dogsounds reviews: Fall of Quality: Point Of No Return
This review is for the DEMO of Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty available on Xbox Live and was written January 2008.
So, I have just played the demo for Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. Another WWII-era FPS (which is fine, I love 'em), but this time with a twist.
The game has a fantastic premise: Winston Churchill is hit by a taxi in New York before the outbreak of war, and before he took the office of Prime Minister (true) and dies (not true, and this is where things get interesting). The story lies in the fact that without Churchill to bolster and rally the British people during the years of World War two, there is little "allied" resistance to the Axis regime, and this excercise in speculation posits that the defiant little island would have been defeated and enslaved into the Nazi war machine. Then, as the 1940's come to a close and the 1950's arrive, the Reich sets its sights on the next prize: mainland America.
Coming to America - in this case, a whole fuckton of Nazis. Time to drink three pints and find a towel, I guess.
The team at Codemasters have explained how they went to great pains to flesh out this brilliant "what if" idea, that if successful, would create a fresh, new entry into what many see as a tired genre. They researched weapons and technologies that were on the drawing board at the time the Third Reich fell in 1945, and tried to imagine what would have been if Germany had not been defeated and had continued on in its domination.
That sounds like a lot of effort. So it is a pity then that this demo has just wiped out all that hard work and put me in a position where I wouldn't even want to rent it. This is why the review is only for the demo.
You play...um...I have no idea. Some construction dude who works out, it seems, and hangs around the low-res parts of town.
Now, this is going to be hard, because in so many ways this is Hour Of Vicotry all over again. However, whereas Hour Of Victory was nothing more than standard fare at very best in terms of plot and design - nothing more than an open-topped tunnel crawler with the worst implementation ever seen - Fall Of Liberty: Turning Point has, at it's heart, a cracking idea, and one mitigating circumstance, which I will come to.
So, what's it like? Well, first of all, visually, it is dull, simple, unattractive and almost not "current-gen" at all. textures are schmooshy and indistinct, effects are limited and pyrotechnics are...well, just terrible and reminiscent of 2-D bitmap animations. Lots of brown, gray, and...well, the occasional bright yellows are to be seen. I was shocked to see a burning building giving off said 2-D flames and what appeared to be two-foot diameter orbs glowing in green and blue. Go figure. Imagine Medal Of Honor: European Assault with something it didn' have - decent last-gen Xbox graphics, and you pretty much have Turning Point.
Now, whereas in Hour Of Victory this was appalling, here there is one tiny mitigating circumstance: when you start to play (which is is like, "la...la...la...BAM!") you look down and see a WHOLE DAMN FREAKING CITY below you. That is impressive, and I have to give Codemasters credit for that. It is no doubt because of this that the texture and lighting quality has taken a hit. Still...I would much rather have a nice-looking game than a crappy-looking game in an enormous world I can explore 5% of.
Although the graphics are clunky at best, and shameful at worst, at least they are rendering a whole city. Hour Of Victory had no such excuses.
Nothing looks real. Nothing has bumpmapping or any solidity, as far as I could tell. Cityscape draining the graphics budget aside, it is just poor.
Then there is the animation. It's probably in there somewhere, so if anyone does find it, please call Codemasters on 1-800 ZOMG and let them know to come and collect it.
Nazi parachutists drop from the skies on what appear to be solid plastic parachutes, and they hang there utterly stiff and lifeless, unless you shoot them, in which case they make a clunky transition from "hangng lifeless with legs up " to "hanging lifeless with legs and arms down and maybe no helmet any more". I shot four in succession, and they all animated in exactly the same way. Immersive, not. Troops on the ground do no better. They seem to spawn crouched behind cover (key frame one), then stand up and move utterly out of cover to shoot you (key frame two), and then when shot they stand up straight, fling off their helmet like a vaccuous model throwing her hair about for a shampoo advert (key frame three) and then drop to their knees (key frame four). Every single time the same way.
Sound is lifeless, dull and off the shelf. Through the entire first half was a sound that I can only assume is supposed to be the sound of the engines from the huge zeppelins flying over your head (which are impressive), but which in fact just sounds like very loud, very annoying cyclical mains hum. Weapons sounds are not interesting - and the "futurised" Gewehr 43 has a sound that, unbelievably, cuts off before it has finished. Oh, and each gun seems to have one single audio file, so don't expect any Halo 3 style ability to figure out where the bad guys are and how far away by the sound of their weapons. Or, for that matter, any realism.
And lastly, what of the controls?
Just. Fun. Removing. Fucking. Awful.
Throughout the whole demo (which is about 5 minutes) you have this sensation that time has somehow slowed, that you are running through treacle, and this applies to animations within the word also - NPC movement, debris falling, buildings collapsing. It is all just SLOW. And the same applies to the control scheme.
