Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Released: December 9th, 2024
Developer: MachineGames
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Systems: PC, Xbox X/S (reviewed)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle may be the first time in history a videogame’s protagonist is less competent in cutscenes than during gameplay. When you play as him, Indy has feline reflexes and the fighting skills of a championship boxer. When you’re not in control, Indy is… Indy.
It’s the opposite dynamic you see in other games, where a character is shown as capable of much more than the player can make them do, and it’s perfect. I genuinely love that MachineGames scripted a few fights for the seeming purpose of showing how Jones isn’t a flawless action hero, and that some of his survival comes down to dumb luck.
They know what they’re doing.
An impressive amount of work has gone into giving The Great Circle as authentic a flavor as possible. You may not always “feel like” Indiana Jones while playing, but the sum of available parts nonetheless feels remarkably close to the movies. The story beats, the characters, the campiness, it all fits into the series comfortably and confidently.
Also, you get to bash fashy fuckheads. Yes, the lefty media critic is going to do the predictable thing and go on at length about how good it is to hurt them.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gives you ample opportunity to bash fascists in the head. It harkens back to a time when the common gutter Nazi was the easiest fodder a videogame could feed its audience, an objectively acceptable target to be unabashedly battered and ballistically corrected. Y’know, before online right wingers started trying to make “Nazis are bad” a controversial sentiment.
The environment is strewn with objects that you may use to wallop Blackshirt bitches and Wehrmacht wankers from behind. You can brain fascists with guitars, you can brain fascists with skillets, you can brain fascists with bells, you can brain fascists with carpet beaters, crowbars, shovels, and… fly swatters. Each one comes with a delicious audiovisual presentation that sells the impact perfectly.
For a less subtle approach, albeit a more dangerous one, you can shoot the fuckers too. Revolvers, rifles, shotguns, plenty of 1930s firearms are available to pick up, empty, and subsequently use as another thing to brain fascists with.
Gunfire is typically a last resort, or at least something you save as a treat when the herd’s thinned. Stealth is the primary focus of The Great Circle, with players encouraged to sneak behind enemies, take them down “quietly”, and hide the bodies. I’ve put “quietly” in quotes because stealth attacks are really loud and Indy even shouts his quips, but surrounding entities won’t hear any of it if they don’t see you.
Enemy AI, such as it is, doesn’t shine particularly strong. The Nazis are stupid dumbasses. They’re also pretty stupid in the videogame as well.
Stealth is simple and sometimes trivial in its ease of use. Enemies possess a particular lack of spatial awareness, and if they spot you out in broad daylight you have ample time to hide before they clock you as a hostile. Once you’ve gotten to grips with the game, you’ll have few qualms about sneaking into heavily patrolled encampments, knowing that even if you choose not to hide the bodies in your wake, any alerted fash will do a terrible job of searching for you.
Indy’s signature whip gives him access to an infinite luring device. Cracking it against a surface will draw a nearby guard to investigate the point of impact, which can be easily used to take them out one by one. At the midway point of the adventure, you’ll get an opportunity to turn the whip into a longer distance KO on unaware and lightly armored targets, using it to yank them to the floor with concussive force.
Basically, stealth isn’t challenging at all. However, it’s just so consistently fun to smashify the dorks with a bevy of improvised smashification implements. Sneaking around may be a doddle, but it’s quite entertaining.
Direct combat is a little less easy, but not by much. Indy can punch with both hands independently as well as block and parry attacks, while his whip momentarily stuns opponents and pulls weapons out of their hands. Holding the whip command yanks regular enemies into a grab attack, allowing players to repeatedly punch them in their awful right wing faces.
With some choice upgrades, melee fights can become almost as trivial as sneaking to the point where spamming attacks will take down most targets in short order. However, just like with stealth, it’s still amusing - there’s a nice meaty feel to the impacts, and getting yourself surrounded by enemies will still prove dicey.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle’s gameplay structure is similar to Deus Ex in that, rather than take place in an open world, you’re given a number of fairly large open areas in which objectives both mandatory and optional are littered. These sprawls are interspersed with more linear sections where Indy explores tombs and the like to solve puzzles and partake in some environmental navigation.
Environments are densely packed, featuring plenty of side missions and loads of collectibles. The amount of mileage gotten from each space is laudable, but the scenery becomes all too familiar. If you wish to be thorough, you’ll be running around the same old streets or stretches of desert a lot with nothing dynamic to spice them up. While I’ve enjoyed much of my time, trying to grab all those relics, books, and photo opportunities left me feeling rather burned out before the game was over.
Thankfully you can return to previous locations after moving on, which helps you to advance the story without worrying about the money and XP left behind. Given how important such rewards are, however, scurrying back and forth to tick off a large list of repetitive jobs feels somewhat compulsory.
