Turning Point: Fall of Liberty Preview
What if Winston Churchill died before becoming Prime Minister of Britain?
What if he were not alive to lead his country to victory against the Nazi war machine?
What if Germany conquered Britain and invaded America?
This is Turning Point: Fall of Liberty’s intriguing alternate reality. While the assertion that the “sheer force of [Churchill’s] personality and resolve” alone was the key to winning WWII strikes one as dubious, it is clearly an inspired take on the tired WWII shooter genre nevertheless.
We might as well get the bad right out of the way: This is NOT a technologically impressive game in its current state. In fact, it’s pretty ugly. Bland textures and character models, terribly spotty character and gun animations, and bizarrely absent hit detection, all come together in a game that resembles something closer to a below average last generation game. If this is indicative of the final product, it will likely sink the game.
But having sat down and played through the demo there are some very promising elements at play here. Level design was very impressive. Your character is a high-rise construction worker in New York City, and the demo perches you on the metal beam scaffolding of a building in construction just as the Nazi invasion begins. Your first order of business, then, is to navigate the harrowing narrow beams down several stories below while chaos ensues all around.
Once on the solid roof below you continue to descend through the burning, crumbling building. You’ll travel inside and out again, falling through floors, avoiding flame and debris, down elevator shafts and more. You’ll even cross a sky-link connecting two high-rises to get to an external elevator on the next high-rise over. Once at ground level things aren’t nearly as interesting, but the ride there was as inspired as the game’s concept.
During your decent, you’re introduced to a few minor innovations that taken together hold promise as significant additions overall. Context sensitive action is the order of the day, and is employed in a number of ways.
The more mundane context sensitive actions involve simply traversing the level. For instance, although you can jump, some ledges will require pulling yourself up onto them, and a simple tap of the appropriate button completes the task and zooms out into third person to do so. The demo also featured the ability to move hand-over-hand hanging from a pipe. This compliments the ambitious level design by allowing for greater structural variety, and indeed this was present in the demo.
The more gameplay-centric context sensitive actions involve some light puzzle-solving elements and special kills. At one point during your escape from the beleaguered building, you’re trapped in a hallway with the only exit in flames. There is, however, a nearby sprinkler system activated by a fire alarm on the wall. Walk up to the alarm, yank it, and presto: no more fire. It was an obstacle and solution perfectly fitting the situation.
Special kills are also available through context sensitive actions, initiated by grappling with enemies face-to-face or unawares. While crossing the sky-link a Nazi paratrooper lands, back turned, in your path. By walking up and grappling him, you’re then given a few choices to finish him off with. I threw that evil bastard clear off the sky-link. On other play-through, I grappled him head on and beat him down before landing a killer elbow to his upper spine. Satisfying, to say the least.
Surely with innovations like these, Turning Point will provide us with a good deal of interesting and varied gameplay. It is notable too just how well the level design and context sensitive actions come together for what was an entertaining, albeit brief, experience. Mix in a generous helping of scripted events and you have a solid structure to build a game on.
Yet we come back full circle to the technology all these gameplay elements sit upon. The great structure seen thus far won’t be able to save a game with very poor performance in the fundamentals, which is hurt by said weak technology. A shooter needs to “pop”, but the technology here falls flat on its face. The gunplay is acceptable, but there isn’t anything more off-putting than shooting a Nazi clearly in the open and having nothing happen, or watching a character fall forward against the trajectory of the bullet. The controls are also very loosey goosey. This game has big issues.
This small helping of Turning Point reveals a game being crafted with inspired ideas and a captivating premise. At this rate it’s not likely to stand up to the likes of Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4, that’s for sure. But it may very well end up being well worth a play in the end, if you can get past its rough exterior.
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is scheduled to release February 26, 2008.
peachey @ January 25, 2008