Despite the 5.0 given by IGN, I shrugged the poor score off knowing that few FPS clones have disappointed me tremendously despite the press they’ve gained. And then there’s the great screenshots! Turning Point had what seemed to be awesome depictions of a German-invasion in an older New York City, playing out a “what-if Churchill had died” scenario that seemed pretty awesome.

Boy was I ever wrong. Turning Point is hands down one of the most awful FPS games I have ever played. It runs on what they claim to be the Unreal Engine, but so poorly I honestly wonder what generation this game was designed on.

Graphics – Slower than Crysis with Texture Mapping from the early 90s.

I honestly can forgive poor graphics and frame-rate when there is a justified reason. When Doom 3 came out and my graphics card wasn’t strong enough, that made sense. But Turning Point, despite the doctored screenshots they’ve released, looks bloody awful. Being a console port, they’ve also closed off most Video Options to PC users, so you can only select between Low, Medium and High graphics, and the maximum resolution is a mindbogglingly ancient 1024 x 768.

The strangest thing is that despite my decked out computer with an E6600 Duo Core 2 and a Geforce 8800 GT, the game has stuttering frame rate issues that make it strangely slower than the beautiful Crysis which I can run at a reasonable 30 fps on much higher settings. Then there’s the fact that the game looks like a Half Life 1 (Yes, 1) byproduct, with jerky soldier animations that seem to defy gravity, and the worst texture mapping I have ever seen. Everything in this game looks like it has been covered with vomit. I’m not kidding. Do not believe the screenshots that have been released. Even if the first few minutes of the game seem alright, as soon as you play it for more than that, you’ll realize the truth.

Gameplay – If it played like an FPS…

Turning Point doesn’t even come close to any FPS standard of the modern day. The AI is blisteringly stupid and non-reactive. I’ve run into train corridors only to see them standing there guns faced out the window aimed at an invisible enemy that has already flank them. I’ve then fired on them, only to watch them finally turn around, and flail their arms at you like zombies in slow motion (though the game is in real time).

There are even more nuances beyond the heavily scripted and stupid AI. The sheer number of glitches and scripted deaths in the game are painful and make it not about skill but about trial and error. If you run past a certain bridge without looking up, then you’ll get killed almost instantly by the blimp that has suddenly materialized from above and is firing at you from a black void (meaning you can’t really fire back). Or if you run past a guy too fast, he’ll suddenly freeze up on walking on the wall like he’s Spiderman. Then there are the snipers. The game at least warns you about them, so you can turn on your special sniper-detecting gun that lets you see in infrared and pick them off. But as you’re picking them off be sure to reveal your cover one step at a time because if you just happen to go a little too far, you’ll be dead.

There’s more though. A lot more. The game uses and auto-save checkpoint system like most console FPS games, but the checkpoints are conveniently placed before LOAD TIMES as if to mock you. I swear I ran up a ladder, Load time, ran up to the roof, and then hopped from one roof to the next, ran down the stairs, another LOAD TIME, and then down, and up another building where the snipers were, ducked out a bit too far and died. Where did I respawn? You guessed it, where the first stairs were. In between that whole sequence? No enemies at all.

Even with the worst FPS experience I’ve ever faced, I was still willing to give Turning Point a few points if it had good level design. The premise after all, again still appealed to me somehow, I liked the notion of ducking through a bombed-city fighting off invading Nazis like some kind of Indiana Jones wet dream.

However, the level design is even atrocious. It starts off ok, with you as a construction worker, and then a sudden surprise attack, construction beams blowing up and you rushing down the building as quickly as you can, to escape, grab a gun and join in the resistance. But everything falls apart after that. The levels are completely linear and don’t even leave the slightest room for a wrong turn, you are guided to your destination by heaps of flaming wreckage everywhere. The biggest problem again lies in the lack of purpose. You’ll traverse up the fire-escape of a ruined building to go up to the roof, only to be told by another guy that you need to get to the subway, and then after running through abandoned subways, you’ll go back up to the roof, and back down again. Sometimes you’ll do this for no reason whatsoever, without an enemy encounter along the way, and the feeling of that, is like going out on a stroll in the midst of a flaming hell.

Story

What about the story? Well there IS NONE! That’s the beautiful part. Despite the cool premise, once you’ve gotten past that all you get are barked orders from people you don’t know or ever see again telling you to do ridiculous things like take out tanks, defend from snipers. You never see the face of the guy you’re controlling, he never talks, and the cut scenes are laughable, they have nothing to do with anything.

Sounds

I would like to comment on the sound, a riveting score maybe, or anything, but you know what? The game, despite my Soundblaster Audigy card I have plugged in my PC doesn’t work properly with my sound, so all I got were loud audio cracks and pops over the gunfire and music, which after some attempts to troubleshoot, caused me to turn off the sound. The lack of attention to detail is also apparent; the bad guys don’t even speak or yell at you, which has been a common element of most modern FPS games. They just die, soundlessly, and the lack of overall atmospheric noise besides the chorus of steady explosions makes the whole experience a pretty dry one.

Conclusion

As I’ve said, I usually never give games one-star for being absolute failure but I was so angry playing Turning Point and felt so ripped off, I honestly wanted to put this review out as quickly as possible in hopes of deterring as many folks as I could from ever playing it. It is not anywhere close to the advertised promise of a German-invaded New York simulation. The horrible controls, the poor AI, the insulting save-game system, the atrocious graphics and no ability to tweak them, not to mention the clippy frame-rate among others, make this one of the worst FPS-experiences I have ever had.

Cheaply made with a complete disregard to gamers, Codemasters honestly deserves to go out of business. Avoid like the plague.


Recommended: No