Today we got hands-on with Gameloft’s upcoming movie tie-in Tintin. Based of course on the upcoming Spielberg/Jackson animated movie…
The game is a puzzle based adventure in a similar vein to TellTale’s Back To The Future series, which takes the usual point-and-click adventure genre and adds a little more user control.
Tintin is in it’s early stages, and so there were many instances of place holder visuals in both cut scenes and the game itself. Having said that I think the game looks fantastic, with Tintin and the characters all animated beautifully, amongst rich and detailed environments. I’m assuming the game is sharing graphical assets from Gameloft’s big sister Ubisoft, who are working on the console versions, as everything had an incredible high quality to it. Little details like dynamic shadows add atmosphere, and depth of field blurring was used to great effect, highlighting things of interest.
The level we played started out with Tintin waking to find himself tied up in a ships cargo hold. His faithful companion Snowy unties him and it’s then your job to take control and explore your surroundings to find a way out. You control Tintin with a virtual joystick, and pull off various actions when prompted using action specific onscreen buttons. The camera is fixed and frames Tintin at the optimum angle. Apparently there is also a free camera option, but I felt the fixed camera did a good job of framing the action and the best viewpoint for Tintin.
Some tasks require controlling Snowy, such as areas where Tintin can’t fit. In this demo level it was down to Snowy to steal the cargo hold keys from a watchman, without being seen. A scent trail is shown on screen showing where the keys are, so you must follow the scent and use stealth to get the keys while the watchman reads his paper. This task was actually pretty challenging, and gives me hope that there will be more substance to Tintin than the hand-holding we see in so many of Gameloft’s games. I have a good feeling about this one.
The film is due out in the UK in October, so expect to see the game hit the AppStore around the same time.
