All the potential in the world can't save this game.
This has to be one of the all-around best plot lines I have ever seen in video game history. I can not even think of another game that takes a "what if" scenario and runs with it like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty does. That makes the truth all the more painful. This game is beyond bad, so bad in fact that I would rank it among the top 5 worst games on the Xbox 360.
The graphics are about the only highlight to the actual game play. They are not stellar, but they do get the job done. Sometimes you will even be surprised at just how good an explosion looks on screen.
Beyond the graphics Turning Point is just hideous. The best possible description I can think of is to imagine any game from the Call of Duty series, and then imagine that game was just completely broken. The aim mechanic is one of the worst I have seen in recent years. When looking through iron sights, most of the guns will actual obscure your view instead of assisting it. Beyond that, the guns are terribly inaccurate. It's common place in Turning Point to aim at an enemy's chest at 10-15 yards and not hit him. The upside to this is that the enemies seemingly can not hit you either. On "insane" difficulty it is very easy to just run around the streets and not take damage. You are free to strafe your way right up to a machine gun nest and take out the waiting Nazis.
Turning Point is based on a checkpoint system similar to the Call of Duty series. If you die, you are returned back to the start of your checkpoint. The problem here is that the loading time is rather extreme. Other than that, while I was playing a mission I managed to die. Rather than start me back at the beginning of my checkpoint, the game just skipped me forward to another checkpoint with no guns, or grenades. That is a perfect example of broken game play if I have ever seen it.
Due to the game's plot you will actually use some relatively cool looking guns in Turning Point. Take all of the familiar guns from the other World War II shooters out there, imagine the Germans upgrading them for a decade, and those are what you will be using. The MP40 becomes the MP50, and so forth. A true pity that the guns barely function in the game.
The sound in Turning Point is rather bland, but it's not repetitive or annoying either.
Overall, I find it extremely hard to recommend this game to anyone out there. There are games that do everything Turning Point does (aside from the plot) far better. If you were to combine the plot in Turning Point, with the game play of even Call of Duty 3 (in my opinion the worst of the CoD games on the 360), you would have at the very least, one of the most intriguing games on the market. As it stands, Turning Point is one of the least playable games currently available. $8 is the absolute maximum I would pay for a mint condition copy of this game. For someone looking to play a fun game, you will not find it here. For a collector, there are a couple thousand better investments out there. At the time of writing this review, Turning Point has been all but forgotten about. In 10 years no one will remember this game, and there will be little to no demand for it.