Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fantastic action-adventure game. It consists of thrilling heroics, daring escapes, nasty villains and larger-than-life moments. It's a globe-trotting adventure worthy of an Indiana Jones title that has gone to great lengths to retain the style, tone and iconography of the pulp blockbuster classic. When I close my eyes and imagine what a great Indy game would be, this is what comes to mind.
Related
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has always been Todd Howard's “dream”.
Todd Howard's ten-year dream is coming true.
But then there is another game in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. It's littered with checklist-style task logs, overstuffed map markers, and an emphasis on quantity over quality. In this half of the game, Indy is lured away from his mission to thwart the Nazis and protect the world's cultural artifacts by such temptations as underground fight clubs and missing cat posters. Every hour or so, the adventure of your life comes to an abrupt halt and you find yourself on a large map filled with countless things you should be doing but no good reason to do them.
Indy's to-do list
It's a bizarre way to build any game, but especially an Indiana Jones game. It starts off incredibly strong. The opening sequence is an almost one-for-one recreation of the Raiders of the Lost Ark opening, complete with the iconic boulder chase. As fun as this sequence is to watch, it's even better to play it. It immediately sets the tone and tempo of the game. There's no mistaking what this introduction says: you're playing an Indiana Jones movie.
Over the course of the next hour, it continues, starting at Marshall College with an incendiary incident (and some narrative tie-ins to the events of Raiders), before the adventure begins in earnest, Indy sneaks into the Vatican on the trail of an artifact thief (played by the incomparable Tony Todd, who sadly passed away earlier this year) . It's linear, but with level design that encourages a bit of exploration and stealth gameplay that requires some problem solving. Indy for now.
The Vatican is the first open world zone and my first clue that something is amiss. As my quest log quickly filled up with quests and my map was covered with dozens of markers, that Indy feeling started to fade.
It's the kind of open world that was already outdated when Marvel's Spider-Man had us collecting lost backpacks all over New York in 2018. But at least it made sense for Spidey's personality. Here, Indy's preoccupation with collecting comic books and taking Polaroids is definitely not. I can practically see a studio chalkboard with the words “player retention” circled in big, bold letters. It might pad your playtime, but it certainly won't make for a more authentic Indiana Jones experience.
I was still kind of on board with the open world of it all during the Vatican sequence. It has an interconnected layout that allows you to discover your own routes across the city and approach exploration in interesting ways. Those Shades of Dishonored help keep things interesting at first, but once I got to the second open-world zone in Giza and realized it was going to be the exact same experience all over again – right down to the comics – I was ready to write off the entire open-world half of the experience.
Less would be more
In between all of this is a very tight Indiana Jones story that hits all the right beats and paradoxically wastes no time. It's got everything you want: globetrotting, Nazi punching, creepy crawlies. Tombs, traps, ancient artifacts. Indy is equal parts tough and charming (played to the letter by Troy Baker) and has just the right amount of sexual tension with his dirty sidekick, Italian journalist Gina Lombardi. Nazi villain Emmerich Voss is as sinister as he is corny, with all the undeserved bravery you'd expect from an Indy villain.
Developers MachineGames are obviously big fans of the character and demonstrate a deep understanding of what makes the Indiana Jones story work, which makes it all the more confusing that they chose to litter the story with so much open-world fluff.
Related
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle Preview – Whip, punch, shoot and trick the Nazis
MachineGames creates a first-person action-adventure with great potential.
It didn't have to be that complicated. Linear sequences have all the necessary components. You travel around the world looking for MacGuffins hidden in ancient tombs. Along the way you solve some puzzles, avoid traps and swing on a whip. Uncharted created the perfect formula for an Indiana Jones game, and when Great Circle apes Uncharted (which itself apes the Indiana Jones movies), it's a blast. There's a special set piece in Shanghai that rivals any of Uncharted's most famous cutscenes, and if MachineGames had focused all their energy on creating more of those moments, it would have been a much stronger game.
You could argue that all that extra stuff is optional and only there for people who want more, but the problem with so much low-key side content is that Great Circle reveals its flaws over time. The more side quests I completed, the more I became uninterested in the narrative. The more Nazis I fought, the more I realized how miserable fighting was. The more puzzles I solved, the more it seemed that MachineGames isn't particularly good at designing puzzles. Classics like rotating mirrors to reflect light or moving sculptures that open secret doors are only classics when they complement fresher ideas. But that's pretty much all Great Circle has to offer, and you won't find anything deeper in the dozens of hours of side quests.
Unless you're the type who gets a lot of satisfaction from checklist-style open-world games, I highly recommend ignoring anything that isn't on the critical path in the Great Circle. If you just focus on the main story, I think you'll get a lot out of the experience. It's a fun story with decent gameplay that is authentically Indy. By sticking strictly to the main quest, you won't miss much, and you'll actually do better for it. It's a shame the rest falls so flat.
Unravel one of history's greatest mysteries in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™, a single-player first-person adventure set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. The year is 1937, sinister forces are searching the world for the secret of an ancient power known as the Great Circle, and only one man – Indiana Jones – can stop them. Become a legendary archaeologist in this cinematic action-adventure game from MachineGames, the award-winning studio behind the recent Wolfenstein series and executive produced by Hall of Fame game designer Todd Howard.
- Thrilling scenic moments that fit Indy.
- A fun story that is authentic to the series.
- Beat the Nazis.
- Stuffed with too much fluff.
- No innovative or particularly clever puzzles.
- Pace destroys intermittent open-world segments.
