Mainly, the game is a 2D platforming game, it's really easy in terms of timing and such, but it's still pretty fun to play. There's quite a bit of variety there, there's some collectibles (crabs with golden claws) if you explore a bit more, and there's enemies to take out, some of which require you to do a bit more than just punch them. You mostly play as TinTin himself, but there are parts where you play as snowy. It's hard to describe in general though what makes the platforming good, best I can do is say that it 'feels' right. It might be a result of the animations or something, but it's pretty fun to play. I also liked the fact that with certain weapons you pick up in levels, you can create chains of events to take out baddies. Throwing a banana peel on the ground so one badguy slams into several others for instance, or picking up a torch and setting a guy on fire who then sets a casket of TNT on fire.
The other parts of the game, more minigames than anything really, have you flying a plane or driving/shooting from a motorcycle. Neither of those are very good, but they don't last very long, and they're not so bad that they would annoy you anyway. There's also some scenes where Haddock imagines himself to be his French ancestor, fighting against Rackham's pirates. The sword fighting is pretty fun, and is more than just ramming buttons, but nothing an experienced gamer would have any difficulty with. Still, more challenging than sword fighting in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood!
In terms of presentation, I thought the game was rather excellent. While it's obvious they didn't have an Assassin's Creed level budget to work with, they did very well, the art style is fantastic and fits TinTin really well, it looks and feels like TinTin, and due to it not having state of the art graphics, the game runs very well. The music and sound effects are excellent as well (though I would've loved it if they had the cartoon intro theme in there
).
It took me about 4-4.5 hours to finish the game, which isn't very long (and thus, wouldn't advise anyone to pick this up at full price), but there's a very nice brisk pace to it, so at least they were generally a pretty good four and a half hours. The story I didn't really love, I thought it a bit of an awkward mix between the Crab with the Golden Claws and the Secret of the Unicorn, and tiny bits from Red Rackham's Treasure. Mild spoilers: There's no Prof. Calculus, no diving for the wreck. The story still wasn't bad, but I was hoping for more, because the two Unicorn books are some of my favourite TinTin books.
One last thing to note I thought is that the game just feels polished. I didn't run into a single bug and load times were brief.
Overall: Worth playing, but not at full price. 7/10.
