Code Lyoko has a Matrix-like premise that should be fairly easy to grasp for sci-fi nuts. A group of high school students attending a boarding school in France stumble upon an abandoned factory near the school. Inside the factory, a powerful supercomputer idly waits, holding within it a virtual world plagued by a sentient virus: X.A.N.A. The friends soon begin traveling to this world, called Lyoko, hoping to save it from the virus' clutches and preventing X.A.N.A. from taking over the world.
Quest for Infinity, as far as I can tell, seems to take place during or around the fourth season of the television series. This means people unfamiliar with the show will be completely lost and will miss out on a lot of minor character details, though the more important aspects of the plot can be gleaned from basic guess work. The overall goal of the game is to stop X.A.N.A. and its evil schemes, so that's really all you need to know.
The gameplay in Quest for Infinity is extremely standard and offers very little excitement. After jumping into a level from the main hub (a point-and-click sort of interface on the school grounds), you lead one of the four Lyoko-bound teens through a series of virtual environments, jumping chasms and killing baddies along the way. You can switch characters at any time during the game, though your team shares gauges for health and energy. The purpose of switching is to make use of each character's unique weapon as well as take advantage of his or her character-specific skills. For example, Odd (that's his name) can use his cat-like abilities to climb up certain walls, while Yumi can balance on thin ledges and beams. These skills are unlocked over the course of the game.
I -- on rare occasion -- enjoyed Quest for Infinity, if only because it bears a slight semblance to other standard action-filled platformers. But there's so much going sour here it's ultimately very difficult to enjoy. First of all, Code Lyoko does not look good. Environments and character models alike look next to awful. Even though the actual game runs smoothly, the entire affair is cheap and embarrassingly bland.
And surprisingly (for a 3D platformer), you can't control the camera at all, which makes certain segments of the game frustrating. This wouldn't have been a huge concern had Quest for Infinity boasted tight controls but it does not. Moving your character around treacherous terrain is annoying and unpredictable because the input response just doesn't click. But that's not the worst of it. Battles can be irritating thanks to a highly unreliable lock-on system that makes focusing on particular targets a colossal chore. If you only have one enemy and it's directly in front of you, things go smoothly enough, but that's not usually the case.
Less noticeable but still problematic is the overall flow of both the game's narrative and mechanical structure. To elaborate on the latter, Quest for Infinity's gameplay just doesn't seem to connect as you jump from level to level with almost no grasp on continuity or an overarching goal. A poorly executed narrative is bad enough, but having the gameplay structure feel so loose is a problem.
As I mentioned briefly above, Quest for Infinity has a few enjoyable moments, but they're only enjoyable compared to the rest of the uninspired nonsense that's going on. I like how you gather points from defeating enemies which can then be spent on character upgrades, similar to bolt collecting in the Ratchet and Clank series. It was also pretty neat to switch the audio over to the French language track, but all the cutscenes are still in English. Oh well.