Turning Point: Fall of Liberty does a lot of things right, but misses the mark where it counts.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty presents an interesting alternate-history premise. On December 13th, 1931, Winston Churchill was struck by a car while visiting New York City. He was injured, but he survived (Note: this is all true). Fall of Liberty deviates from history when it presents the question: What if Winston Churchill hadn’t survived?

Without the great leader’s help in WWII, the German Army grows stronger than ever. As the game begins, a Nazi fleet descends upon New York City.

You take control almost immediately. Your character is a construction worker and you find yourself up on some scaffolding as chaos reigns all around you. You must make your way down the scaffolding as your co-workers plunge to their deaths. I wish I could’ve helped them, and at times it feels as if you should be able to, but everything is happening so fast that it’s understandable that you would immediately run for safety.

The atmosphere and feeling here is great, but it’s ruined by some pretty terrible graphics. The screenshots for the game didn’t look that bad, but in action everything looks very unimpressive, such as the awful textures. The character animations also look very stiff and unrealistic, for the most part.

However, those previous gripes are small potatoes when compared to the game’s absolutely atrocious shooting. Enemies show no signs of flinching or anything while being shot and it isn’t until you see the death animation that you know you’ve been making any progress. The AI is decent. Some enemies will run at you and make no attempt to hide, but plenty will run for cover and some will even blind fire.

The game has a fun grapple mechanic, where you can instantly kill opponents with the butt of your gun (there was one part where you could throw a guy off a building) or use them as a human shield. The feature works well and unlike Turok, the game is challenging, so charging someone head-on in hopes of grappling them will usually get you killed.

At the end of the demo, you’ll hop in the back of a truck and watch behind you as people struggle to stay alive. A building in the center of the background collapses, sending a shockwave and dust cloud straight at you. Again, if it weren’t for the lackluster graphics, this sequence would be amazing.

There is definite potential here, but it’s completely buried underneath the poor graphics and flawed shooting.

So just how hard is it to screw up a game about stabbing dinosaurs? Not that hard, apparently.

Let me preface all of this by saying that Turok has a steep hill to climb. The bar for shooters has been raised tremendously in the past year with games like Halo 3, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Call of Duty 4. I personally think that Call of Duty 4 is the best shooter ever made and probably one of the best games ever made. This is what Turok has to live up to.

The demo loses points right away for starting off in a cave. As far as I’m concerned, that’s no better than a sewer. Along with your partner Slade, you need to find a way out. Slade is quite possibly the biggest dickhead ever, but he’s voiced by Ron Perlman, so it’s all a-ok in my book.

The environment looks very bland, but I really can’t imagine a cave looking that spectacular. The texture leaves a lot to be desired and there were things scattered about – such as bones – which just looked downright bad.

You can dual wield guns, which is always good, and you can switch through your weapons with the D-pad. Up will always be your bow and down your knife.

We encountered our first raptor when Slade shot a flare from his shotgun. This is where I became the most excited and was also the most let down. I immediately whipped out my knife and jumped into the action. I charged towards the raptor knife in hand, like only a true badass would. Once I got close, a prompt came up on screen telling me to hit the right trigger, so I did. Turok stabbed his knife through the top of the creature’s head, ripped it back out, and then kicked the dead creature to the floor.

That was it. Before the thing even had a chance, I pulled off a context-sensitive one-hit-kill and dropped it like a sack of hammers. By this point, more raptors had swarmed in on us. One of them knocked me down, which gave me a neat little sense of panic. I got back to my feet, rushed towards the raptor, and once again planted my knife in it. Now I had easily taken down two dinosaurs while only losing a trivial amount of health, which regenerated quickly. For the first 2/3s of the demo, I didn’t use anything other than my knife. Even when taking on humans with guns, I simply rushed them and insta-killed them, and then waited a few seconds for my health to regenerate.

After a while, it felt more like a stabbing simulator than a shooter. Of course, I didn’t have to use my knife, but why waste my ammo when I don’t need to? What’s worse, having to endure the killing animations over and over again – of which there were only a few – really pulls you out of the game.

Another gripe I had was with the stealth. There’s no actual system to it, so you just have to crouch in the bushes and hope you’re not spotted. Many times enemies will stand right in front of you and look in your direction, but you’ll still go unnoticed.

Fortunately, the level began crawling with baddies and it became rather difficult to not use firearms. The enemy A.I. was terrible, with guys just standing out in the open and blasting away. However, the lack of any sort of cover system made it a fair fight, as I had to do the same. At one point I lobbed a grenade into a pack of enemies, where they seemed to just stand there and stare at it before being blown away. They clearly acknowledged its presence, yet they made no attempt to escape.

A year or so ago, Turok would have been a mediocre shooter. In light of recent games, it’s just bad. Stabbing enemies is fun for a while, but the animations and actual act itself get tiresome quickly. I also had a lot of fun taking out enemies with my bow, but it’s not nearly enough to carry the game.

With only a couple weeks to go until the finished game, I can’t imagine much of anything will change. Color me disappointed.

Turok_Tim AKA Tim Lewinison, Associate Director of Propaganda Games, has been posting on the IGN boards lately. He created a thread titled “Developer greetings from Propaganda Studios…aka ‘Questions? We’ve got answers!’” where he’s been answering many questions from gamers themselves about the upcoming next-gen Turok.

His latest post assured worried PS3 owners who have been getting the short end of the stick lately when it comes to getting gimped ports of 360 games. Tim assures that “the PS3 game rocks as hard as the 360 version. No worries there.”

Moreover, he confirmed that a demo is on the way “VERY” soon, for the Xbox Live Marketplace, and would follow on the Playstation Store later. Tim also went on to confirm the presence of dino’s in multiplayer, online co-op, and the validity of the achievements that recently hit the net.

Let’s hope the game has improved on its most immediate predecessor.

The post in its entirety reads:

Good morning, folks. Happy New Year to you, I hope it was a safe and fun one. Let’s tackle these one at a time, shall we?

PS3 - Issues with PS3 development are largely overblown by internet “experts” and folks with an axe to grind. Face it, any new platform is going to present challenges and the PS3 is no different from the 360 in that regard.

We’ve had over a year’s head start getting experience on the 360, but Propaganda has extremely talented coders who took on the challenge of making Turok multiplatform and giving PS3 owners the best game possible.

Sony was also a great supporter, providing on-site assistance here so that you guys on PS3 got the same AAA fps experience that the 360 owners are going to get when Turok’s released.

So to make a long story short, the PS3 game rocks as hard as the 360 version. No worries there.

Demo – We’re going to make the 360 demo more widely available VERY soon, and we’ll be releasing a PS3 version too. I look forward to the comparison videos and jpegs which are soon to follow, I’m sure.

Dinos in MP - I’m not going to give away the farm, but you’ll definitely see more than just raptors in all multiplayer sessions. They’re a great addition to the mix, making things unpredictable for both sides and really fleshing out the game universe to the same high level that our single player game enjoys. You guys will love ‘em all…when they’re chewing on your opponent as opposed to you.

Achievements, online co-op - We’re supporting online co-op play, for sure! 3 distinct maps telling aspects of the SP campaign from a different perspective.

The AI is suitably tougher, as you’d expect from a mode which supports 4 players working together. There are specific co-op achievements as well. For a full list of achievements, check this link.

TIM

Source: IGN Boards