The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (3DS) Review

The gaming industry has its fair share of problems and one of the most prevalent is movie games. You see movie games don’t have to be good as others and most of the time aren’t much more than playable (and some not even that, yeah I’m looking at you Enter the Matrix). All a movie game needs to do, is be released at the right time, so that all the family members who don’t know any better see it on the shelves and think “my Jimmy really loves that film, I’m sure he’ll just love the game”. You may be able to tell by now that I was a child who was cursed with such parents and now as an adult, it’s hard not to take out all my repressed memories and pains out on The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. I will say, even though it was a bit foolish of me, that I had a glimmer of hope for this game and it comes in the form of a purple swirl in the right hand corner of the box, the Ubisoft logo. Ubisoft are a company make me weak at the knees and swoon like a schoolgirl over their games and a game that can call itself ‘brother’ to some of my favourites like Beyond Good and Evil, Assassins Creed and Rayman games can’t really be that bad, can it?

From the game’s very start, I felt the sound design was lacking. It’s all very minimal, with little to no music unless you have sparked an enemies attention. There are ambient sounds, for the few locations that the game offered, but you really had to be listening to hear them and it almost made me wonder why they bothered at all. The game lacks any voice acting, by falling back on Tintin’s origins and using comic book style speech bubbles, not only for story progression but even when Tintin falls or slips, so it’s hard to say if it’s laziness or a genuine nod to the past. When the music does decide to show itself for whatever reason, it really does make a difference. The score has the feel of a romping adventure, but because it’s only heard every now and again, it distracts more than it adds.

The 3D makes the graphics look very pretty, adding a lot of depth to the almost painterly art style. Unfortunately it suffers rather heavily from trying to do either too much, or just not very well. The slightest tilt of your head or the 3DS will render your screen unusable and many headaches were had until I had the common sense to just turn the slider off. The graphics are still quite nice without it, but there’s not really that much variety so they feel samey and boring fairly quickly.

The game only has four types of locations, you’re either platforming on a ship, in a cave, in a house, or outside of a house and most are only used once or twice as the game itself is quite short. This is why I was so surprised at how repetitive it managed to be. Usually the payoff for a good short game is that everything feels new and fresh and at the end you find yourself wanting more, while still somewhat satisfied. Tintin seems to have forgotten all that and many of the puzzles are the same as before, and the boss battles are almost exact copy and pastes. On the occasion where the game does introduce a new game mechanic it does a good job of it, giving you the tools and the information without overly babying you. It also usually teaches you in an environment where it’s not too crucial that you get it right, but there’s no real point where the game is overly punishing. When you die (and you will, a lot) for many stupid reasons, the restart point is never too far away and any items that are needed to solve a puzzle will respawn if lost, despite this the game can still be incredibly frustrating.

Tintin seems to suffer from sort of severe obnoxiousness. There are many times in the game where he seems to plainly refuse to do what I’ve asked of him. Some ledges just aren’t good enough for this reporter to grab until the third or fourth try and there have been many times that a leap to grab a swinging hook ended falling to another frustrating death. There’s also no option to look around the map, or see anything other than what is relative to Tintin’s positioning, so knowing whether or not jumping from a ledge will end in death is sometimes nothing more than trial and error. This only feels more frustrating as sometimes jumping in to unseen territory is the only way to progress.

Unfortunately Tintin isn’t much more likeable in the story than he is in gameplay. The whole story begins when Tintin buys a toy boat just because his dog likes it and then refuses to sell it to another man who clearly wants it more and is willing to pay ten times the amount for it. Tintin’s refusal doesn’t seem to have any other reason behind it than ‘no it was mine first and my dog thinks it’s pretty’ as at this point in time he has no idea that this man will try to beat him to a pulp, or that the boat will start him off on this adventure. Finding a clue in the boat Tintin sets off to find answers and is quickly mugged of the model, so naturally, he breaks in to the mansion where it’s held in order to find more clues. Not much later on this journey he meets up with Captain Haddock, who is sadly not any more likeable.

The Captain has an overzealous approach to story telling, in that you actually take control of his ancestor in some swashbuckling side missions. At first I was quite excited about this, the idea being that you use the stylus as a sword, making swipes to attack and tapping to block and being a bit of a fruit ninja I thought this could be a lot of fun. The response of the stylus on the 3DS touch screen is unfortunately woeful in this part of the game,and having played other games that respond much better, I’m marking this failure down to the game rather than the console. What I thought would become a nice breakup for the repetitive platforming action was actually much more repetitive on rails sword play, in which the best way to play is to stylus mash and hope for the best. After these odd ancestor flashbacks the captain seems to destroy whatever was around him and from the gist of the small comic book cut scenes almost kills Tintin several times (which at this point actually gave Haddock a few ticks in his favour from me).

Something this game does do fairly well is intensity. There are a few parts where things need to be done quickly: be it running away from danger, or trying to save a friend and the game does a good job of capturing that sense of urgency. What I couldn’t understand is why, when running away from incoming water, touching it is death and yet later while exploring a cave going for a swim is a perfectly viable option. Why a man with a gun isn’t that much of a threat, but encounter swarm of bugs and you’re doomed, or why when flying a plane it changes from inverted to normal controls depending on whether or not you’re shooting (and it has the twitchiest controls ever encountered).

There’s a lot about The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn that doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s not really any story other than ‘lets go find this treasure!’ which would be fine if it could stand up on game play alone, but it can’t and I think it relies too heavily on the idea that people have seen the film. The most baffling thing of all about this game though is that as much as I hate it and the very essence of it’s ’pumped out quickly to make money’ nature, is that it’s not awful. It’s repetitive, some of the controls are just stupid, there’s also not much story, but the platforming can actually be quite fun when it works and I’m sure it will appease fans of the series. I actually think it could’ve been a really nice game if it had been worked on a little more, although I suppose we can all blame market forces for that. It’s fairly easy to assume that there will be more Tintin movies, and sadly with this more Tintin games, so if they can learn some lessons from this one, as well as put more time in it, it may be one of those rare movie game gems to break the mould. Sadly though, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, is not the combo breaker I was hoping for.