This is an excellent example of taking a license and driving it right into the ground of barely tolerable crap.
You spend the roughly 10 hour game running through the plot of Dan Brown’s novel as either Robert Langdon, the professor of symbology who has a knack for uncovering cryptic conspiracies, and Inspector Sophie Neveu, a Parisian cryptography expert. If that’s not a match made in heaven, I don’t know what is. At any rate, the game opens up with the murder of Sophie’s grandfather in the middle of the Louvre, and because of some cryptic clues scattered about, Langdon is the prime suspect. Rather than hanging around to clear his name, Langdon and Neveu stage an elaborate “escape” attempt that leaves them trapped in the Louvre with a bunch of patrolling policemen. If you remember from the novel (or the movie), they now have to decode the caretaker’s clues while evading the police. But that’s just too dull for a video game, so in addition to sneaking from room to room, you’ll also have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the police.
Oh, yes. Scrapping in the art museum. It’s the game you’ve always dreamed of, and just didn’t realize it. It turns out that Langdon’s a boxing expert, so he can hold his own in a poorly-staged fist fight, and Neveu is trained by the French, so she’s got to be good at fighting, right? If you sneak up behind an enemy, you can take them out with a handy stealth attack, which is the best option since it totally circumvents the crude battle engine. However, The Collective anticipated this and decided it wanted to ram its shoddy gameplay elements right down your throat, so there are several sequences throughout the game where stealth is thrown right out the window and an enemy charges headlong at you. Unfortunately, although your opponents are mostly French, they don’t surrender at the first sign of resistance. At this point, you are forced to – shudder – grapple with your opponent and hope you get the upper hand. If you do, you have the option to “throw” your opponent (push him in some direction and hope he hits something and falls over it), “push” your opponent (oh, look at that. It’s the same option), or “attack” your opponent. This last option is by far the most interesting, as it’s the quickest way out of the mess of “fighting.” If you’re wise enough to choose this option, a sequence of buttons will appear at the bottom of the screen and if you press them all in the correct order, you may just knock out your opponent. Or get the chance to do it again. Of course, if your enemy gains the upper hand, then you may get thrown, pushed, or have to defend yourself against his attacks. If this happens, just push the buttons in the correct sequence as shown, and you’ll make it out all right.
If not for the slipshod combat sequences polluting this game, this could have been a decent adaptation of the novel. The puzzles are neat enough to solve, although you can glean a lot of the answers just by reading the novel. Or watching the movie. There are a few sequences that were thrown in there just to pad out the game length, and to give you more opportunities to fight the same battles over and over again. Fun and frolic.
The game really suffers in the graphics department. The character models are semi-lifelike, although they look nothing like their counterparts from the movie. And when I said lifelike, I only meant in appearance. The dialogue is delivered in a near monotone, and the characters don’t move. Or blink. It’s very unnerving, and since there’s a lot of dialogue in the game, it tends to put you to sleep fairly quickly. Luckily there’s a cookie cut combat sequence around the corner to wake you back up.
While the puzzles were interesting in a campy, adventure game sort of way, there were too many dull sequences to really keep this game moving in the right direction. After reading the book and seeing the movie, there aren’t really a whole lot of surprises in store for the audience, and the target market for this game is way off base. I really don’t suggest wasting a lot of time with this game.
Life’s just too short to play sub-par games.