Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review: An Adventure Worth Seeking

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a riveting experience that knows its strengths and sticks to it. It’s a lavish adaptation that smartly blends prolonged hours of rewarding, open-ended exploration with fewer but satisfying set pieces. 

It’s a surprisingly well-paced 25-hour adventure brought down infrequently by its uninspiring environmental puzzles and mostly forgettable supporting cast. 

But Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gets so much refreshingly right that it’s hard not to forgive its few mishaps that could be easily rectified in a potential sequel or two.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s biggest strength is its first-person perspective

Perhaps one of the most controversial things about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for some action-adventure fans would be its first-person nature. In reality, however, it’s not just what separates it from titles like Tomb Raider and Uncharted, but also makes it a fascinating game to play through. 

From the get-go, it’s evident how uniquely reinvigorating it is to explore untamed historically significant places in first-person.

A heightened sense of tension enveloped me every time I walked through a desolate, thousand-year-old cavern while holding a torch above my head to light the way. I realized it’s a sentiment that would have been immensely difficult to manifest if the game was in the third person. 

It helps that the environments in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, especially the interiors, are a sight to behold and could make for an excellent case study for an architecture nerd. 

From the bright mosaic walls in Vatican City churches to the gloomy inscriptions deep within the tombs of Gizeh, everything has been brought to life with such attention to detail that it’s hard not to stop and gawk at its beauty. 

Fidelity can be used to make games like these more immersive, and in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Machine Games has cranked it up to eleven. 

It constantly urges you to take in every sight and examine every tiny object, whether it be the intricate carvings on a stone tablet or the crusts of an Aish Baladi Bread.

It goes without saying, but you get a better view of everything when you see things from your own lens instead of from the back of someone’s shoulders. 

Everything seems more immersive and grounded in first-person, but fidelity can only do so much. In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it's the level of interactivity it offers and how it drives curiosity to explore and make revelatory discoveries that take immersion to new heights.

It borrows immersive-sim elements of Dishonored and Skyrim to make moment-to-moment gameplay more engaging and rewarding.

 It’s evident in the more subtle ways, such as when you push the left trigger up and then right to open a locked door, or in the more prominent easy-to-miss situations when you complete a quest without going through a whole ordeal of directed objectives. 

You read in-game notes in real-time, so there’s always a sense of urgency and the fear of getting caught by a patrolling enemy. The game is also quite reactive to your actions, not necessarily to the extent of the aforementioned titles, but enough to create silly emergent narrative moments. 

Once in Gizeh, I threw a Nazi down an elevator shaft. Then after a long-winded quest that involved powering up the elevator, during which I had forgotten all about the poor guy, I pressed the button to bring the elevator up, and lo and behold, that same dead Nazi’s body came wriggling on top of it. 

I paused the game and laughed for a minute straight. These accidental moments are easy to create and adhere to Indiana Jones’ light-hearted nature in a way a movie could never do. An ingenious direction by Machine Games that deserves praise. 

Adding a sandbox feel to its world greatly improves the game’s overall pacing, which is not an easy feat to achieve in a 25+ hours story campaign with a ton of bare-bone stealth sections (more on that later.)

There are three open regions in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and you get to spend a substantial amount of time completing side quests, finding collectibles, and making lore revelations in each of them.

Vatican City is crammed with tall, vibrant buildings and narrow alleyways full of fascists and church members. Gizeh is surrounded by long stretches of desert with dilapidated caves and ruins and unruly Nazis. Sukhothai is the complete opposite of both, full of lush rainforests and mystical temples surrounded by nothing but water, and also deranged Nazis. 

Instead of shoving down one high-octane set piece after another, every time you reach a new region, Indiana Jones and the Great Circles boldly takes a back seat and lets you take the helm of the narrative. 

It doesn’t stop you from indulging in your Indy fantasies and provides tools and platforms that make you feel like a renowned archaeologist in your own way without hindering the flow of the main story. 

You could take the golden path, but helping out the local resistant members first may provide insight into the state of the world and add more context to the overarching narrative.  

You could let the curiosity get the better of you and snoop around restricted enemy encampments to make startling discoveries or stumble upon lost tombs or temples full of mechanical puzzles and mysterious artifacts. 

Or, you could simply take in the sight, admiring some of history’s most fascinating cultural spots brought so vividly to life in Id Tech 7.

Indy has two tools at his disposal: a trusty old whip that the audio wizards at Machine Games have stunningly recreated to make it sound exactly like it did in the movies and a vintage camera that lets you take pictures of anything and everything. 

They both support the same notion, which is that you’re Indiana Jones in this world, and the game is incredibly good at convincing you to embrace that idealogy.

When you get in that zone, even the tiniest discoveries can feel quite revelatory. For instance, once I spent a considerable amount of time cracking a safe, which didn’t include anything substantial from a gameplay perspective but contained an original copy of “Secretum Secretorum” made for a Portuguese Queen in the 12th century that got me quite excited. 

It’s not like there are no gameplay benefits of exploration at all. Going off the beaten path to take pictures of intriguing POIs or opening locked safes can get you Adventure Points, which you can spend on Adventure Books to unlock passive abilities. 

These include stuff like Lucky Hat, which gives you an extra chance to get back up after getting knocked down, and Climbing Ace, which reduces stamina drain and improves movement speed while ledge climbing. 

However, since pretty much every activity in the game can get you Adventure Points, going out of the way to complete certain side activities might not seem as satisfying after a while. 

