Wow was excited today when I popped open my browser and learned that the Turning Point demo had hit the marketplace. I have been anxiously following this game for over a year now. Some say it is hard to get excited for another WW2 shooter but this game has a hitch, the hitch is that the Nazi’s actually invade the good old US of A this time around. The premise of this game appeals to me because I am sort of a “what if” history kind of guy and having to fight of the Germans in plain view of a broken down Statue of Liberty was something I was excited for…until I played it.

The demo starts off as your a worker on a skyscraper in New York City. From this vantage point you can look out over the horizon and admire the beautiful skyline but the chubby in your pants quickly recedes as you hear bombs in the distance with German Zeppelin’s beading down on your location. As you make your way down through the building you run into a few scripted events that serve as a brief generic tutorial before hitting the ground and starting America’s fight for freedom. After hitting the ground you soon begin to notice the faults in the game.

For such a promising game, in my mind anyway, I was really shocked that they put the demo out with so many flaws. The hit detection in the game is probably the worst I have ever seen in a console shooter. Like many other FPS’s you can zoom in to shoot down your sites but this hardly helped me as I missed more often than I hit the target I was acquiring. On the contrary the Germans were expert marksmen. It seemed that the only time I really hit my target was when I was sure I was supposed to be missing it. These guys obviously never played very many FPS’s in their lifetime.

While the hit detection was weak one of the biggest problems was the sensitivity with the aiming. There are only 3 settings to choose from if I am remembering correctly and they are way off. The default setting was way to slow and if you jumped it one setting up your character acts as if he is on video game crack, it is more jumpy than a kangaroo in heat. Where is my slider for sensitivity Codemasters? Every quality game has one, where is yours. The controls in the game just don’t feel right. Do you remember that first time you played the original Halo? What I got from that game was how tight the controls were and thats my measure for how a game is supposed to control, if your game does not feel like Halo then get back to the drawing board, you should not have fight your guy just to turn around.

My last gripe with Turning disapPointment is the graphics of the game. Now I don’t expect every game out there to ship looking like COD4 or Crysis but cmon fellas, shipping a demo of a game that has been in development for two years and having it look like an Xbox Originals title is down right disappointing. Look at the other games out there, look at how they are done, you don’t even have to make a great game, just make it good. I was so excited for this game and the new alternative history that was made up but now I just feel sorry that people are going to spend $60 for it. The way this game stands it is not even remotely playable for me, when I play a FPS I want tight controls, I want to be able to see whoever I shoot actually get shot, I want the game that I thought I was going to get and as of now I can guarantee that this game gets nothing higher than a 5.8 and a 5.8 is not something I am going to spend my money on.