14 DAY TRIAL // 
Not too long ago, we had a massive movie-book event going on in the world. Basically this is what happened: a writer named Dan Brown wrote a book called The Da Vinci Code, a novel that was sold worldwide in gazillions of copies. Short after that, a movie was made...
We all know the story by now and even if not everybody was a fan of it, the book and the movie and maybe Tom Hanks did their job very well. After that we had the answer from the gaming realm which led by 2K Games launched a PlayStation 2, an Xbox and a PC game. The second game that came to storm the mind of the fans is this one here, which is basically a "free-to-try" downloadable game. The developers of this one are the same that brought us the feature film.
And now, it's time for us to discover the mysteries and have a taste of the thrill we experienced in the book or movie. For starters, it's good to know that "The Da Vinci Code" is a 3-in-a-row puzzle game. The players are presented with a board of tokens and they must swap the adjoining ones in order to make a vertical or horizontal row of three (or more) identical tokens.
The cleaning of the board will make new tokens fall onto the board, giving you other possibilities and challenging you. You'll realize pretty soon that things are not so easy...
Many could think that this recipe is the same like in all the others similar games, meaning when you father enough points the table will be clear and you'll be moving on to the next challenge/puzzle/level etc. But no! Not this time. Now you have to swap the pieces because doing so you will clear the way of your character who must reach a hint to solve the quest.
By now I think you all realized that this is a new twist in this game's genre. This is the first game that has this unique feature, meaning to let the player travel across the game board from start to finish.
Now, let's talk about the "path" the player must walk. Like I said earlier there is one that the gamer has laid before him. This happens by matching three or more tokens in the direction you need to go, even if this is more or less decided by the game. Later in the game, the player will have to make a choice in what this path represents. At one point they will hit a crossroad: the yellow one is for an easy way out, the blue is for a harder path and the red one for a difficult one.
During the game-play, the players will see familiar faces from the movie popping up on the screen. One of them is the police inspector Silas. But these presences are not there just for the fun of it. For example, the inspector will follow you through the game. This basically adds a bit of thrill to everything, because if you get caught, you restart the level.
The game does not lack in power-ups and tokens. The first of them is a flashlight that you can use to light up dark areas of the game board. The catch is this: you can only use this flashlight by matching special pieces on the board. Then you have the "triskeles" that will add to your scramble meter - thing that can be used to scramble the tokens when you need it. The 5-pedal roses will build up your hammer meter which will be very useful to you when you want to smash pieces (such as the brick tokens). The double-clicking on the spiraling tokens will destroy all tokens in a vertical or horizontal row.
Now, going back to the features of this game, there is one more that needs to be mentioned: the 90 boards which are spread over 10 chapters, such as the tricky jigsaw puzzles or deciphering Cryptex riddles. You will have to play with a small locked device that requires you to select the correct alphabetic combination.
Even if the game is slightly boring at the beginning, you'll realize that your time was not spent in vain while playing this. Not a bad follower of the whole Da Vinci phenomenon. Enjoy!