Upgrading Indy is convoluted but interesting. He doesn’t “level up” when he gains what the game calls Adventure Points, and said points don’t go into skill trees. Instead, Jones must find or buy specific skill books and spend the AP to unlock whatever abilities they grant. These books offer mostly passive boosts, such as increases to health, stamina, or the damage of specific attacks. There are a few less mundane ones, however, such as that aforementioned whip takedown.
While it can be a little annoying to spend money or time acquiring a book only to then need Adventure Points for it, the system makes upgrades feel more involved. It’s weirdly compelling to locate books and find out what they offer, and collecting them to use in an order you see fit effectively dresses restriction up like freedom. It’s a nice change of pace to the standardized videogame upgrade systems we see everywhere these days.
One area in which The Great Circle isn’t so refreshing is its user interface. In fact, its UI is bafflingly bad. The quest log is especially awful, a poorly spaced column of objectives broken up into categories that cannot be minimized. Quest names are often non-indicative to make browsing that slightly less convenient, and it’s overall unpleasant to navigate.
Some menus place aesthetic vibe above usability, requiring players to use all four directional inputs to simulate flipping through books instead of interacting with an intuitive menu that works rationally. Text and selections are scattered across the screen, reducing readability. It’s all a bit of a mess.
The map is similarly rubbish. It’s visually uninformative and when you buy the guides that flag collectible locations, they aren't actually marked on it. Collectible items are only shown on the map if you’re actively tracking the sidequest they’re associated with. Every item type is its own separate quest and you can only track one quest at a time - this limit includes proper story missions, meaning your map will only ever show one mission objective or one of several collectible types at any single moment.
Considering several story missions take you to areas that are strewn with collectible items… just… why? Why is it like this? The quest menu is already shit to use, and this makes using it even more mandatory. The whole setup runs so counter to common fucking sense.
Another irritating aspect to all of this is how you don’t get told what parts of the map you can and can’t access. Some items and quests can only be reached after certain points in the story, but you won’t know that if you try and get to them as soon as they’re shown as available.
Linear sections between the more open ones are sometimes good. Exploring tombs to uncover the game’s titular mystery can be atmospheric and cool, but it can also be slow paced and tedious. Same goes for the puzzles, none of which are complicated but range from cute to dull.
There are some nice setpieces to break things up, and the story provides a solid dose of worldly adventuring. The main antagonist, Emmerich Voss, is a particular narrative highlight - exactly the kind of slimy Nazi prick who chews the scenery and deserves to be repeatedly smacked in the face.
Other characters are less edifying, primarily because this is one of those games in which NPCs nag incessantly if you don’t immediately do what they tell you to do. Heaven forbid you take the time to look for all the documents and relics you’re encouraged to find while fucking Gina wants a door opened. I need games to cut it out with the characters who cycle through voice lines every few seconds like a child yelling “are we there yet?” on a road trip.
Speaking of Gina, as an AI companion she’s an outright liability. She ruins combat because Indiana won’t attack if she’s flailing around in front of him, and she loves doing it. Trying to whip a gun out of a guy’s hand and getting shot to bits instead because Gina’s staggering between you while pretending to fight him is fucking dreadful.
Thankfully, she’s only around for certain missions, but said missions are made entirely worse for her presence. As a result, I came to despise her so much I can’t tell if I really find her obnoxious as a written character or if the impact she has on gameplay only makes me think that.
On a far more positive note, our lovable dipshit of a protagonist is impressive as hell, to say the least. While the animation can be somewhat uncanny at times, Indiana Jones resembles a young Harrison Ford to an astounding degree, with MachineGames even nailing his more subtle facial expressions.
When it comes to nails, however, I think Troy Baker can claim the gold medal on this one. That’s a damn near 1:1 vocal impression of Indy if ever I heard one. Whether he’s quietly snarking or doing that uniquely “wide” voice Ford uses when he shouts, every element of the performance is just plain right.
Between the character model and the voice, the representation of Indy puts to shame many of Hollywood’s ghoulish attempts at de-aging or resurrecting actors. Then again, this game isn’t being made by a cheap digital effects studio that got the job by winning a race to the bottom.
Graphics overall, by the way, are fairly solid - nothing too breathtaking and not averse to some visual glitches, but overall it ain’t bad. I’d say it hits the “AAA” graphical quality scale right in the middle.
I had a good time with this thing in spite of my many gripes. I remained invested enough to spend hours traipsing around moderate sized maps to find new skill books, old artifacts, and take photos of stuff. The gameplay doesn’t vary up much, and that contributed to my eventual fatigue, but I also can’t stress enough how enjoyable it is to hit fascists with detritus. That alone kept me returning.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle brings a level of authenticity you almost never see for videogames based on movies, even among the good ones. There are many things I can moan about, from the sometimes trivial challenge to the backtracking to the terrible UI, yet there are plenty of things I can praise in turn. The delightful impact of delivering blunt force trauma to a Nazi, the dense use of space, the sincerity of the atmosphere, and that amazing Harrison Ford impression. Sure, it’s marred by many little issues, but The Great Circle's a good bit of adventuring fun in the face of them.
7.5/10
