Yeah, this is a typical staple of European developers in the 90s (and late 80s), and Traveller's Tales is a great poster child for that. I used to think only Japanese games (at least in the platformer genre and such) were good, while Western games almost always had the same flaws (pretty graphics, but extremely uninteresting and repetitive level design), but looking back at it now, I think that especially describes European developers, maybe even British specifically - usually coming off the C64 and Amiga demo scenes, where making cool effecient coding algorithms and special visual effects was more important than fun gameplay.
I remember, back in the days, I'd always remember the Traveller's Tales logo due to how much their games managed to stand out after all, plus they had a thing for working with those licenses that would make kids buy their games no matter how good they were.
However, I would also quickly begin to notice that pretty much ALL the games with the TT logo were also pretty bad. Not terrible, but never good at all. I think Mickey Mania was the only decent game they managed to make (and then, only the Sega version), and looking at Jon Burton's YouTube videos today, that's kinda sad, because you can tell he's really passionate about their products... in his own way anyway. That video about how they bypassed Sega's QA process by disguising bugs in their games as "secret level selects" is pretty shady, but at least he's being honest about it.
He's also working on a director's cut version of Sonic 3D at the moment, hoping to fix everything that was wrong about that game. I'm not sure that game is fixable, but it's a game I've always wanted to like, so I'm curious about it.