The Da Vinci Code
Crack the code... before the story puts you to sleep.
Published: May 30, 2006
What's worse, the storyline as it's presented in the game sort of rambles its way to a mild plot twist and climax, but then peters out into what feels like a half-assed conclusion. I'm not sure if it's just the presentation as a whole, or if it's the source material that devolves into a very "....huh..." moment and then the credits roll. Actually, that's not true. The credits don't roll, you're just kicked back to a loading screen and the main menu where you can revisit two more levels if you want more puzzles. Since I enjoyed the puzzles, this wasn't an issue, but the way the story ends is so limp that you don't feel rewarded for playing through it all.
Some of this may be the fault of the visuals. Though I mentioned it before, it should be noted that the CG just isn't terribly powerful. I would say that most -- if not all -- of the scenes that were shown as pre-rendered could probably be done in-game, but the in-game stuff is pretty painful to watch in close-ups, so you're forced to sit through the lesser of two evils; a stiffly animated series of shots that either matches the movie shots so well that it's boring or just isn't much of an effort to begin with. Either way, there's the feeling that things are rushed and there was some missed potential.
The in-game stuff isn't much better. Robert and Sophie are saddled with one of the slowest move speeds I've seen in a game in a while, and the animations themselves are stiff and unnatural. Close-ups show that the models aren't terribly poly-rich, and the lip synching is lazy at best. On the plus side, this means the detail went into the environments (where it should go), but some lower-res textures and mysterious glitches like shadows popping through walls hurt some of the areas. When you are presented with some nicer views -- like, say, thick shafts of light pouring through the cloister in Westminster Abbey, it does make an impact, but these aren't especially plentiful.
The one part of the game where the animation is solid is in the pre-set bits for combat. Because combat is limited to timed presses when defending and stringing together combos of face buttons, you'll likely see the same three animations when attacking over and over again -- possibly interrupted if you miss a button or get attacked by someone else. You'll also notice every enemy in the game, despite looks, fights with the same style. Whoops. It might get a bit repetitive (though the game is over before it gets too old), but there's a heaviness to the attacks that makes each blow satisfying. Though it would also apprear Bob and Sophs are part ninja given some of their reversals and moves.
Audio-wise, the game is a little more solid. Winifred Philips' score is heavy on the choir voices and can be, at times a little creepy and unsettling when it needs to be. The voice actors do a modest job of providing an aural backdrop to the characters, straddling the line between sounding something like the big-screen counterpart and being solid enough on their own that it doesn't really matter. Most of the other sounds you'll hear in the game are clicks and stone rumbles and some light sliding sounds and all of these do the trick quite nicely.
The result is the game that's presented as nicely as can be afforded by the Slayer engine, but that doesn't really mirror the kind of ambience of the movie. It does the trick, sure, but there's a sense that if there had been a little more time that it could have been tightened up. The story falls flat, too, with characters that are rarely allowed to joke or offer any quips (when they do, the interaction is rather nice, though), while the combat tends to get a little too repetitive.
It falls, then, to the puzzles themselves to save the game, and for the most part they do. What The Da Vinci Code the game does best is provide that sense that you're cracking some kind of ancient code. The devices used to do this are recycled, sure, but it doesn't make them any less fun, and trying to use what's at hand to get past the next part of the game is done well enough that I don't feel like the adventure genre is totally dead. Hopefully a game can come along that fuses these old-school techniques with visuals that are a little more high-tech.
Hey, if it can happen on the PC, surely it can happen here. Or so I hope.
