The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn Review

Whether it's video games, fashion or music styles, it's cool right now to bring things back to the present. This leads us to the revival of The Adventures of Tintin, a series that's been around since the early 1900s. With the help of Steven Spielberg, this worldly journalist is back on the scene in both a feature film and video game, which incorporate Tintin's The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure stories. Often with film tie-ins, the quality isn't there, but with The Adventures of Tintin this is just not the case. Indeed, it's a rather adventurous title that doesn't suffer from the typical pitfalls.

Whether you are familiar with the stories or not, it's pretty easy to follow. In the solo story mode, you follow Tintin who is a journalist with a knack for adventure. After buying a mysterious model boat from a street vendor, he's quickly thrown into a whole mess of thieves and pirates. Turns out, the model ship is one piece of a set of three model ships which all contain parchments that lead to hidden treasure. Tintin and his model ship are kidnapped and thrown onto a boat by evil smugglers in search of the treasure. On the way, Tintin meets Captain Haddock whose ancestry is connected to that of Francis Haddock who originally sailed the Unicorn. The two manage to flee the smugglers and decide to look for the treasure themselves with their parchments.

As Tintin is geared towards younger gamers, the gameplay is very simplistic. There's one button that you use to attack, but you can also perform sneak attacks as well by either sneaking up behind enemies or hiding in barrels. Tintin primarily runs as a platformer with a few 3-D areas splattered throughout. There are also some sections which require a bit of puzzle solving like using items around the room in order to open a door, but they don't require much thought.

Golden Crabs are hidden throughout for you to collect which requires a bit of creative exploration and generally the gameplay works rather well. The animations are pretty smooth too, which is great to see. Environments offer some creativity as far as fighting goes. You could choose to knock out someone by falling on their face or throw down a banana peel and watch them slam into a wall.

There's a few sections where Tintin needs to either drive a car or a plane and overall, they don't interfere with the rest of the game. The main issues with the gameplay are all within the sword fighting sections. The rest of the game you use the one button to attack so you'd think sword fighting would be much the same. Instead you need to use the directional buttons to slice and dice your enemies as your character moves along rails to their next fighting area. Blocking doesn't come easy as you need to hold down one button but then direct your blocking hand with the other.