I was a pretty huge fan of Indiana Jones when I was a kid. The idea of a globetrotting archeologist who solves ancient secrets, avoids traps, and always has great one-liners made him one of the quintessential action-adventure heroes. By the time The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull released, I realized that my take on Indiana Jones was much like how I felt with Star Wars at that time: I apparently enjoyed the first three movies and then no other films in the franchise. The Dial of Destiny didn’t do much to dissuade me from this opinion either, though at least that one killed off Shia LaBeouf’s character.
All of that personal information is to say that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle carries itself so well as an Indiana Jones story, that it took me back to the first time I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark on VHS in the late 90s. The characters, voice acting, humor, and mystery all helped developer MachineGames do such a good job capturing the essence of the first three Indiana Jones films that it reminds us why we loved those old movies: Indiana Jones is fun, sassy, and interesting in the best ways.
The story of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle starts off with Indy discovering a break-in at the college where he teaches, which sparks a globetrotting adventure for an ancient mystery that sends him through different pre-WW2 countries. A man with the penchant for doing anything except talking with his love interest Marion Ravenwood, Indiana is called to action to solve an ancient plot and for some reason nazis are involved. The introduction of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle features a lot of Indy’s greatest hits, such as sprinting away from a giant boulder and barely escaping to safety.
After the introductory chapter in an ancient ruin, Indiana Jones is almost immediately thrust into a stealth section in fascist Italy. While I’m no stranger to titles that use robust stealth mechanics, it’s worth noting that the stealth system of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t exactly what we can call robust. Stealth gameplay is functional, but it can be very easily exploited much of the time, as you can pop out from around a corner which can cause an enemy to walk straight to where they last saw you. This gives you plenty of control over the movements of your enemies, allowing you to freely get behind them and perform a stealth takedown or failing that, punching them repeatedly until they pass out. Sometimes the enemy AI just breaks during stealth segments, and you can toss bottles at enemies in full view. And you know they see you because they actively dodge what you’re throwing at them and then immediately go “Must have been nothing” and then go back to their route. This only happened a few times, but it was pretty funny when it did.
The enemy AI is pretty stupid, which makes doing the stealth sections pretty easy, but it’s also worth noting that stealth is very much optional. You can sneak around and perform stealth takedowns on enemies if that’s what you like to do, but if you have no patience for it, you can just get spotted and fistfight all of the enemies just like you’d see Indiana Jones do. The actual combat in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a lot better than what you’d expect. You can punch and block with simple button presses and have a stamina bar to manage your defense and offense, but you can also pick up a wide variety of objects in the environment to use as weapons.
You can use your whip to knock the guns out of the hands of nazis and then grab a shovel sitting nearby and club them in the face with it. The improvisational nature of combat where you can grab items littering the scenery to knock out the guy that’s bothering you is probably one of the best aspects of this. Effectively, if you don’t have the patience for stealth gameplay, you can enter a one versus nine melee with every enemy in an area to see how many bodies you can place in a tent before you take damage. Unlike stealth-focused games like Deus Ex, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is incredibly fair with getting caught while exploring, and fighting your way out is always an option.
Later in the story, this becomes slightly more challenging as nazis will sometimes carry guns, so you’ll need to take out the armed ones stealthily, disarm them, or simply run away because they don’t exactly have great memories. Of course, if fighting multiple enemies at once sounds too stressful, you can absolutely play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle as a stealth action title, which is probably what’s intended, though you will still have moments where you’ll still need to engage in combat.
Outside of fighting, you’ll spend plenty of time traversing- while your whip can be used to knock guns out of the hands of fascists, it can also be used to swing across gaps, ascend walls, or help solve puzzles. There is a lot of puzzle solving in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle too with some being as simple as rotating a painting while another might involve finding four jars of human remains and placing them in the correct order on an altar. The solutions to most puzzles are pretty easily found or deduced, though if you get stuck you can use your camera to take photos of things which will cause Indy to think aloud about potential hints.
Each level Indy ventures through has a variety of collectibles, side quests, and optional paths you can explore as you try to find a relic or uncover some great mystery in one of the three major areas. As you progress through the game, you’ll discover fieldwork you can do, and the main quest and fieldwork are integrated so well with one another that completing the optional quests actually illuminate more about the overarching story and characters. There are no “Please go get me 14 biscuits. I know we’re being invaded by aliens, but I can’t live without my biscuits!” style quests you’d see in so many other games.
Voice acting veteran Troy Baker fully imitates a younger Harrison Ford, absolutely nailing every single scene with the perfect timing and delivery for all of his lines. The quips and stares from Indy work very well with Baker’s delivery, and the same can be said for almost all of the voice cast. The visuals are phenomenal on appropriate hardware, and the music really hits that 80s nostalgia with excellent use of the classic Indiana Jones leitmotif in several backing tracks throughout the title.
Everything that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle sets out to do, while safe, is competent and solidly designed in most regards that actually matter, especially when it comes to puzzles, exploration, and the occasional platforming challenges. The Great Circle does very little new: you’re not going to encounter some revolutionary game design here. The puzzles and platforming will likely remind you a lot of Uncharted, which would make sense since Uncharted is basically Indiana Jones for a newer generation, although at least Uncharted’s fourth entry is good.
The stealth gameplay can be a little underbaked at times. But outside of the few bumbling idiots of enemy AI you may encounter during a playthrough, the AI is consistent enough that if things break out into a fistfight or firefight, you know that the reason it happened is on you. When the stealth works, the Great Circle will likely remind players of something like Dishonored, where if you’re found you can quickly switch to a pretty solid combat system (with Indiana Jones having the benefit of not giving you the bad ending if you engage in combat).
All in all, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an amazing title. You don’t have to be a fan of Indiana Jones to enjoy the quips, exploration, and the unraveling of the grand mystery of all those various dig sites all over the world. It is extremely polished in a very apparent way, and the focus on telling a story makes The Great Circle feel like a great new Indiana Jones movie we never got.