The Adventures of Tintin | Life of Android

The Story

The Adventures Of Tintin is the official smartphone accompaniment to Stephen Spielberg’s latest cinematic epic. An action app designed to rival its big screen brother, this Android offering sees you crossing the globe in an epic quest to track down the Secret of the Unicorn. It’s hugely impressive stuff and a huge benchmark for Google’s smartphone and tablet OS.

The Experience

A blockbuster movie deserves a blockbuster app and let’s make no bones about this, The Adventures Of Tintin is both big in scale and ambition. For starters it looks A-MAZING, especially when you play it on an Android tablet as we did. The graphics are easily equivalent to a PlayStation One game, if not an early title for the PlayStation 2 with Tintin and his pal Snowy impeccably rendered in 3D be that for gameplay or one of the game’s many cut scenes.

The app itself works via a set of touchscreen controls, including a virtual joystick for movement and some additional buttons for running or sneaking across terrain. Additionally, you interact with the game using several touch points to open up secret passageways, grab puzzle pieces or execute a quick-time-event. This can lumber you with more to do than humanly possible on rare occasions but for the most part the balance is judged pretty well.

As you work your way through the app you’ll be able to play as multiple characters (Snowy, Captain Haddock and Sir Francis Haddock) and engage in a huge variety of gameplay options such as swordfighting, piloting a plane and racing a camel. Since Tintin is the star of a family movie, there’s little peril involved in its gameplay but with a smorgasbord of gaming opportunities to savour, the app is invariably a thrill to experience.

Best of all, little feels half-baked about The Adventures Of Tintin. While Gameloft have interwoven this app with an impressive number of threads, the big picture is never lost amidst all the intricate details. As we said in our intro, we really do think this is a standard bearer for what’s to come on Android in the future and the action app to beat on a still fledgling platform.