If any blockbuster franchise should be easy to adapt into a good video game, it’s Indiana Jones, but spinning the source material into a truly great game is a less enviable task. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ends a long hiatus for the archaeologist’s interactive adventures, re-appearing in a world where the Uncharted series has already redefined the genre. With the newest outing, developer MachineGames attempts to avoid retracing Nathan Drake’s steps while wrangling a game into something that genuinely resembles the movies, an ambitious venture with an appropriate touch of daredevilry.
The game opens with a bit of fan service that more or less stakes out this claim, diligently recreating the set piece from the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark before pivoting into its own story. Situated between Raiders and The Last Crusade, The Great Circle is interested in the same subjects as the franchise’s most memorable films. The plot starts at Marshall College, but it doesn’t take long for Indy to get wrapped up in a race to recover powerful artifacts before the Nazis can make use of them.
This article has been published as an unscored Review In Progress to allow our reviewer more time with the game. This article will be updated with a Review Score when available.
It’s a proper globe-trotting adventure, and it features the same kind of erratic pacing that tends to define stories driven by set pieces. Several big playgrounds offer Indy ample room to explore, starting with a tour of the Vatican that features a milder version of the Hitman franchise’s undercover flavor. Smaller, more linear levels are also interspersed, and true to the spirit of archaeology, there’s a generous dose of wandering through underground tunnels in search of artifacts that hide behind puzzles inscribed in ancient languages or walls that are weak to sledgehammers.
Scrappy Melee Action Is The Star Of The Gameplay
Guns Can Be Nice Decorations
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Most of the action sticks to a first-person perspective, a choice that makes a lot of sense whenever Indy’s bashing Nazis with bottles, wrenches, and guitars. It’s not exactly an immersive sim, but for a game with a focused story and predefined character, it sometimes comes surprisingly close. The first-person approach isn’t without its concessions, however. Swinging across chasms on his whip or climbing certain obstacles switches to third-person, as do the cutscenes, which are frequent to a degree that occasionally verges on comical.
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Like the Wolfenstein titles from MachineGames, combat that never truly reinvents itself relies on a succession of set pieces and new opportunities to keep things interesting. Scavenging melee weapons is the easiest way to take out enemies, and although smacking a guard with a rolling pin or a mallet mostly comes down to the same thing, there’s fun to be had in seeing tools that should be perfectly durable explode against the thickness of fascist skulls. There are guns, of course, but between a realistically slow revolver reload and the general risk of blowing cover, a scrappier approach comes naturally.
Puzzles and platforming break up the combat to varying degrees of success. The puzzles aren’t often real brainteasers, but they do feel bespoke enough to earn their keep. Platforming is comparatively a weak point, with some typically finicky first-person ledge-grabbing and a general lack of fluidity. A commitment to incorporating the whip is the most commendable part of the affair, and a few gratifying moments that outdo the standard chasm-swing pop up here and there.
The Journal Threads The Adventure Together
Smart UI & Structure
The various gameplay prerogatives are all tied together through the Journal, a feature that goes much further than it does in Uncharted. Quests, snapshots, collectibles, and more are all organized in a physical item that Indy flips through, part of an overall initiative to make the game stick to diegetic elements as much as possible. The way the game structures tasks avoids the worst aspects of repetitive side content checklists, and occasionally running into too many doors that are locked from the other side is a small price to pay.
Upgrades are handled through books that can be found or purchased throughout the world.
I’ve mostly stuck to settings that minimize hints and display indicators, something that some games with a heavy focus on UI will punish by failing to communicate key interactions in intrinsic ways. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does a generally good job of avoiding that kind of reliance, and ideas like delivering hints through taking extra photos of key objectives put the ball in the player’s court.
Cinematic Presentation That Actually Means Something
The Spielberg DNA Is Very Present
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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s focus on immersion works in service of its story experience, and although I haven’t reached the end credits at the time of this writing, I’ve been consistently impressed by how it handles that narrative. To address the elephant in the room, it’s not a game for those who don’t like cutscenes, and it can occasionally verge on a Frankenstein marriage of movie and game in a way that doesn’t always work out perfectly. It is, however, a game for those who only dislike bad cutscenes, because bad cutscenes are essentially nowhere to be found.
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Imitating Spielberg is a risky business, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn’t operate with the same level of sheer invention. It puts forth a sincere effort, however, and that pays off with results that are well ahead of the cinematic direction in most games. The characters are charming, the tone appropriately mixes goofiness and sincerity, and the story situates itself in a realm that’s comfortably familiar but not overly so (even if the Siwa segment occasionally does resemble Raiders). Major side content can feel just as bespoke as the main story, and I had to check once or twice to remember which I was doing.
A lot of games have good stories, but far fewer have good storytelling, and the style is what ultimately sells Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Cutscenes actually make use of both foreground and background action, and characters occupy themselves in more ways than just opening and closing their lips. The lighting puts ray tracing to a far more deliberate task than usual, delivering a dizzying array of Spielberg-style god rays and making the shadows matter in a way that got sidelined when global illumination took off. It may be the only game that’s ever looked better with the film grain filter on.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle requires a card with ray-tracing support on PC, which isn’t a typical demand. For compatible cards, however, the performance seems better than the requirements might indicate.
There is, unfortunately, one downside to this success. Although it consistently looks great, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle occasionally overshadows its own gameplay with its cutscenes, rigging up climactic moments as clever scenes that play out passively while the player simply watches. Seeing Indy dodge traps or knock out enemies in especially inventive ways makes me want to participate directly in them, and although that’s easier said than done — I wouldn’t be any more satisfied by shoehorning QTEs into the mix — I do wish the game had managed to close the gap more.
Final Thoughts & Review-In-Progress Status
Like Dr. Jones himself, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a little bit out of time. It’s a strange amalgamation of modern cinematic game sensibilities with the adventurous spirit and minimal hand-holding that more frequently characterized older movie tie-ins. For me, that mostly works wonderfully, and there’s real magic to seeing what’s effectively the best Indiana Jones movie since the ’80s play out in the middle of a game with incredible production value and a sense of player agency and discovery. I haven’t finished the adventure yet (stay tuned for my final review score), but right now, I’m not sure I want to see it end.