Da Vinci Code
A decent puzzle game hindered by a bad movie game.
Tags: Da Vinci Code Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Michael Hanning on Jun 6th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Da Vinci Code (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Movie tie-ins for videogames are traditionally third-person adventure games, running through the plot of the movie while battling new generic foes. The Da Vinci Code should be different by its very nature, however – the movie and book were all about solving puzzles. The word ‘code’ is in its name. To stay true to the source material, you’d expect the gameplay to take after great puzzle games of the past. Does the Da Vinci Code do this? Well, yes and no.
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The Da Vinci Code’s great flaw is that it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. It wants to be a cinematic game, but the presentation is horrid. The graphics in particular are a sticking point – the protagonists look slack-faced and bored, and the rest of the cast alternates between badly rendered and downright badly designed. The music is cinematic and sounds good, but it’s covered by mountains of exposition being read by the most bored and disaffected voice actors that money can buy. Regarding the exposition, get used to it – every clue and plot point is going to be hammered into you by two people standing and talking about it for a very long time. This is at odds with the game’s camera, which tries to jazz up the experience by dramatically swooping and panning while all this goes on. Do not be fooled, you are still watching a nun and a cryptologist talk for five minutes.
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Regarding the game’s plot, there are no real surprises. There’s some extra content to extend the game’s running time and more puzzles than there were in the book, naturally, and the leaps in logic between the puzzles and what the protagonists infer from them are absolutely astounding, but it was all there in the movie in the first place. Long story short, this isn’t going to change anyone’s mind one way or another regarding the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.
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The puzzle and exploration elements of the Da Vinci code are where it does everything right. The puzzles are varied and will stretch different modes of your thinking, everything from sliding-tile puzzles to cryptograms to chemistry problems. Exploration is handled in a manner rather similar as well, you run around in 3rd-person view until you see a desk or a painting or something that needs examining, at which point you can go into a first-person view that lets you take closer looks at everything around. Pressing X over a highlighted object will cause Robert and/or Sophie to talk about it for a bit, giving you some clues as to what to do next. If this were the entire game, it would actually be a fun throwback to puzzle/adventure games of the past. Unfortunately, the game tried to reach a wider audience and threw in melee combat with hordes of enemies and stealth sections, which is where it all goes bad.
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The action is handled in as boring a method as it possibly can – you and your opponent grapple for a moment before a seemingly arbitrary decision is made as to who has the upper hand. If the computer has the initiative you have to press buttons as they flash on screen to dodge attacks. If you win, you press buttons on screen to deliver attacks. Something to note is how ridiculously jarring the combat is – rather than simply punching out enemies, the characters deliver astoundingly brutal martial arts attacks. They’ll hammer-punch enemies in the face repeatedly, throw them into walls, and even deliver a Johnny Cage-style strike to the genitals. When game players who grew up in the shadow of Mortal Kombat think a game is unnecessarily brutal, that’s saying something.
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The bonuses are one of the more pleasant parts of the game. To begin with, at any time you can press L2 to see additional info on almost everything you’ve encountered in the game, from the Louvre’s design to individual pieces of artwork and symbols you see. As you play the game you can find additional secrets, mostly things such as models of Da Vinci’s inventions that unlock some extras after the game. Among these unlockables is the chance to walk around two of the stages more leisurely. The Louvre a nice one as you get to see a bit of the museum and its artwork in broad daylight without worrying about sneaking past security guards for a change. It’s fun, but ultimately unsatisfying. The game just doesn’t look good enough for this to be anything but a novelty, and you can’t zoom in on the paintings anyway. The second unlockable stage is much more interesting – you get a sound gallery, a display of the secrets and inventions you’ve found, and a gigantic new puzzle that unlocks even more bonus content. The ability to focus on a puzzle-oriented part of the game without worrying about combat whatsoever is a welcome respite.
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In the end, the Da Vinci Code is a good puzzle game with a bad movie game added to it. If you’re a big fan of the source material or starving for puzzles, it’s worth picking up. In the end it gets a 5.0 out of 10 – add a point or two if you’re willing to use cheat codes to get out of most of the combat. For the curious, a rental at best.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ A variety of challenging puzzles. + Wonderful extras. + Some new twists to the source material. |
5.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Combat is unfun and jarringly brutal. - Voice acting is flat and boring. - No map. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| It’s a collection of decent puzzles surrounded by a bad movie tie-in. | |
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Tags: Da Vinci Code
Posted by Michael Hanning on Jun 6th, 2006 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
