The final credits begin their slow crawl up the screen, and we’re overcome by the strong urge to let it all out and have a little cry. What is this feeling? Is it sorrow? Rage, perhaps? A surge of relief tinged with exquisite joy? Maybe we’re hungry. Perhaps this is a new emotion, one that no stimulus yet made available to mankind has been able to elicit. If so, we’ll have to think of a name, but all that enters the mind is an unbroken string of expletives. We have reached our very own turning point.

If reality is entirely defined by perception and experience – as many philosophers have claimed – then Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty is as close to time travel as the human race has come so far. Wandering around this universe of endless corridors, with tanks neatly arranged to form strictly defined paths, and scaffolding that mysteriously crumbles away whenever you attempt to take the less obvious route, the sensation of being back in the year 2000 is simply uncanny. We took to keeping the BBC website open on the UK singles chart for reassurance – the first and hopefully last occasion we will ever take comfort from the existence of Leona Lewis.

Every major innovation made by a first-person shooter in the last few years seems to have been roundly ignored by Spark Unlimited. Doors remain inexplicably locked until a set number of enemies have been dispatched. Your ability to interact with the environment is limited to ladders and a handful of crates and bins, which flash to render it impossible for even an infant to mistake their importance. Fire escapes wreath the exteriors of buildings, yet the entrance to every staircase is cluttered with a stack of conveniently placed boxes. You might assume that the ability to dispatch hundreds of Nazi storm troopers would make a cardboard box the least of your worries, but Turning Point isn’t concerned with all that ‘coherent physical reality’ nonsense that everyone’s banging on about these days. It’s as if Half-Life 2 never happened.

There were times when we were perilously close to giving Turning Point a break, when we overcame the deficient aiming to make a handful of satisfying headshots. World War II shooters have thrived for years based on the inherent satisfaction that comes with shooting Nazis, and Turning Point occasionally benefits from this incidental strength. But then it invariably and depressingly returns to type, glitching so we couldn’t press a lift button and making us restart the console, or providing us with arguably the flattest and most underwhelming final level in recent memory.

The amount of bugs still present in the retail code – the version we played, due to Codemasters’ decision to delay all reviews until after Turning Point hits the shelves – speaks of a game unloved even by its own publisher. The fact that this will cost you the same amount as Call Of Duty 4 or The Orange Box is inescapable, so if Codemasters can’t find enough reasons to want Turning Point to succeed then we’ll be damned if we’re going to look any harder for them. For an action game to be released into a market so replete with brilliant alternatives in this state is nothing short of astonishing. All of a sudden, tears seem to be the only reasonable response.

With tongue pressed solidly in cheek there are moments when Turning Point’s ineptitude can be thoroughly entertaining. Could this be the gaming equivalent to the high-concept trash of Bay and Bruckheimer, or the gossamer thin pop clichés of Girls Aloud? Perhaps Turning Point could be enjoyed in the same manner as Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code; full of hackneyed prose, contrived events and flimsy characters. The trust you hold in our writing makes us feel compelled to expose Turning Point’s flaws, but not everybody is so demanding.

Nutritionists preach the benefits of a well-balanced diet, and your consumption of culture should be treated with the same care. If you are playing the landmarks and the milestones - the BioShocks, the Mass Effects and the Halo 3s – then by all means rent Turning Point. You might laugh, you might cry, but it won’t matter because at the very least you’ll be able to see the game in context.

However, consume this and only this, limiting your experience of the medium to the most cynical and opportunistic of releases, and you might start believing the eagerly perpetuated myth that all games are a terrible waste of time, which Turning Point most certainly is.

Matt Handrahan