The beginning level is a great rollercoaster ride.
We’ve only seen the first level; unsure of how linear it will get.
When you see the opening sequence to Turning Point, it feels like whatever alternate-timestream creating entity that created Turning Point’s reality should have also plucked Paul Revere out of 1775, dropped him into alternate-1952 New York, and have him ride around shrieking, "the Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming!" The images of massive zeppelins dropping off Wehremacht paratroopers, bombers peppering the streets with fire, and tanks demolishing skyscrapers in Manhattan are bold and compelling, and should help distinguish Turning Point from other WWII-era action games.
The American Reich
"We didn’t want to make just another shooter in either the Pacific or European theater. And we didn’t want just another rendition of D-Day or a similar battle," comments producer Dean Martinelli. To that end, the development team at Spark did some reading on what the Third Reich would have done if given the chance to invade America, and extrapolated those plans into the game’s fiction. In the Turning Point universe, Churchill is killed in 1931, England surrenders in 1950, and the Axis steamrolls over America two years later. Other influences for the game’s feel and tone run from obvious fare such as Guns of the Navarone and Bridge over the River Kwai, to less obvious ones like The Pianist and the Ratchet & Clank series of all things (mostly for the "vertical" feel of the level design).
Besides the crazy "Nazis win and invade America" setting, the other interesting facet of Turning Point is how you play just a normal dude. You’re not a soldier or a handpicked agent for the newfangled OSS, you’re just a guy in construction working on a Manhattan skyscraper. As you navigate the various beams and girders, buildings explode, zeppelins crash, and even the very building you’re on starts to crumble. As you balance your way to safety, you occasionally slip and fall, only to be find yourself grabbing onto a girder in the third-person perspective. Designer Robert Berger comments, "originally, Turning Point was all first-person, but that felt a bit claustrophobic and awkward at times (such as when trying to climb up an unstable building). So in response, the game automatically switches to third-person for certain sequences."
This is like D-Day, but with the roles flipped and blimps instead of boats
There’s also a grappling attack system. We didn’t get hands-on, but from what we saw, the grapple system seems to be a fusion of Quick-Time Event-style gameplay (think Shenmue) and context-sensitive actions. When you enter a grapple, you need to quickly decide what action to do; possibilities are determined by a multitude of factors such as whether you’re sneaking up on the target, how close he is to the wall, whether something is dangling above, and so forth. For the first grapple, you’re approaching a Nazi soldier from behind. You can either just smack him, or grab him to use his own weapon in a choke hold, or just shove him over the side of the skybridge.
Guerillas in the Mist
Again emphasizing the more everyman nature of the protagonist, you find yourself using the environment more than the weapons. In Turning Point’s universe, Americans are put in the rare position being guerrilla fighters defending their home turf. Yes, at its base level, Turning Point is still a first-person shooter, but you can’t really carry that many weapons; a couple at most. Guns will be handy here and there, but you’ll rely more on your fists (for simple takedown and combat disarms) to throwing Nazis out of windows or straight-up smacking them against walls.
Martinelli summarizes the core game into four Rs: run, regroup, resist, and retaliate. The opening level is the blitzkrieg on New York, and you spend much of the early game just being on the run from the Nazis as they roll into the U.S. Cut forward a few weeks later, after the Nazis have fully occupied the country, and the game places you in Washington D.C., as the American resistance starts forming up. It’s over in D.C. that the alternate fiction feel is more palpable. German propaganda (with slogans such as "The Third Reich provides for you! You must provide for it!") litter the walls while the Nazi banner drapes down from the walls of the Capitol Building. Additionally, German equipment follows the extrapolated progression of a 1940 victory, hence all the gear is a theorized evolution of "real" WWII equipment. Hence, the new "Angriff Luftshiff" zeppelins that are used in the invasion of New York, or the elite Natchjager corp officers who use infrared goggles to spot insurgents at night. Later levels will have you participate in mass raids (don’t expect squad-command gameplay, just other folk on your side in the same general area), and you’ll even hop over to London at one point when it comes time to retaliate.
Occupied Washington D.C. is a scary sight indeed
When questioned about how linear the beginning looks (in light of Spark’s involvement with the Call of Duty series, which is commonly compared to rollercoaster rides in terms of spectacle at the price of restricted freedom), Berger commented that the opening level is, indeed, very linear. But that’s mainly for tutorial purposes, and that while Turning Point won’t be mistaken for an open sandbox game, it will be less restrictive than a Call of Duty title. We really like the presentation and spectacle seen so far, and we’ll keep you posted on later parts of the game as they’re shown.
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