You know a character is iconic when millions of people name their pets after them, but there’s something so satisfying about Indiana Bones… I mean Jones, being named after a dog in the first place. It’s just so pleasingly cyclical. Video games also move in circles, and where Indy’s mystical archeological adventures provided the inspiration for Tomb Raider and Uncharted, we’re now completing the loop in a way with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Well, kind of, because MachineGames has clearly sought to stand apart from those series in a number of ways, some of which really help make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feel more like an Indiana Jones’ cinematic adventures than a video game romp.
Set after Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy gets that adventuring itch after a break in at Marshall College brings him into very close contact with a Latin-speaking giant – a now posthumous appearance from the late great Tony Todd. Figuring out that it’s one of his own recently unearthed finds that has gone missing, he decides to ditch all his marking and classes yet again and hare off around the world following the one clue that he has found, replete with the iconic red line slowly inching its way across a world map to the Vatican.
MachineGames has absolutely captured the look and feel of Indiana Jones, both with the general graphical style, but most particularly in the game’s cutscenes. Troy Baker as Indy puts in a shift mimicking Harrison Ford’s gruff mumbling and mannerisms, and there’s only maybe a dozen instances where I can hear Baker’s natural accent coming through instead. His companion through most of the story is Gina, the Italian journalist, whose backstory is gradually unpeeled, while there’s friends old and new in surprising places that will lend a hand in the race against Nazi archeologist Emmerich Voss.
Add to this the classic 1930s serial style (by way of the 80s), the exact right kind of comedic fight choreography, and the story’s race against time to stop some unknowably powerful artefacts from falling into fascist hands, and this feels every bit an Indiana Jones tale.
They’ve also done a great job of translating the tone and style of Indiana Jones as a character to the gameplay. One of the most intriguing decisions was to use a first-person view for the vast majority of the game. Whether you’re punching fascists, whipping and yanking down on high up pulleys, taking photos of artefacts, or setting light to ancient brush that’s blocking your way, you do so while looking out from Indy’s eyes.
Let’s come back to the Nazi punching, which Indy has always been famous for. This really is the main way that you’ll fight in this game, with actual gunplay generally discouraged by just how quickly you can end up dying. Fisticuffs are fast and ludicrously loud as you can batter most enemies into unconsciousness on standard difficulty, and even quicker if you grab highlighted impromptu weaponry from your surroundings. Higher difficulties will reward you mastering the block, counter and dodge, as well as using the whip to disarm or pull enemies in for a beatdown.
Stealth is an option here, though it’s often more of a prelude to a flurry of fists or sneaky takedown. It feels a little cumbersome, as enemies are both very sensitive to sound if you drop something or bump into objects and very quick to give up. It can be easy to get overwhelmed if you don’t pick your battles and isolate enemies, and at those times it might be tempting to pick up a gun or whip out Indy’s revolver. Ammo is so limited, though, and you can’t take that gun with you – you can, however, use it as a melee weapon when it runs out of ammo.
In fact, you’re constantly dropping things on the floor, whether it’s so you can pull out the camera or lighter, so you can interact with a switch or object, or just any time you clamber over a ledge, it feels like whatever you were holding will be left behind. It’s a shade annoying sometimes.
There are cuts away from first-person to a third-person camera in instances where it makes sense – essentially any time that you’re hanging from or sidling along a ledge, swinging across a gap, or squeezing through a gap in a wall. It’s a pretty sharp cut between views that manages not to be too jarring after the first couple instances, but these moments are generally so short that I do still wonder if the whole game couldn’t have played from the first-person. Certainly, Indy is a slow, grunty kind of manly man climber compared to Nathan Drake, and we’ve seen a number of games where short first-person climbing sections have worked fairly well. The gameplay heritage here, however, is The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher’s Bay.
But that first-person view compared to third-person helps to foster a slower pace throughout the experience, hand in hand with the open locations at the Vatican, the Gizeh dig site and beyond. You’re in areas that are infested with guards, so even if you’re in disguise as a priest, it feels right to walk at a brisk pace and not sprint everywhere, even if you absolutely can without raising suspicion. Admittedly, by the time I got to Gizeh, I was running around like a madman, especially once I had found a guard’s uniform, only to be forced to a slower pace when boating through Sukhothai.
These handful of open locales evoke some of the slower moments from the films, where secrets and clues are hidden away in plain sight. With both the main story thread, significant side missions and more incidental puzzles and mysteries to unravel.
I really enjoyed the puzzling throughout Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and the standard setting struck a good balance for me with not prompting too much with clues from Indy or companions talking. Of course there’s these implausibly old mechanisms hidden throughout the world that still, somehow, manage to just about work, if sometimes needing a little persuasion. These are also ancient tombs and temples where shafts of light just so happen to be in the right place when Indy finds hs way in, and there’s so many traps and things that he inadvertently triggers, with a few nice nods back to the films.
Each locale brings with it a new gadget to acquire and use, such as the camera that you use to gather information for the quest, which can be used to gain Adventure Points from snapping interesting views as you explore more generally, and that is all then fed into the character upgrade system, where you find and then spend those points on instructive books. Oh, and you can photograph the cats of the Vatican as well. Sadly there’s no petting the animals.
That camera and all the other clues you find end up wonderfully rendered in Jones’ notebook, filling out with all the details of the journey so far as you go. You don’t need to peel through it too often, outside of checking the mission log and map of an open area (which also briefly reveals a waypoint, if you don’t have those permanently enabled), but it’s nice to flip through the pages and details every once in a while.
On the whole, the game comes together beautifully well, each discovery, each plot beat pushing you on, wanting to see the next. but there are a few rough edges and moments that draw it back down. While it does fit the tone, stealth is undeniably awkward, climbing is slow and ponderous, and the fast beatdowns of ordinary guards become tiresome slugfests for the handful of what are effectively boss fights. The third location of Sukhothai also saps the pace by forcing you into a boat with a maze of waterways to navigate – this is a long game, especially if you do a lot of side tasks. There’s also just a few times where NPC animation and scripting is a bit clunky, which reminds you this is a game, even if not really affecting the experience.
Playing on PC, I felt that performance was generally great on my system – Ryzen 5900X and Radeon RX 6800. Outside of one graphical glitch that’s set to be fixed in a patch – temporary black boxes mainly in cutscenes caused by dynamic resolution scaling – the default High settings and dynamic resolution let me target 1440p with a resolute 60fps. The game still looks pretty great even when tuning things down to ‘Low’.