On normal setting, it will take you half an hour to turn a full 360 degrees. Combat is a case of "I hope the enemy dude doesn't shoot me too much while I spend twenty minutes lining up a shot with this thirty-five foot long rifle." Which makes the enemy lack of motion, I suppose, a good thing. So you turn up the sensitivity to high, and whoa, fuck me Jesus, it is utterly unplayable. The slightest touch of the stick will send your weapon whizzing all over the screen. I tried running around a corner, turning at the same time, as I usually do to round a corner properly, and I ended going back the way I came. Which didn't help when combined with the fact that several times it was not clear where I was supposed to go. When I finally figured that out, I couldn't keep control of my guy to make him go that way.
This is actually an animated gif of me spinning around on the spot. Don't adjust your sets. It's just showing gameplay with the control sensitivity set to normal and playing in realitime speed. For the hard of thinking, that was sarcasm.
So, nasty visuals, terrible off-the-shelf sounds, cringeworthy animation and controls that can be set to "tree sloth" or "motion sickness express" and nowhere inbetween. Is there anything positive I can say here?
Well, yes, again, it's the idea. I would have loved for this demo to be good. I would have loved if it had been as playable as Medal Of Honor: Airborne or Call Of Duty 3, and I would have loved if it had looked as good as Call of Duty 4, Halo 3 or Bioshock (which is the nearest thing to compare it to visually, in terms of style, but boy, they are in different leagues). Why? because of the idea. Such a great idea.
And such a waste. And this is why a feel a little bad ribbing on the demo, because whereas Midway just seem to have churned out Hour Of Victory, I can't help shake the sense that the guys at Codemasters had a real vision for this game, and for whatever reason, it just never came together. When you see games like the ones I mentioned above, especially those set in WWII, it makes games like Hour Of Victory and, sadly, Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty all the more feeble, lifeless, lame and inexcusable. And definitely not worth £45.
And, unlike Hour of Victory, which felt like nothing more than corporate shill and whip-cracking from above, it makes me feel guilty to be so negative about the game I have just played. These guys all doubtless work hard, and have families and bills to pay. But I suspect - sorry guys - that this game is not going to go very far to pay those bills.
Sadly, with release set for February 29, I don't see that there is really any chance for the game to be much different from this awful demo. Which sucks, because there is a dire need for games with innovative settings and stories.
A need that this game would have filled, had it been on anybody's wish list. Which, I suspect is no longer the case.
dogsounds verdict: half a star at best - not even really worth renting, it would seem, and no fun at all - I'd rather eat my own hair.
So, I have just played the demo for Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. Another WWII-era FPS (which is fine, I love 'em), but this time with a twist.
The game has a fantastic premise: Winston Churchill is hit by a taxi in New York before the outbreak of war, and before he took the office of Prime Minister (true) and dies (not true, and this is where things get interesting). The story lies in the fact that without Churchill to bolster and rally the British people during the years of World War two, there is little "allied" resistance to the Axis regime, and this excercise in speculation posits that the defiant little island would have been defeated and enslaved into the Nazi war machine. Then, as the 1940's come to a close and the 1950's arrive, the Reich sets its sights on the next prize: mainland America.
Coming to America - in this case, a whole fuckton of Nazis. Time to drink three pints and find a towel, I guess.
The team at Codemasters have explained how they went to great pains to flesh out this brilliant "what if" idea, that if successful, would create a fresh, new entry into what many see as a tired genre. They researched weapons and technologies that were on the drawing board at the time the Third Reich fell in 1945, and tried to imagine what would have been if Germany had not been defeated and had continued on in its domination.
That sounds like a lot of effort. So it is a pity then that this demo has just wiped out all that hard work and put me in a position where I wouldn't even want to rent it. This is why the review is only for the demo.
You play...um...I have no idea. Some construction dude who works out, it seems, and hangs around the low-res parts of town.
Now, this is going to be hard, because in so many ways this is Hour Of Vicotry all over again. However, whereas Hour Of Victory was nothing more than standard fare at very best in terms of plot and design - nothing more than an open-topped tunnel crawler with the worst implementation ever seen - Fall Of Liberty: Turning Point has, at it's heart, a cracking idea, and one mitigating circumstance, which I will come to.
So, what's it like? Well, first of all, visually, it is dull, simple, unattractive and almost not "current-gen" at all. textures are schmooshy and indistinct, effects are limited and pyrotechnics are...well, just terrible and reminiscent of 2-D bitmap animations. Lots of brown, gray, and...well, the occasional bright yellows are to be seen. I was shocked to see a burning building giving off said 2-D flames and what appeared to be two-foot diameter orbs glowing in green and blue. Go figure. Imagine Medal Of Honor: European Assault with something it didn' have - decent last-gen Xbox graphics, and you pretty much have Turning Point.
