Every great game begins with an excellent concept. Spark Unlimited's Turning Point certainly had a fantastic genesis, attempting to answer the question of what would have happened if Winston Churchill were not around to thwart the Nazis. What sounds like a slam-dunk turns into a clang off the iron, thanks to an underdeveloped story and horribly buggy gameplay.
Turning Point is an example of what happens when a great concept meets terrible execution. Leaving no time for story, the game shuttles you rapid-fire from one location to the next, kicking things off on top of a high-rise construction site in the middle of New York. Unfortunately, the story is the most interesting aspect of Turning Point, and you get far too little of it. You spend about half your time in the Big Apple, with the remainder of it between Washington D.C. and across the Atlantic in London. Yes, your quest to save the US from the Nazi invasion leads you to the UK. All the while, you talk via radio or brief encounters by other New York resistance fighters, but it all feels very stale. The one time they use a breaking television report to announce the newly appointed President, it shows level of detail that that the rest of the game sorely lacks.
Your character has no back-story, and the story unravels so dryly that you would have more fun listening to your old history teacher drone on for the several hours it will take you to complete the game. There really is a lot going on throughout the game, but you only get brief snippets of information before jumping into the next level with a gun in your hand and swarms of Nazis in your sights. There was such an opportunity for a slickly told 'what if' story here that it almost hurts to see them squander it. The game takes what it does well and minimizes it, choosing instead to focus on what it does so poorly, which is the action.
When the game is working properly, it performs like a sub-par first-person-shooter. The weapons themselves seem authentic, with the exception of the sniper rifle, which oddly comes equipped with an infrared view to show other snipers' line of sight. The hit detection is laughably bad, with far too many one-shot kills to the hand or foot of burly Nazi soldiers. Sadly, the terrible hit detection and goofy futuristic rifle will be the least of your concerns, as the game is so full of bugs that you wonder how it hit the shelves. Each time you hit a checkpoint, the game seems to hiccup and awkwardly jump forward in time about ten seconds. This is not nearly as much fun as the regular screen tearing in the New York and Washington D.C. levels, or the sudden framerate sputtering in larger battles.
Perhaps the most annoying issue is the way the game regularly changes its mind regarding the density of objects. Sometimes you can shoot between the bars of a railing, and sometimes the game decides there must be bulletproof glass in the spaces. Occasionally, you can shoot through a grated metal floor, and other times it is as solid as concrete. Stand on a garbage dumpster one moment, then be in it the next. Try to climb back out, only instantly fall back through the apparently non-existent lid; oh, then repeat this fun 'dumpster dance' a dozen times. Climb up a brick wall only to fall back through it. Dead enemies instantly turn to ghosts, laying half on one side of a wall and half in the next. Some enemies will even just float dead in mid-air, as if stuck in The Matrix. Finally, the way you are stuck on seemingly invisible objects while running through the game may be enough for you to turn it off and let the Nazis win.
