ry as I might, I can’t come up with a single redeeming quality in Turning Point. The subject matter, alternate history or no, is worn wafer-thin. The controls are poorly laid out and the analog stick sensitivity feels off no matter which setting you choose. Level layout is a study in tried-and-true on-rails FPS design. It feels like somebody decided it would be a good idea to combine everything that hasn’t worked from the entire Call of Duty franchise and package it together into a game. It’s even got the crappy minigames from CoD 3!

Normally, any modern FPS is entertaining in a basic sense because the genre’s conventions are so set that it’s easy to jump in and have a good time shooting bad guys. Not so in Turning Point – the control problems muck up the most ground-level aspects of the genre. The game doesn’t even get this elementary concept right, which makes its myriad other failures all the more unforgivable.

The only thing worse than suffering through poor controls in unoriginal settings is doing so in objectively bad levels. First-person platforming is bad enough, but having to do so on maps saturated with invisible walls and lame climbing sections is salt in the wound. Long load times after a death are irritating; coming back into the game to find you hadn’t crossed a checkpoint in the last 20 minutes is maddening. Turning Point has all this and more.

With the number of average-to-outstanding FPS titles available on next-gen consoles, there’s absolutely no reason to waste your time with this disaster.