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Terrible.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game had a good idea to it, but it was not incorporated into the game very well. I have had previous experience with WW2 games, and they are fairly accurate historically. The weapons are all work well, and are matches to their counterparts.
This game obviously needed more work. I bought it for Xbox 360, and it had the graphics of a PS2. The producers obviously had some trouble making up what might have happened if the US had not intervened in World War two. Also, the weapons and controls are hard to use and configure.
My advice- There are things on which your money is better spent.

You Should Read the Book!!!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: April 06, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This games is obviously based on Stephen R. Pastore's novel, Never on These Shores. Belive me, the book is great, much better than the game, but maybe they'll improve the vid to match the book. I hope so.

beyond broken..

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

You play as Carson Daily....erm...I mean just Carson. He is a construction worker from New York during an alternate-early-50's era where the Nazis have conquered Europe and WW2 is still raging on. One day you're on some steel gerders and BOOM! The Nazis begin attacking the United States!! You regroup with...the National Guard? And its up to you and your Resistance group to stop the Nazi invasion.

You'll travel the east coast of the United States to repel the attack. You'll start off in a decent replica of New York (and at one point will see the Chrysler Building ripped in half and laying in the street), Washington D.C. to save some fictional resistance general from execution and the constitution from being burned (which is an achievement), in the New York subway system, and a few other areas. The environments look, for the most part, pretty good.

The action is pretty intense and you can do these grapple moves where you run up and either use the Nazi as a human shield for a little bit or you beat the bajesus out of them in different ways. However, Turning Point is a very buggy and glitchy game, so the icon to indicate you can grapple the people sometimes does not show up until you are on the verge of death. You can run up and press the B button numerous times until you actually do grab the person. You get a bunch of "modified" WW2 weapons such as the "new" MP50, Gewher 45 (theres a new "Vampir" version that has thermal vision for oyu to snipe with), the M1 Garand, the version of the Thompson with the drum on the bottom of the barrel, the "combat shotgun", a multi-barreled Panzershrek, and the potato masher hand grenades.

Again, this game is really glitchy. For instance theres this stage you go into near the end of the game...its a bridge. You walk out and theres enemies on EVERY side of you..they can actually hit you through the wholes in the bridge but you can't shoot them. Sometimes you'll go to aim down your iron sights, only to find you can't shoot or get out of the aim mode for a couple of seconds to a minute. Sometimes your grenades won't explode or sometimes an enemy can hit you from a mile away with the shotgun..a lot of time the game will freeze up, the frame rates will drop, and finally the sound will cut out sometimes.

The AI is pretty bad too. Sometimes you can run right into view and sit there for about 3-5 minutes before they take cover and start shooting. Its pretty embarrassing for CodeMasters to have released such a terrible AI system upon the world.

The music is pretty good though. Its mainly an orchestrated score to help you feel heart wretched or pumped up. Additionally, some power sets like the Chrysler building being destroyed will push any New Yorker (like me) over the edge and want to finish the game.

The ending was somewhat believable. You board this Nazi Zeppelin that has a nuke on it, and you must disarm it before it blows up (I think) New York. Anyway, you kill everyone on the aircraft and reach the nuke. You take one look and notice you have 10 seconds left, and you attempt to stop it. The whole time your commander is telling you good job and what not but your character does not know how to stop a nuclear device. So, he sits down, shakes his head, and the nuke blows up in the sky. Your a casualty of war, but you stopped the missle from actually being launched at a target.

Overall, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty could have been so much better if CodeMasters would have taken more time to work the bugs out and make the gun power more balanced. On a scale of 1-10, I give it a "rent it first" 5.5.

Good Idea, Bad Game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

It looked like a good idea. I bought the game because it looked fun. It is NOT that fun. Graphics are good, but there is no freedom of movement, not a good story line, nor is it really exciting. For the price, I would go with Rainbow Six 2, much more fun.

A solid 3-star game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 13
Date: February 29, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I usually wait until there are a few reviews out for a game before I buy it, but I was so intrigued by the concept of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty that I thought I would take a chance. Having just come off great games like Call of Duty 4, Assassin's creed, Bioshock, Mass Effect (you get the idea..) ... I was fairly disappointed by how unintuitive the controls of this game are. They aren't the worst, by far, but certainly felt sloppy in light of other better games I have recently played. The control sensitivity is too low on "medium" and felt much better on "high" except when I went to aim with "Iron Sights" then medium was better, constantly changing got annoying though, so I decided to melee exclusively (see below) Moreover, the graphics are cartoony, the checkpoints are few and far between, and the weapons... this takes me into a second paragraph.

