Was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle really that bad?

Indiana Jones returns with a bang in a brand new adventure spanning the globe, racing against the Axis powers for an ancient power that could change the fate of the war and the Earth itself.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle comes from Machine Games, hot on the heels of the new Wolfenstein reboot series, which, to be honest, was a great fit. They have done incredible justice to the film series, in my opinion, and sits easily into the existing lore.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - A perfectly recreated scene from Raiders

After an excellent recreation of the opening temple raid you would swear was lifted straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark we flash forward to 1937, One year after the events of Raiders, Indy catches someone breaking into his university museum, a giant played by the late Tony Todd, and an artefact is stolen. Following the theft to the Vatican, Indiana discovers the artefact was one part of the “Great Circle”, an ancient legend spanning various locations of the globe, and that the German war machine believes is vital to world domination.

Being familiar with their previous work I was expecting Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to be a linear level-based first-person game. While it was this for the first hour, when I arrived at the Vatican it opened up to almost becoming an immersive sim with me being able to explore (almost) everywhere and tackle objectives in whatever order I wanted.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Indy and Gina find one of the stones in the Ice

This helped sell the immersion as it was best to maintain a low profile as Indy isn’t an invincible action man. During these investigative sections, you could disguise yourself to gain access to restricted areas and find sidequests, access shops and find collectables.

Presented in a mostly first-person perspective Indiana Jones and the Great Circle mostly focused on platforming and puzzle solving, but wasn’t shy on combat either. If you didn’t fancy stealth you could go in full combat but this was not recommended as weapons and firearms are not plentiful to the player and you are often hopelessly outnumbered.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Indy fighting two Solidiers

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Getting stopped by guards in Ghiza

The hand-to-hand combat system is quite in-depth with parries and dodging mechanics (and one move where you can steal their weapon with your whip) but you are regulated by a rather strict (at the start) stamina system. Being stealthy rewards you with opportunities to knock out guards with one hit and less damage to your health and resources.

Tucked away in all of the mini open-world areas is a literal smorgasbord of items and collectables from health and stamina-boosting foods, rare artefacts and skill-boosting books. Skill progression is dictated by these books and offers a permanent boost to many of your stats in an RPG lite-style mechanic. Each area also hides either puzzle rooms or full tombs/catacombs to explore as the story unfolds with a nice mixture of platforming and puzzling involving a lot of the Indy tropes from the movies. Whipping over lava pits? Check. Rotating giant stone pillars? Check. Accidentally triggering ancient death traps? Check!

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - carrying a giant cog in a temple

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Indy sliding down a rope

Indiana is not infallible which helps lend credence to his character making him a more believable and ultimately loveable character.

This is of course accentuated by Troy Baker’s outstanding performance as Indiana Jones. Don’t get me wrong the entire cast is fantastic, but Troy was not only able to get the voice right, the cadence and performance made me forget it wasn’t Harrison Ford on-screen.

The other main cast is the aforementioned Tony Todd as Locus; Alessandra Mastronardi as our sidekick/love-interest; journalist Ginetta ‘Gina’ Lombardi; and as our villain of the piece, Marios Gavrilis as the German archaeologist/psychologist Emmerich Voss, a truly despicable and often scary but also hilarious foil to our hero.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - badguy Voss collects the stones

All the music is here from the films. As well as helping to set the mood, to my delight they also lifted sound effects including the very distinctive punch sound effects from the movies. It just brought a smile to the corner of my mouth every time I heard it.

Although we do see through Indy’s pov for the majority of the game, we sometimes switch to a third-person perspective, usually through climbing or swinging animations. Graphically the team outdid themselves here. Indiana looks fantastic, it’s almost like they captured the essence of a young Harrison Ford in digital form. The rest of the game is no slouch either with very little loading outside the initial boot-up in each area with plenty of different locks being showcased.

From the desert dunes of Ghiza to the tropical jungles of Siam the engine is working magic to present visuals this good. This was a major contention point at launch as the pc version needed quite a powerful machine to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but as I can only report on the Xbox version as that is what I played and it ran excellent on the Series X.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Indy and Gina find a temple in the jungle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Indy uses his whip to disarm a guard

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle continued the immersion with a minimalist UI, with the only backend menus pausing the game. Any in-game objectives or skills are accessed by your journal, and your bag of equipment and consumables are all assigned to direction buttons. In fact, I don’t think there was a single controller button that wasn’t unused. In-game actions after weren’t just a single prompt either, opening a door for example required a direction input from the stick as well, but it never felt intrusive and just helped suck me into the world.

Puzzles were just the right difficulty as well, never feeling too taxing or “moon logic”. The only times I did get stuck was because I’d often miss a whippable object or in one case I was literally too fast and missed a trigger.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Indy explaining the great cirlce

There was very little the game did wrong. The only criticism I would give is that Indy himself sometimes moved a bit stiff and had more momentum in micro-movements than you would think but I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. The plot moved along at an exciting and well-timed pace, taking Indiana all over the globe and feeling like a true Indiana Jones adventure.

Yes, a lot of the time older franchises will get by on nostalgia alone but I’m happy to report that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is not one of these times. This has been made with love and respect for the franchise with even nods to the extended universe of the TV series and novels. Playing this was like playing in one of the movies and is one of if not possibly the most faithful additions to the franchise to date.