes and all, because the checkpointing is unsympathetic.

In this bit you man a gun and just rake the enemy constantly. It's easy, which is a relief, because aiming is needlessly difficult.

Turning Point's use of the Unreal Engine is also rather baffling, given the things we've seen done with it in Gears of War, BioShock and company. On occasion it looks like a PlayStation 2 game, and not in the sense that it's ropey-looking for a 360 game and we're being severe, but in the sense that it literally looks like a PS2 game. The character models are basic to the point of appearing to be cartoons on several occasions, while the textures are flat and bland. Even the more detailed areas are seas of repeating rust, brick and steel. Fire effects range from party streamers, to blobs of orange Vaseline having their own party.

The smoke effect isn't awful, but it, along with just about anything requiring remotely complex calculations, like standing next to smashing glass, causes the game to stutter and belch. Fighting up to the White House towards the end of the game, the frame-rate plunges far below 30fps as you desperately fire into the gloom. Textures regularly turn up late (at one stage I stood on a rooftop for about five seconds staring at a fuzzy billboard, only for the high-res image to arrive as I was turning away), and the shonky design often floors what little disbelief you were managing to suspend: following one chap as he hunches over to avoid imaginary enemy fire, he stops and stands bolt upright until you reach the magic point on the floor that allows him to resume his hunching and scamper the remaining five yards to the door you're approaching together. This sort of thing happens whenever NPCs are involved. Glitches aren't uncommon either, like shimmering character models and dead bodies vibrating or lying suspended in the air.

Grapple kills cut to third-person, but the Germans must be worn out if this sort of feeble thwonking snuffs them.

Venture online and you're able to engage in deathmatch and team deathmatch, but with the core FPS mechanics in such poor form and little to distinguish the combat from anything else, the only reason you would do so would be to drag a little more life out of a game whose single-player mode ends in under five hours anyway, replaying the same bits over and over included.