Combat: Explain this to me: Nazi bad guy with sub machine gun is perfectly accurate at 1000ft. I manage to take him down with the only good weapon in the game (bolt action rifle) and when I get his machine gun, I can't hit a guy 30ft away. I don't get that. Regardless other than rifles, the weapons aren't even worth it. I found myself running up to guys for melee combat instead of wasting my time shooting them. Of course, I have to wait for the enemy to finish whatever animation he is in before the melee prompt appears, but it was far more effective than shooting. I found myself quite irritated by the combat.

Other things that annoy me are the dumbing down of vehicles battles. Enemy tank, no problem there is a rocket launcher conveniently stowed around the corner. Boat? Ohh... another rocket launcher... blimp? Same. I did not come across one combat encounter with an enemy vehicle that didn't either drive off in a hurry, or didn't blow up with a couple well aimed rockets. It was all very formulaic. To wrap it up, the game sacrificed game play for story, and is overall at best a 3 star game.

Edit 3/2/08: There weren't many multi-player games going on, but I managed to play a few. What I found was, the levels were boring. You get to pick your weapon each time you spawn, but they are as bad in multi-player as they are in the single player campaign. Except that the other players can't use them effectively either. Stick with Call of Duty Multi-player which is a lot of fun.

A great idea poorly executed......

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: March 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Turning Point alters history by having the US stay out of Europe during the Nazi takeover in the 1940's. Now it's the early 50's and Hitler has set his sights on America. The game has some excellent graphics and cool post-modern designs throughout. Unfortunately the character animations, controls and weapon functions are already outdated by more recent shooters like Call Of Duty 4 and BioShock. Even Soldier Of Fortune: Payback has a better feel to it overall. The enemy soldiers fall down like they were shot on the moon. There is a slow motion/lack of gravity look to it all. The "imagined" modernized Nazi aircraft and weapons are interesting, but at times questionable (MP 50? Basically an MP40 with a wooden stock and mounted flashlight. Huh?). It's almost as if the designers were going for a BioShock vibe with the art deco look of New York, but the graphics are WAY below the beauty that is BioShock. It's a nice change from the normal WW2 games and for that reason alone, I give it 3 stars. You could do worse as far as shooters go, but you could also do a lot better. I would wait until it drops to 39.99 or below.

Just an average offering...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 31, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Alternate histories have been quite popular for many years. We've seen it in movies, on television, in comics, and of course, in books.

Eric Flint is quite adept at spinning tales of Alternate Histories, and anyone who enjoys this type of genre would be hard pressed to find a better writer.

So, it's only natural to see alternate histories eventually make their way to the gaming platform.

That's the idea behind Turning Point: The fall of liberty. It's a game that speculates - what would have happened during World War two if Winston Churchill would have been killed instead of crippled in that accident?

Well, the game lets us know. The 3rd Reich would have won the war.

The game begins with the German war machine invading New York City. You take the role of Dan Carson, just an average Joe trying to earn a living in the city as a construction worker.

As fate would have it, Dan ends up becoming a resistance fighter in the war to throw the Nazi's off American soil.

Hey, the game sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? I know after I watched the trailer for the game I was quite eager to pick it up and give it a whirl.

Sadly, the best I can say about the game is that it is, at best, an average offering. Which is a pity. The story has so much potential, and it could have been a really great game.

It is divided up into three major chapters. The first chapter takes place in New York City itself, where Dan has to fight his way out of the city, past the occupying German forces so that he can lend his fighting skills to the militia.

The second Chapter involves Dan and the militia assaulting Washington DC. I can't really say too much about this without giving away some of the really cool points to the game.

The third and final chapter involves Dan and the militia heading to German occupied London in order to destroy a nuclear weapon that is destined to be used on New York City itself.

Oh, there is a great deal more to the game than what I just stated. I pointed those out as more of a teaser than anything...

I was quite pleased with two parts of the game. One took place in Washington, and the ending itself. Again, I won't say what these things were, as I don't want to spoil it. But if you want to know, just look it up on the net. It won't be difficult to find.

Now, down to the game play itself. It is the typical Xbox 360 first person shooter. I've brought this up in several of the other reviews I've written about Xbox games, so what I'm about to say isn't new or ground shaking.

You don't have a health meter. Instead as you take damage, the screen turns grey, your vision blurs and the worse it gets, the closer you are to dying. If that happens, make sure that you find cover fast so that you can regenerate.

You can only carry two weapons at any time through the game, so choose wisely. Generally try to carry a close combat weapon (such as a sub machine gun or shotgun), and a long range weapon (sniper rifle or regular rifle).