Now, whereas in Hour Of Victory this was appalling, here there is one tiny mitigating circumstance: when you start to play (which is is like, "la...la...la...BAM!") you look down and see a WHOLE DAMN FREAKING CITY below you. That is impressive, and I have to give Codemasters credit for that. It is no doubt because of this that the texture and lighting quality has taken a hit. Still...I would much rather have a nice-looking game than a crappy-looking game in an enormous world I can explore 5% of.
Although the graphics are clunky at best, and shameful at worst, at least they are rendering a whole city. Hour Of Victory had no such excuses.
Nothing looks real. Nothing has bumpmapping or any solidity, as far as I could tell. Cityscape draining the graphics budget aside, it is just poor.
Then there is the animation. It's probably in there somewhere, so if anyone does find it, please call Codemasters on 1-800 ZOMG and let them know to come and collect it.
Nazi parachutists drop from the skies on what appear to be solid plastic parachutes, and they hang there utterly stiff and lifeless, unless you shoot them, in which case they make a clunky transition from "hangng lifeless with legs up " to "hanging lifeless with legs and arms down and maybe no helmet any more". I shot four in succession, and they all animated in exactly the same way. Immersive, not. Troops on the ground do no better. They seem to spawn crouched behind cover (key frame one), then stand up and move utterly out of cover to shoot you (key frame two), and then when shot they stand up straight, fling off their helmet like a vaccuous model throwing her hair about for a shampoo advert (key frame three) and then drop to their knees (key frame four). Every single time the same way.
Sound is lifeless, dull and off the shelf. Through the entire first half was a sound that I can only assume is supposed to be the sound of the engines from the huge zeppelins flying over your head (which are impressive), but which in fact just sounds like very loud, very annoying cyclical mains hum. Weapons sounds are not interesting - and the "futurised" Gewehr 43 has a sound that, unbelievably, cuts off before it has finished. Oh, and each gun seems to have one single audio file, so don't expect any Halo 3 style ability to figure out where the bad guys are and how far away by the sound of their weapons. Or, for that matter, any realism.
And lastly, what of the controls?
Just. Fun. Removing. Fucking. Awful.
Throughout the whole demo (which is about 5 minutes) you have this sensation that time has somehow slowed, that you are running through treacle, and this applies to animations within the word also - NPC movement, debris falling, buildings collapsing. It is all just SLOW. And the same applies to the control scheme.
On normal setting, it will take you half an hour to turn a full 360 degrees. Combat is a case of "I hope the enemy dude doesn't shoot me too much while I spend twenty minutes lining up a shot with this thirty-five foot long rifle." Which makes the enemy lack of motion, I suppose, a good thing. So you turn up the sensitivity to high, and whoa, fuck me Jesus, it is utterly unplayable. The slightest touch of the stick will send your weapon whizzing all over the screen. I tried running around a corner, turning at the same time, as I usually do to round a corner properly, and I ended going back the way I came. Which didn't help when combined with the fact that several times it was not clear where I was supposed to go. When I finally figured that out, I couldn't keep control of my guy to make him go that way.
This is actually an animated gif of me spinning around on the spot. Don't adjust your sets. It's just showing gameplay with the control sensitivity set to normal and playing in realitime speed. For the hard of thinking, that was sarcasm.
So, nasty visuals, terrible off-the-shelf sounds, cringeworthy animation and controls that can be set to "tree sloth" or "motion sickness express" and nowhere inbetween. Is there anything positive I can say here?
Well, yes, again, it's the idea. I would have loved for this demo to be good. I would have loved if it had been as playable as Medal Of Honor: Airborne or Call Of Duty 3, and I would have loved if it had looked as good as Call of Duty 4, Halo 3 or Bioshock (which is the nearest thing to compare it to visually, in terms of style, but boy, they are in different leagues). Why? because of the idea. Such a great idea.
And such a waste. And this is why a feel a little bad ribbing on the demo, because whereas Midway just seem to have churned out Hour Of Victory, I can't help shake the sense that the guys at Codemasters had a real vision for this game, and for whatever reason, it just never came together. When you see games like the ones I mentioned above, especially those set in WWII, it makes games like Hour Of Victory and, sadly, Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty all the more feeble, lifeless, lame and inexcusable. And definitely not worth £45.
And, unlike Hour of Victory, which felt like nothing more than corporate shill and whip-cracking from above, it makes me feel guilty to be so negative about the game I have just played. These guys all doubtless work hard, and have families and bills to pay. But I suspect - sorry guys - that this game is not going to go very far to pay those bills.
Sadly, with release set for February 29, I don't see that there is really any chance for the game to be much different from this awful demo. Which sucks, because there is a dire need for games with innovative settings and stories.
A need that this game would have filled, had it been on anybody's wish list. Which, I suspect is no longer the case.
dogsounds verdict: half a star at best - not even really worth renting, it would seem, and no fun at all - I'd rather eat my own hair.
