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Europe's most famous comic character has finally made it onto your home computer. And he's determined to be the first man on the moon!

Swots might protest that there's already been a man on the moon, but of course he wasn't French, so it doesn't count. Sadly, Tintin isn't your typical comic hero and instead of tying his mum's curtains around his neck and up, up and awaying to the Moon, he hitches a ride on a Professor Calculus's rocket ship.

Needless to say, Tintin is soon in the pilot's chair, guiding the ship through an asteroid field - to escape he must collect eight red spheres. Yellow spheres boost energy when collected.

However, after escaping it's literally a case of 'out of the frying pan, into the fire'. Fires have broken out in the ship, and must be put out using fire extinguishers. In addition, the mad Colonel Jurgen is on the loose. He's tied up various members of the crew which Tintin must rescue by walking over them. Jurgen has planted some time bombs and is armed with a pistol. Spray him with the extinguisher to incapacitate him. Unfortunately, some of the bombs can't be reached by simply walking to them. Instead, Tintin must turn off the artificial gravity and float over to them!

Once all the fires have been put out, the bombs deactivated and Jurgen apprehended it's onto the next load - back into the asteroid field. There are five space stages, and five rocket stages (of increasing difficulty and varying layouts) before the final leve where Tintin must land the ship on the moon, using just the fire button to reduce speed.

A wave of nostalgia swept over me when I loaded up Amiga Tintin, the superb start up sequence capturing the flavour of the brilliant comic series. Unfortunately, it seems Herge himself didn't have much say in the actual game design [I'm not surprised, he's dead! - Ed] as it's so limited with a shallow space flight section and repetitive platform game.

Still, both sections are well presented (on both machines) and there's a certain short-term appeal with two types of game to master.

On both Amiga and C64 there's a neat intro, showing the rocket taking off, and the space scene is really nice. The rocket moves really well and the gameplay is good, albeit limited.

Once inside the rocket, the game begins to disappoint: the flick-screen-scrolling is fine, but the animation is jerky - equally so for C64 and Amiga.

Putting out the fires and so on is initially fun, but again limited. Repeating the levels improves the challenge, but while the multi-load is fine for disk drive owners, cassette users may come off badly (we haven't seen this version yet; the C64 marks are for disk).

All in all, quite a nice game which Tintin fans at least should find worth the asking price.

Presentation 69% Nice intro showing rocket take-off, quite fast disk multi-load (tape would be a bind, though).

Graphics 65% Nicely animated rocket, interior background graphics okay but lack variety, main sprite mediocre and animation poor.

Sound 59% Cheery intro tune, sparse in-game FX are okay.

Hookability 68% Attractive first section, but second section is fairly common on C64.

Lastability 60% There's a fair challenge, but not much variety.

Overall 64% A nice game for disk owners, but not much lastability.

Presentation 70% Very nice intro, but no interlevel screens.

Graphics 68% Quite pretty asteroid sequence, fast too, but the interior rocket sequences are mediocre with poor animation.

Sound 64% Some original spot FX during the asteroid sections, okay background thrum in spaceship.

Hookability 69% Fairly simple to get into and enjoyable enough to play for a while...

Lastability 53% ...but later levels don't add enough new.

Overall 61% A quite playable, if limited, game.