Bargain Bin Lovin'

Good Cheap Nazi-killin'...

Game Stop...damn you, Game Stop. I stopped by to pick up a WiiU game for the kid, and ended up pawing through the marked-down Xbox game bin. Five bucks for Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena? And what the hell is Turning Point: the Fall of Liberty? Who cares, it's only four bucks! I felt like Lindsay Lohan on Dollar Shots Night, determined to load up on everything because it's on sale! By the time I got home, I was loaded down with a bag full of three-to-eight year old games, some popular but aged, some equally aged but utterly obscure. I started off with obscure by popping in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.   It's standard shootie-killy fun, based on an intriguing premise: what if Winston Churchill's accident in 1931 left him dead, rather than just sporting a dashing limp? According to this game, Britain goes down as fast as France, and, before you know it, the Nazis (in my best Aldo Rayne voice, pronounced nazzzeeeez)are dropping troops in the Big Apple, of all places. By God, that idea alone is worth my four bucks.
How does it play? Comparisons first: it uses the Unreal engine, so the look is familiar. Think TimeShift, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Singularity, or any of that era. Yeah, facial animations are creepy and some of the physics get a little wonky, but the engine is more than up to the job of rendering Nazis to shoot. Invisible barriers keep you from going all open-world and exploring nooks and crannies, but you aren't here to explore, are you? Hell no, you're here to defend America from goose-steppin' Nazzzzeees, dammit.
Not a ton of plot to slow things down in this game. Basically, America stays isolationist as the Axis takes over the rest of the world. Dewey defeats Truman, for real this time. By the time 1953 rolls around, the Axis has dominated everything but the contiguous 48. America is happy with its head in the proverbial sand, until...well, here's where the game comes in.
You start right off with no real lead-in: Messerschmitts are bombing New York, and paratroopers are wafting down through Manhattan. You are an ironworker, the proverbial Regular Joe working thirty stories up, and having to navigate the narrow I-beams to get down to ground level. About halfway down, you find some of your first parachuting Nazis, and it all heats up after that. The story mostly consists of joining the thrown-together resistance and killing lots of Nazis. So you're asking, "What's the point? Sounds like the same old." Maybe. Just maybe. But the game only cost me FOUR BUCKS and I got to shoot Nazis in New York, suckers! Yeah, the story is a rail-road that never does any justice to the awesome basic premise, but...did I mention it was only four dollars? Verdict (or, in this case, VERDICKTEN): BUY, but not if it's more than five bucks.