The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn adventure game

The general rule for games adapted from films is that they tend to be rubbish. With that in mind, we were pleasantly surprised to find that large chunks of the tie-in for Steven Spielberg's CGI blockbuster The Adventures of Tintin were quite enjoyable.

The main single-player campaign loosely follows the plot of the film, as Tintin stumbles on a mystery surrounding a lost ship, the Unicorn, and embarks on an epic hunt for hidden treasure. The movie is, of course, based on Hergé's classic boy's own adventure stories, so it's fitting that the game takes an old-school approach to gameplay.

The main sections are essentially an old fashioned two-dimensional platform game in the vein of something like the Super Mario series, blended with a bit of Prince of Persia, as Tintin lithely leaps from ledges and climbs up ladders, exploring or escaping from large, labyrinthine areas. For the most part, these sections of the game were a lot of fun, with further amusement added by hidden collectables and opportunities for using the environment creatively in order to deal with bad guys.

The trouble is that the platform-jumping segments are split up by several interludes that involve distinctly different types of gameplay – puzzle solving, sword fighting or vehicle driving – and these sections were far less successful. The puzzles were a welcome distraction but were too simple to be much of a challenge, the vehicle-based levels were rather dull and the sword-fighting bits were just clunky and awkward.

The visuals could have been bit better, too. The design takes its cues from the movie versions of Hergé's characters and backdrops but they ended up looking a bit bland. The voice-acting and music, on the other hand, were pretty good.

The good news is that The Adventures of Tintin won't tax your PC that much (click here to see the full system requirements) but the bad news is that it won't tax your gaming skills much, either. It's a very easy game that even younger players will be able to breeze through very quickly, although additional ‘challenge' levels and co-op missions help to flesh the package out a little.

PEGI age rating: 12+

Available on: PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360