The premise of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, the latest shooter from Codemasters, is a good one. The year is 1952 and the United States never entered World War II -- Winston Churchill died in 1931 when struck by a car in New York and never helped rally the world against the Nazi threat; America remained an isolationist nation. (We're left to assume Pearl Harbor never happened either, but that's a question left unanswered.) After steamrolling through Europe, eventually the Germans set their sights on the United States and it is at this critical moment that the game begins?and everything starts to head downhill.



You play the stunningly silent hero Dan Carson, a New York City construction worker who is caught on a high-rise building as the invasion begins. Waves of German aircraft and zeppelins fill the sky as bombs are dropped on the unsuspecting populace. It's like you are literally hanging around eating your lunch 20 stories high and all of a sudden -- Germans!



The idea is that Carson is an Everyman -- an everyday Joe that happens to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and simply has to survive. At least that was the idea when the game was demoed at E3 in the summer of 2007. Playing the role of a man with no military training trying to help thwart the unstoppable Nazis when given the chance is a novel idea. Instead, Carson might as well be a grizzled military veteran, as he's capable of mowing down dozens of dumb-as-nails Wehrmacht without missing a beat. Carson's backstory turns out to be completely irrelevant.



Yes, unfortunately, the Germans aren't too bright. They run out into certain death via heavily-scripted sequences and while they do try to take cover and do the "Gears of War blind shoot" technique, everything feels staged, canned and by the numbers. Everything is a set piece; you never have to fear a Nazi soldier outflanking you or trying to flush you out of a fixed position. They do what they're programmed to do, and that's usually die by the hands of master shot Carson of the New York City Construction Company.



The lack of roaming ability is at times comical. This is evident as early as the game's second "mission," when you have to go into a subway hub to grab some ammo and a few new guns. Once you come out of the subway area, a battle ensues and the game doesn't allow you to go back into the subway because a truck conveniently moves to block the entrance. You can forget about jumping the railing to gain entrance to the subway (where extra ammo can be found). The game has deemed it's time to fight the Nazis. There's no going back now!



While it's certainly an interesting World War II-era twist to see the German army running around New York and Washington D.C., destroying and defacing every landmark Americans hold dear, the graphics themselves leave a lot to be desired. The Unreal 3 engine drives the game and Turning Point fails to use it to its fullest. The textures are dated and everything looks drab. The game also keeps its "Teen" rating by avoiding blood at all costs. A German soldier might fall 50 feet from a hovering zeppelin and you can use an infrared sniper rifle to shoot one between the eyes, but they don't bleed. It's a strange dichotomy in that the game has no issue using the most reviled symbol of hate, the Swastika (even though it is your goal to kill the guys who wear it) and yet blood is way out of bounds. You do get the now famous "rag doll" death scene when you gun down a bad guy, but this is not a game that will leave a visual impression other than seeing the White House blow up.

It's easy to lob hate grenades at the game for its lackluster graphics, linear gameplay and stale multiplayer, which is as predictable and vanilla as the rest of the game, but the "feature" that secures its legacy in the PC gaming graveyard is the fact that it uses save checkpoints, and some of them are spread so far apart that you have to play quite a while before it auto-saves. This is inexcusable for a PC game, even one that is an obvious console port such as this (you can't even navigate the menu with your mouse). If you are going to take the time to port a game over to the PC, at the very least you should allow the user to save the game when and where he wants. It's infuriating to play for 20 minutes, die, and have to play an entire section over again.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is simply a tough sell. If the game was a bargain release, selling at $20, it could at least be suggested for those who want to try every shooter on the block. It does work, it is functional and isn't totally devoid of fun, but the game is sitting on the shelf at full price next to truly next-gen shooters and first-person action games like BioShock and Call of Duty 4, and in this day and age, if you are going to ask full price for a shooter, it has to bring a lot more to the table than what Turning Point offers.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.