Games:Turning Point: Fall of Liberty Demo

Fall of Liberty, or Fall of Quality?

In a market that is flooded with first-person shooters, many of them carrying a World War II theme, it is hard to stand out from the crowd. Producing an inferior product in such a crowded market is the kiss of death. Fortunately, for the wallets of gamers everywhere, the demo of Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty has been released early. Let's just consider this demo a warning shot for your pocketbook.

First the plot. Maybe the only saving grace that this game has is that it at least attempts to be original through its storyline. The concept is that the Third Reich was able to overtake many nations because Winston Churchill died in a car accident, and now Nazis are attacking America. They've also been able to develop a few weapons that didn't quite reach production in reality. They're calling it an alternate reality shooter, but it's really a world war two shooter with a plot twist.

The Demo (and I assume the finished product) starts with an incredibly boring and unnecessarily long 'tutorial' section, which seems to be designed for people who have either been living in a cave for the last twenty years or have mysteriously time warped from the year 1987. Basically, the game assumes that you don't know or can't figure out how to walk, climb ladders or shoot guns using your controller (or keyboard and mouse as the case may be). I thought that stages like this had been done away with over a decade ago. To top it all off, the fact that you actually need to press a button to climb a ladder is archaic at best.

The first five minutes of the game are literally spent tip-toeing along narrow I-beams at the top of an under-construction skyscraper. This approach is creative, but also very boring. On my second play-through, I decided to try jumping off of the beams to get down. When done successfully, this was an effective way to shorten the painful training exercise, but because I died a few times while figuring out how to do this, this tactic ended up costing me time in the long run.