With all the demos released this week I’ve been having trouble keeping up. I got a chance at lunch today to check out the demo for Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. I’m going to start with the one thing I did like (yes, things are going to go downhill quickly). I really like the concept for this game. Instead of the normal World War II battles where you play a US/Allied soldier in Europe you play as a construction worked in New York. The plot is setup by the idea that the Nazi’s are attacking the USA. The demo starts with you on top of a building being constructed. The Nazi’s start attacking and you need to get off the construction site. Instead of just going down the building they give you a puzzle type setup where you have to walk along narrow steel beams. It is lame start to the game like this because it is not a very good puzzle, and it is annoying. There is only one path way down the building, but you have to walk real slowly around the edges of the building to get to the ladders. Once you’re off the building it is a very linear game. You work your way through the city killing nazis you come across with a gun you take off a nazi paratrooper who lands in front of you. They try to make the game better with some gimmicky attacks. You can walk up to nazis who are knocked down grab them. You can then either kill then or use them as a human shield. After the first human shield I did I stuck with using the instant kill because the human shields block about 1 bullet before they are worthless. The instant kill seemed pointless too. It was easier to shoot them from a distance than risk them getting up before I could get close enough to grab them.

The guns are setup like Call of Duty where you need to pull the left trigger to have any type of accurate shot. Personally, I don’t like this style of control. I prefer to click the right thumb stick to zoom and then only when I want to. In Turning Point if you’re not using the aim option your spraying bullets so wildly that you might as well not be shooting. The guns themselves were pretty unremarkable. They were generic machine guns with no noticeable features.

The graphics and enemy AI both seemed like they were strait out of an original xbox title. The graphics were trying to look nice, but were all blocky. The enemies had a single attack plan. Hide behind cover and then pop out for a second to shoot. Literally every enemy I came across except the one who was knocked down used this tactic. It made killing them all pretty easy. Just aim right above the cover and wait for them to pop out.

After trying the demo I can see no reason to play this game. It lacks in every way that makes a game fun. If you tried out the demo let me know if you agree with me on it or if I got it wrong.