We Will Fight Them on Ellis Island!
A central hook for the game is that you're not playing an elite WWII soldier, or even a soldier at all. As Dan Carson, a high-rise construction worker in New York, you're at ground zero as jets start crashing into skyscrapers and German troops come parachuting down. We'll say this for the opening sequence: a game that starts off with jets smashing New York skyscrapers into rubble earns full marks for mature storytelling. Even as we struggled to get Dan off of the high-rise he was working on and to safety, we still winced as New York's 1950s skyline was torn to pieces around us.
Part of the appeal of the game is meant to be the every-man nature of Carson, a high-rise worker in '50s New York. While we recognize that gameplay demands that the main character in a shooter be a bit of a hard-ass, we were disconcerted to be playing an every-man who easily bests Nazi troopers in hand-to-hand combat. Whether throwing his victims in front of him as human shields or simply killing them with a single, contextually chosen instant-kill, Carson is quite the martial artist.
He's also a mean hand behind any weapon you care to name; we saw a Mauser pistol, an updated version of the M1 Garand and a Gewehr 47, as well as a few mounted weapons. Carson stepped behind them without a misstep or hesitation. For a construction worker, Carson was more than capable with the modernized weapons of World War II. There's a solid weapon selection, but it's definitely disconcerting to see a "regular joe" gunning down dozens of paratroopers.
With some actual hands-on time, the controls of Turning Point seem very solid. It's easy to sprint, aim down iron sights, or bring weapons to bear, and impacts reverberate just right. We want to see how the game turns out with a few more months of tuning, in particular to see if there are any vehicle segments or particularly compelling multiplayer choices. Hopefully this "what-if" story has an ending that makes it worth fighting yet more Nazis.