Getting replacement weapons and ammo is quite easy. Kill your enemy and take his! Oh, and make good use of your grenades. If you see a room, and you know that there are enemy soldiers in it, toss one in and step aside and let it do all the hard work for you.

Like the Call of Duty line, if the enemy throws a grenade at you, an indicator appears on your screen, so move away from it or you're dead meat.

One thing I kind of enjoyed was the hand to hand combat. If you got close enough to your enemy, you could choose to grapple with him. If you had a lot of enemy targets around you, the poor sap you grappled would end up acting like a bullet sponge, saving your life as you killed his compatriots.

There were several different graphics available that played through when you grappled, showing different ways you could kill your enemy. There were even parts of the game you could use the surrounding environments to help you in dispatching the poor soul.

Again, as with some of the games like the Call of Duty series, you occasionally had to plant bombs on targets to meet objectives. I guess some people might have found it neat, but I found it a little cumbersome. When placing the explosives on a target or object, you would have to hit the appropriate coloured button representing a wire, and then twist one of the joystick controllers in order to lock the wire in place. Time consuming and pointless to me, but others might enjoy it.

The graphics for the soldiers are just average. All the Nazi soldiers look pretty much alike, with there being only four (that I can remember) models. Most of the maps were average looking; with the only thing really sticking out for me was the destruction that was rendered across New York City by the invasion. That was very well done, but otherwise, the maps and surroundings were pretty much standard fare.

The game utilizes the Unreal 3.0 engine and somehow it really does seem under-utilized to me. There were times that the soldiers seemed to get stuck in the walls, other times when they died it seemed very un-natural to me, unlike some of the other games I've played that had beautifully rendered rag doll effects.

Nothing about the soundtrack to the game really stuck out in my mind, so again, it was pretty much just your average game music. It's not something that I would have gone out to pick up if I could find it, or like the soundtrack that you could get if you purchased the collectors edition. Although, there are those who would disagree with that statement. Just check out other reviews.

As is the case with many Xbox games, the time playing was rather short. Even with having to reload several times after getting my rear handed to me in some of the larger maps, it still took me only about six hours to complete the game.

That is the biggest complaint I have about these games, and I've said it before. Purchasing a game that costs about $60 and playing it for only about six or so hours makes me feel that I most certainly am not getting my money's worth.

Yes, the game does come with a multiplayer mode, but again, as I've stated before, I'm not into multiplayer games. That feature is pretty much lost on me. I didn't bother trying it with this game either, as if I really wanted to play multiplayer, I would go and get my butt kicked again in Call of Duty 4.

Consider this... if the single player game is, at best, mediocre, do you expect that the multiplayer version would be any better? I personally would have to say no.

For those of you who love to gain achievements while playing the Xbox 360, there are 39 to be had in the game. I managed to unlock 21 for a score of 450 out of 1000, while I played it but that's the limit for me.

On a final note, it was kind of neat to see weapons that were probably just on the drawing board near the end of the second world war when the Nazi's lost. They were designed and brought into play for the game, and that was a logical, but nice touch.

Pro's
- Intriguing storyline.
- A few neat speculative weapons and aircraft.
- The ending was well done, and totally unexpected.
- One aspect of the Washington chapter.

Con's
- Too short.
- Clunky graphics at times.
- Uninspired enemy units.
- Some frustration factor in the larger maps.

Overall, I'd give it a 2.5 out of 5. Not bad, but not really memorable.

The story, art, and music are terrific. Too bad the rest of the game is horrible.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

"What if the Nazis invaded the USA?" We see this kind of what-if scenario all the time in movies and read about it in books. But we've rarely seen a game with this kind of story. Then there's Turning Point. I couldn't tell you how excited I was to play this game. I was starting to get sick of all these WWII games and this seemed like a breath of fresh air. Then I actually played it.

Let me tell you this, the story is great. It's not much of a "What if the Nazis invaded America" scenario, but more of a "What if Winston Churchil wasn't around to give his influence?". For in the game, Churchill dies in a freak car accident in 1931, there by leaving Europe spineless when the National Army came to power. So they take over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Russia. And since Germany had gained so much power over their conquest, Japan had no need to attack Pearl Harbor, so the USA had no real reason or motive to attack the Nazis. Then in '52, Germany finally attacks America, and totally takes over. Now it is up to you to push back the National Army and save your country!

The art direction is original and very well done. Some of the designs for the vehicals, weapons and Nazi soldiers are very creative. The art also really brings out the scope of the game. Most of the levels have you fighting at famous land marks (e.g. White House, Crystler Building, British Parliment Building, Big Ben) that have been destroyed by the Nazis. It's also a little scary and thought provoking to see hundreds of German fighter planes and zepplins flying over the NYC air space dropping partroopers and tanks to the streets below.

