In 2003 Dan Brown released a novel that doesn’t really need much explaining - if you can read, or even if you can’t and you’re friends with people who can then you’ll have heard the story of The Da Vinci Code. Everyone loves a good conspiracy and Jesus getting hitched and knocking out a couple is as good as they get; good enough to sell millions of books worldwide, spawn a huge Hollywood blockbuster and now an obligatory movie tie-in. But is it The Times crossword or The Sun’s Coffee time?
The game follows the two main characters from the story: Professor of Symbology at Harvard Robert Langdon and French cryptology agent Sophie Neveau. You switch between them in third person as they run around Paris and eventually to England, with the gameplay balanced between solving puzzles and combat, but not as you know it…
The puzzles section of the game isn’t the most challenging on the old grey matter but it keeps you ticking over, like a Sunday afternoon crossword with a couple of letters already filled-in. The puzzles are also quite varied, from deciphering coded messages to the Resi Evil-style “do this to get the key to get through that door you saw back there”, but have some cool little touches in some of them. By and large they’re fairly easy once you’ve found all the clues you need but every so often you’ll get a huge wad of cryptic text with only a shoddy poem to help you. Other times you’ll have puzzles so silly you’ll question the point of putting them in (so the answer’s G-R-A-I-L eh? Didn’t see that coming!).
The sneaking/combat sections however are truly awful, lacking any sense of excitement or skill. To attack and defend you simply have to press a combination of the four main buttons in sequence, like some cheap mini-game! If that isn’t boring enough, it never seems to get any harder the further along you go, the game just makes you perform the same sequences more times! Also, when you’re fighting two people at once and you’ve pressed the four buttons to attack suddenly you’ll teleport into being in a headlock by the other enemy, or some other glitch-related shenanigans! You can also “sneak attack” enemies by approaching them from any angle except directly in front of them, and the animation is very, very poor indeed.
The graphics on the whole are very basic: everything kind of looks like it’s supposed to, enough that you can differentiate Robert from Sophie anyway! All the characters scream dreadfully average at the top of their digital lungs and he environments are nothing special either.
The game doesn’t completely follow the story from the book/film and extends to a few locations mentioned but not actually visited by the main characters. Luckily only the very first puzzle I came across was the same as the book, so there are already millions of walkthrough guides about (not that you’ll need one). For a movie tie-in it doesn’t really do very well, because the main subject matter is the path of the two main characters evading the police and the puzzles they solve, both of which are different in the game, leaving only the main principles of the story.
The Da Vinci Code is a classic movie tie-in, where deep down there’s a good premise hidden under layers of profitability and rushed development. I quite enjoyed the puzzle parts of the game and although the game isn’t too long it didn’t feel stale like other basic tie-ins. The basic graphics and the Godawful combat sections really grate and unfortunately haunt you at every stage. If you read the book and liked the puzzles but don’t fancy an exercise in masochism like Myst then have a look. But I’d advise renting it before you get burned for 30 notes: you probably won’t be able to stand the circus combat!
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