Indiana Jones has deserved a game like this for a long time. While Lucasfilm’s more popular sci-fi sibling has had more video game adaptations than there are stars in the galaxy, Indy has had to suffer in relative gaming obscurity.
A few PC adventures and a console game or two simply haven’t been good enough for one of cinema’s most iconic heroes. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle puts an end to that with an adventure game that not only has top-notch presentation, but is also packed with entertaining cutscenes.
The Great Circle takes place in 1937 between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, right in the middle of Dr. Jones Peak. A mysterious intruder takes Indy to the Vatican to judge an artifact that both he and the Nazis are eager to get their hands on.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a first-person game that splits its time between puzzle solving, hand-to-hand combat, and stealth. There are linear story missions, but the game really shines during its huge open levels.
The first of these, The Vatican, starts out as what appears to be a fairly small courtyard with a few hallways to explore. As we made our way down the main path, we quickly realized that all the balconies overlooking us and all the papal hideaways we walked past were actually explorable.
While the game will point you in the direction of the main quest, there is a significant amount of legwork to complete, which are the game‘s side quests. These missions often have long cutscenes and extended multi-part objectives that feel just as meaningful as the game‘s main missions. There are tons of things to miss if you’re not thorough. Beyond that, there are smaller mysteries, like trying to crack the code to a safe or opening the door to a gun store.
None of this feels like filler either. The inclusion of full cutscenes, additional supporting characters, and valuable rewards means that if you complete absolutely everything in The Vatican, the expansive Giza section, and the other open areas, the game could easily last upwards of 30 to 40 hours.
While exploring the Vatican, we walked down a random staircase and were greeted by a closed door. They told us that only Mussolini’s best can enter. Then we found the appropriate fascist outfit and suddenly found ourselves in the middle of an underground boxing ring.
We spent hours in each of the open areas completing as many quests as we could and we know there is still more to dig. If you’re interested in seeing all the secrets in the game but don’t consider yourself an archeology expert, you can purchase in-universe guides that show the general location of the secrets.
Similarly, with puzzle solving, which you’ll spend a lot of time on, the game lets you do it yourself, but offers guidance for those who need it. If you’re stuck, you can take a photo of the puzzle with the game‘s camera, and each subsequent photo you take will offer an increasingly obvious clue, until the game tells you the solution.
This is a great alternative to some recent blockbuster titles that have basically shouted the answer to puzzles at the player before they’ve had a chance to think. The puzzles themselves are well designed and never veer into busy work or frustration.
Hand-to-hand combat is the only area where the game stumbles a bit. Indy has his whip and a revolver, plus a host of items that can be picked up off the ground. Most of the time, getting into a one-on-one fight is a result of you messing up stealth, but there are some forced combat sequences that break up the pacing.
The hits don’t seem to do much damage, and when you face more than one enemy, things break down a bit. There are some great natural moments where we knock a weapon out of an enemy’s hand and then push him off the side of a balcony, only to turn and catch the chandelier the other enemy was trying to hit us with, but the La The way the enemies confront each other makes these moments rare.
Speaking of stealth, there’s a mix of traditional stealth gameplay of hiding behind things and monitoring vision meters over enemy heads, and Hitman-style disguises where the disguises give you access to forbidden areas. This all works well, but we would have liked the disguise system to be a little less rigid. You can’t just knock out a Nazi enemy and take away their uniform, you have to find a specific uniform somewhere in the world, which breaks the immersion a bit.
“The biggest compliment we can pay Troy Baker is that the only way to know it wasn’t Harrison Ford is by the fact that Ford is 82 years old. Baker’s impression is so good that calling it an impression seems unfair.”
The game‘s main mystery is well-paced and plays out like a classic Indiana Jones tale. Indy is joined by Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi), a smart reporter with a mission of her own. The chemistry between Indy and Gina is well measured, without being cloying. The circle of Nazi bad guys is a true female pantomime, but they’re exactly the kind of monsters you’d like to see with their faces melted off.
What ties this all together is Troy Baker’s best performance of the year as Indiana Jones. The biggest compliment we can give him is that the only way to know it wasn’t Harrison Ford is by the fact that Ford is 82 years old. Baker’s impression is so good that calling it an impression seems unfair, it’s a flawless performance. The serious side, the sarcastic side, everything about Indy in The Great Circle is exactly as it should be. It all contributes to the feeling that Indiana Jones in The Great Circle is really the lost sixth Indy film.
Great Circle is also one of the most attractive games of the year. A highlight for the visuals, the character models offer Naughty Dog-style realism, and the environments are rendered so impressively that “photorealistic” doesn’t do it justice compared to other video games that receive that title.
It is a blockbuster worthy of the franchise. Large sets and huge play areas are introduced in a blaze of glory and then quickly discarded as the story progresses. It feels like a movie, not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that you can almost imagine the behind-the-scenes reportage of how the crew demolished a city block for a flight sequence that lasts 5 minutes. Appropriately, not since the Uncharted series have we seen such Hollywood excess translated into video games.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the definitive video game of the franchise. MachineGames has nailed the tone, humor, sense of adventure, and presentation to such an extent that it feels like it could be on par with the original trilogy. MachineGames’ Nazi-bashing expertise has been combined with clever puzzle gameplay and deep, genuine adventure gameplay into what is one of the best of 2024.
Microsoft provided a copy of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for this review.
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