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I'll be honest and say that I've not read the best selling novel by Dan Brown, or seen the Hollywood incarnation with Tom Hanks. And based on this game, I won't be rushing to fix those omissions to my literary and filmic experience, because if they are this tedious then I might never wake up again.

If you've been locked up in Guantanamo Bay or whatever, then this is a murder mystery story about clues left through history about a secret that relates to Jesus and the Christian religion. Personally, I think this is the worst kind of hokum, and The Da Vinci Code game isn't much better either.

It first asks us to accept that a man dying of a fatal gunshot wound would find the time to wander around the Louvre at night placing elaborate cryptographic clues that can only be unravelled by two experts, one in symbolism and another ciphers. If he had that much time, why didn't he just ring for an ambulance, the twit?

The game is played from the perspective of our investigators who must evade the police while gathering clues to the killers and their motives. So you get to move around the scenes clicking on objects and ‘examining' them - how exciting.

Sometimes getting to the objects is complicated either because it's protected by a puzzle or a person who needs to be overcome. The puzzle bits are as convoluted and fiendish as you might expect, and might need you to examine other objects or information to resolve them. If the problem is a person you have to resort to the classic academic approach symbologists and cryptographs often use; a good fist fight.

Up to this point I'd played along with the game a little, accepting that Tom Hanks wouldn't lend his voice to this production because they couldn't afford him, and the woman hired to play his companion sounded uncannily like she'd worked on Allo Allo.

But the combat system is frightful in the extreme. You're given visual cues to press the mouse buttons in a set order to deliver a successful blow. Left, left, right, both - what? This seems purely designed to irritate both those people who like slow puzzle games, and infuriate those that wanted some action. It was so bad that it started to make the mediocre puzzle parts seem positively enthralling. The more you get into the game the more of these sequences there are, and you get to use the odd weapon to disable people, yawn.

Even if I accept that some might find the solving puzzle aspect amusing, what I can't deal with is the general shoddiness with which this game has been cobbled. Visually it can be very nice, although curiously there are absolutely no controls whatsoever for graphic quality or resolution. However, in other technical aspects it's a complete abomination. When I first fired up the game it wouldn't run correctly, seemingly running at insane speed. I eventually deduced (another puzzle?) that this title had never been tested on a dual core processor, and as such they've made assumptions about timing that just didn't apply. Setting the game to use just one core cured this issue, but others abounded. Towards the end of the Louvre sequence I crept up on a policeman and punched him. I hit him so hard that the recoil fired me out through the wall onto the path alongside the river Seine! I walked up and down the partially rendered set of the river for a while, but I couldn't get back into the gallery.

I'm sure by now that 2K Games have summoned an entire monastery of albino assassins to get medieval on my bottom for saying so, but this game isn't fun, enjoyable or even well crafted. The entire game represents only about ten hours of play, and no replay value whatsoever.

Its only redeeming feature is that they didn't give their Robert Langdon character the horrific mullet they foisted on poor Hanks in the movie - reputedly.

In short, a ponderous, tedious and utterly perfunctory conversion of the book/film.

Price: £34.99
Manufacturer: 2K Games
Website: www.2kgames.com
Required Spec: 1.8GHz processor, 3GB HD space, 512MB RAM, Windows 2000 or XP, 64MB DX9 graphics card, DirectX compatible sound