The music is fantastic. Real professional musicians obviously worked on this score. It's definetly some of the best music ever in a game.

In an artistic point of view, Turning Point is pure gold. But there's just one problem...

The game itself is way below average, unfished, and otherwise broken.

Let me break it down...

The Controls: Say good-bye to the likeness of the smoothe controls of other shooters like Halo, Call of Duty, or Bioshock, for the contols of Turning Point are so uncomfortable and unbalanced, you might just sue the developers. Your character moves like a rock with a gun. He's slow and stiff, and your turning/aiming speed are no different. Your character is able to do a grappling move that will eithter have you take out an enemy instantly or use him as a sheild, but since the contols are so impared, it's hard to tell which action you'll do. It's also practically impossible to shoot an enemy with any weapon. For instance, if your weilding an SMG, you'll be lucky enough to hit an enemy's torso from 40ft.

The Dialog: It's really sad for a game with a story this amazing, to have a script that could pretty much rival any B-movie. All of the characters are cliched, stereotypical, and easily forgetable with very predictable lines that you probably heard somewhere else before. The lines for the Nazis are a bit harsh. For the game literally demonizes them, even though most of the soldiers that fought for the National Army were regular Joes like you and me and were forced to fight as Nazis.

The AI: Naturally, no broken first person shooter is complete without some of the stupidest AI imaginable. It's kind of strange to see entire squads of highly trained "super" Nazis with advanced weapons and technology be totally wiped out by one former contruction worker with a tommy gun (AKA: You). Sometimes they'll run around in cirles, stand and do nothing, and/or they won't be able land a bullet on you even at point blank range. There are even parts where you can even use their thick-headedness to your advantage. At times you'll use the grapple move as a crutch, since it's much easier in the game to run up to an enemy and grapple kill him than to cope with the lousy shooting mechanics.

The Graphics: It doesn't matter what system you have this game on, nor does it matter what kind of TV you play on. Turning Point is one of the worst looking games of this generation. It's very rare for me to complain about something as pointless as graphics, especially since I grew up in the 2D age of games. But I find it a slight bit insulting that this game runs on the Unreal Engine, which is one of the best video game engines ever made, and yet it still manages to look very bland and pixlated. You'll find more polygons here than in a geometry book. Most of the textures are unfinished and/or poorly rendered. The animations and physics are just laughable. Basically, this game is an eye sore.

Turning Point is a perfect example of how developers shouldn't focus on art and art alone when making a game, especially for a first person shooter. There are some games with problems you can easily over look and still have fun with it (like Grand Theft Auto, Dead Rising, and Earth Defence Force), but Turning Point has too many issues for it to even be considered mediocer. The only reason why I'm giving this game three stars is becasue the story, art, and music are truly fantastic. Other than that, this game is an abysmal pile of excrement. If you want to play a good game with a good 'what-if' scenario, you're better off playing Freedom Fighters, World in Conflict, and/or Call of Duty 4. Turning Point is obviously broken, unfished, and most importantly, it isn't fun.

It's not Bioshock or Mass Effect, but it's not bad.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: March 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed this game. True, it's not as amazing as Bioshock, but when I saw the planes flying across the bay into New York, it felt more personal than anything in Bioshock, Half-Life 2, or Halo (1, 2, or 3, take your pick).

Still, there were some problems. Using ladders is a pain, but ladders in FPS games are always annoying; at least in this game you don't have to worry about reaching the top and missing the landing. While I didn't have a problem with the weapons, it was a bit annoying that the Nazis can shoot their weapons with pinpoint accuracy while I have to struggle to shoot a guy across the corridor. The iron sight mode can obscure vision too...but both of these things just made the game more challenging. I can't shoot from my hip with 100% accuracy myself...why should I expect different from my avatar?

Multiplayer's kind of blah, but I don't think a game should be condemned because of multiplayer...I don't think it should be praised if multiplayer takes precedence over single player mode either (*cough* Halo *cough*).

Problems aside, the soundtrack is absolutely awesome, and the premise is an interesting one; the Nazi invasion of the United States. Maybe it's just me, but as long as the controls are okay and the graphics aren't just obscenely bad, I'll enjoy the game as long as the story's interesting.

In short, if you buy this game thinking it's gonna be like Call of Duty, you're going to be dissappointed...personally, I'm glad it's not. I've run up the beaches of Normandy more than I've flown a snowspeeder on the ice planet Hoth, and that's saying something.

Fun game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 31, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Turning point is an underrated, entertaining game that will keep your interest throughout the campaign. It has a very interesting story line...I think that's why I liked it so much. Not the best graphics, but good.

Overall, a very good game!

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