Everything Indiana Jones and the Great Circle sets out to achieve is in cadence to make you feel, think, and eventually act like Indy, with the first-person perspective being at the heart of it all. However, there’s one major flaw in all of this, which, when I noticed, I couldn’t get out of my head. 

When you’re out in the field, finding hidden artifacts, solving ancient puzzles, and fighting Nazis, it’s easy to feel in sync with Indiana. 

However, as soon as the cutscene starts, the camera shifts to a third-person perspective, and the real Indy starts blabbering about an ancient relic and its significance, it’s equally easy to blank out and let the imposter syndrome kick in. 

As the story moved forward, I noticed an increasing dissonance between the Indy in the gameplay and the Indy in the cutscenes. The latter had nothing to do with the quality of the cutscenes or the cast’s performance. 

I had never experienced something so bizarre in Uncharted or Tomb Raider because, in those games, the story wasn’t unfolding from my perspective.

Regardless, it’s not something that I would condemn Machine Games for because, overall, the first-person perspective works in the game’s favor.

The studio could have taken the more linear, third-person, cinematic approach of the Uncharted games for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but instead, it opted for a more open-ended route, taking advantage of this medium’s unique and flexible way of portraying stories in the best possible ways, to carve an authentic, individualized globe-trotting adventure that might not be for everyone, but those who can appreciate it, will find plenty to love here. 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s story feels like a classic Indy flick, for better or worse

On the surface, The Great Circle’s story feels like a good Indiana Jones movie with plenty of spectacular action sequences, glorified discoveries intensified by a John William-induced score, and cheesy cat-and-mouse encounters with a narcissistic Nazi antagonist. 

However, in 2024, it feels a bit dated, especially in its most quiet, intimate moments, where its one-dimensional supporting cast tries its best to serve as a narrative tool to further flesh out Indy’s arc instead of their own. 

Gina is one such side character that I couldn’t warm up to. Despite the game explicitly suggesting otherwise at one point, she couldn’t help being a damsel in distress throughout the campaign. 

It’s not like the game doesn’t put the spotlight on her, but these rare moments never foster anything meaningful and are often blatantly rushed into being another plot device to push Indy’s story. 

Emrich Voss, the primary antagonist of the game, is a daunting figure, brought to life by an aggressive performance by Marios Gavrilis. 

However, he suffers the same fate as most recent Far Cry villains, which is not getting enough screen time to delve into his psyche and understand his motives. The result is a stereotypical Indiana Jones villain with no real incentive to hate him except for his occasional snarky comments and the fact that he’s a Nazi. 

All of this is especially disheartening because it comes from a studio that made Wolfenstein: New Colossus, which is one of the most underrated and stimulating video game stories of the last generation, full of complex side characters and obnoxious villains. 

It’s worth adding that Troy Baker is exceptional as Indiana. While his imitation of Harrison Ford’s voice seems effortless, it probably wouldn’t have been easy to pull off.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s broken stealth doesn’t hinder the overall gameplay experience, but its puzzles do

I mentioned in my Indiana Jones and the Great Circle hands-off preview that I wasn’t too optimistic about its combat sections and the quality of its puzzles, and sadly, that sentiment hasn’t changed after playing through the full game. 

Simply put, there are three different types of environmental puzzles, each unique to a specific region. As soon as I started noticing a pattern, I felt like the game had robbed me of any excitement I could have gotten by stumbling upon something marvelous that would make my head spin. 

There are a few grand puzzles in Sukhothai that got me wracking my brain, but other than that, I didn’t come across anything awe-inspiring or memorable. 

If you don’t like puzzles, thankfully, there’s an option to reduce puzzle difficulty, like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Doing so will reduce complexity and make it simpler to solve. For instance, in a light mirror puzzle, you may now have to focus on two mirrors instead of four. 

On the other hand, the safe lock puzzles are far more intelligent and fun to solve. They also provide some of the best Adventure Books in the game and are often a source of intriguing lore materials.

Melee combat is surprisingly weighty and satisfying, but it’s mostly reserved for last-case scenarios. While you can sneak past most enemies in the game, there are certain situations where you have to get your hands dirty. 

I enjoyed these hand-to-hand melee encounters because they felt refreshing after hours of sneaking and stabbing enemies in the back. 

Stealth is broken with some of the dumbest enemy AI I have encountered in recent memory, though it didn’t bother me because I wanted to get out of these situations as soon as possible and get back to exploring its vibrant world. 

You could amp up the difficulty by reducing the enemy’s detection meter in the Accessibility menu, but it could just end up making encounters more tedious as there’s not much here to sustain stealth gameplay for prolonged hours. 

Indy can’t prone, which makes sense as he’s not as agile or young as other renowned treasure hunters. It’s also why I didn’t mind his slow-paced ledge climbing. 

However, there’s one design choice that struck me as odd and bothered me frequently. Indy can strafe left or right when holding an object in his hand but can’t do the same while empty-handed. 

It led to multiple tiresome situations where I couldn’t examine my environment because there wasn’t anything to pick up. While it did make certain situations more vulnerable, it also brought uncalled frustration.

Speaking of frustration, I didn't experience any while testing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on a high-end PC. It's a surprisingly well-optimized game though the steep storage requirement is a bit stingy.

Aside from occasional screen tearing and fps dips, I didn't encounter anything significant that would hinder my experience. 

It's worth pointing out that I tested the Steam and not the Xbox version of the game, which could have its own set of issues on PC.