The Da Vinci Code [PS2]

Check out Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code on Yahoo! Movies.

Lurking out in movieland is a passively entertaining film about the secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci. It's got heroes sneaking through the Louvre investigating the works of the master, and even a Catholic conspiracy of sorts. Unfortunately, that movie is Hudson Hawk, not the adaptation of Dan Brown's tightly plotted but shabbily written The Da Vinci Code. Sadly, the video game treatment is as threadbare an entertainment as the movie and book it's based on.

Unlike most titles licensed to promote a film, no actual stars were harmed in the creation of this game. So you won't see or hear Tom Hanks or Audrey Tatou. Instead, the characters are blandly conceived as typical video game stand-ins: a blase white guy for ersatz hero Robert Langdon, and a comely but equally uninspiring female cop/scientist model for cryptographer Sophie Neveu.

The plot generally follows the film, which generally follows the book, though of course there are plenty of scenes that "expand" upon the film's locations. Wrongly accused of a murder, American scholar Langdon and Parisian cop Neveu (granddaughter of the murder victim) wind their way through a long series of clues to unravel the sort of titanic conspiracy that would take far too much coordination to actually exist.

Da Vinci is really an old-school adventure game awkwardly crammed into a third-person action format. The now-ancient Myst template is really the thing to use here, but that style of gameplay is so out of fashion that developers The Collective went with a more familiar third-person setup. Nothing meshes well in the resulting mix; while some puzzles stand out, exploration is tedious, dialogue seems to last for glacial periods, and simple movement is a chore. Combat and stealth? Forget about it.

First, the good stuff. The game's puzzles, which range from anagrams and word teasers to multi-part item manipulation, are generally good and sometimes quite difficult. A few will send you racing to Wikipedia to look up various enzymes and obscure symbols. Granted, some puzzles are made more difficult by a poor interface -- the investigation panel lacks sophistication -- but there's a bit of genuine challenge at the heart of the game.