Now Playing: Indiana Jones & The Great Circle

So you’re making an Indiana Jones game? What do you do? What kind of game should it be? The obvious choice and what many – myself included – expected was a linear, third person, action-adventure game in the style of Uncharted or the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. But, thankfully, that’s not what we got. Indiana Jones & The Great Circle delivers something entirely different and unique – a first person adventure/puzzle/action game that successfully combines linear levels with open-world hubs.

So let’s start with all the good stuff – Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a fantastic Indiana Jones game. It really is like playing through an Indiana Jones film – one of the good ones, I mean. Troy Baker pulls off a near perfect (young) Harrison Ford, but the real credit should go to the writers because they absolutely nailed the character of Indiana Jones through both his dialogue and mannerisms.

They also nailed the tone of the (good) films – knowing when to keep things light, when to get a little more serious, and when to indulge in just a dash of slapstick comedy, even in the middle of a fight scene. They also nailed the supporting cast and most importantly – the villain – all of whom fit perfectly into this Indiana Jones adventure.

The story is also pretty good. There’s a nice sense of pace to the mystery as you and Indy put the pieces of the puzzle together but I do feel the ending is, sadly, a little rushed, and one major aspect of it isn’t as set-up to the degree that I would have liked. It’s a bit of a shame because I was fully invested in the mystery up until the very end, but the climax didn’t quite manage to stick the landing in the way that I’d hoped. I know I’m being annoyingly vague, but that’s because I don’t want to spoil anything – just trust me when I say the plot is better than any Indy film post Crusade.

The game opens with a recreation of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark that also serves as a short tutorial. It’s a clever way to immediately set the tone and establish that The Great Circle is very much influenced by and imitating the style of the original films. From here we travel to Marshall College and set up an adventure that will take Indy to several locations across the globe.

In addition to some smaller, linear levels, there are also three fairly large open-world hubs – locations full of side quests (Fieldwork) small mysteries to solve and collectibles to find. You can ignore all of the additional content if you wish and blast through the core story in (I would estimate) around 10-15 hours depending upon your style of play, but if you do everything – like I did – you’re looking at around 30-35 hours.

There’s a fantastic variety to the locations in terms of setting, visuals and design and they all reward your exploration with some genuinely engaging and fun side content. If you really want to skip it you can – but I’d recommend at least doing the Fieldwork as it ties more directly into the main quest.

How you approach this content is really up to you as the game gives you a lot of different tools at your disposal. You can try to brute force things by shooting and punching your way through. You can play sneaky and use stealth to slip in unseen. You can find disguises that let you blend in with your local surroundings. Or you can do all three.

And you probably will, because just like the action in a good Indiana Jones film, The Great Circle builds its gameplay all around Indy’s ability to improvise. No disguise is infallible, Indy can’t tank a dozen bullets or beatings, and stealth will usually only get you so far – just like in the (good) films you need to adapt, improvise and switch tack on the fly. You also need to know when, if things get out of hand, to make a daring escape.

It’s quite amazing how well the gameplay of The Great Circle captures the chaotic, improvisational nature of Indiana Jones film action. This is a very melee focused game, one in which nearly every item within reach can be turned into a weapon and because these weapons all break after a certain number of hits, you’re often using not what you’d want, but whatever you have at hand – just like Indiana Jones.

The first person perspective – with occasional perspective shifts to third-person when climbing or swinging – really does put you into Indy’s shoes. You feel the weight of every punch and the crack of your whip as you disarm an enemy. You feel more involved in every puzzle as you scrutinise the clues before you. The puzzles are neither too hard nor too easy and there’s a nice variety between locations. I do wish the game wasn’t as reliant on the ‘find the code for this lock box’ type of puzzles for its smaller mysteries though.

Disguises, whilst a welcome addition – particularly if you want to find every collectible – do make traversing some areas a little too easy. Avoiding the officers that can rumble you isn’t too hard – and you can always lure them away and knock them out. Even if you are rumbled, it’s easy to just run off for a bit and within minutes everyone forgets you were there. I don’t think the risk/reward balance of using a disguise is quite right here.

And I guess this is where I start to get into the few more negative aspects of The Great Circle. Whilst the first two open-world areas are incredibly polished, the third feels a little rough. There’s a noticeable number of lighting bugs, frequent pop-in, false map markers and some weird audio de-syncs.

This area is also not as well designed in terms of map layout. If you do want to find everything, be prepared for a bit of a slog back and forth throughout this location. It’s the one place in the game where The Great Circle started to feel like a real chore to play. This issue is made worse by the inability to track multiple collectibles at once – even if you’ve unlocked the map for them.

 

I suppose it’s done so you can’t clutter your screen with waypoints, but if I want to track say Notes and Relics in a single location, I don’t see why I can’t have the option to track both at once rather than have to continually go into my journal and set the active quest back and forth.

I’m also not sold on the Skill Book system. The idea is that you earn ‘adventure points’ by completing content and then use these points to unlock skills or upgrades via books you can find or purchase throughout the game. But at some point I just stopped caring about what these books did and unlocked them just because I could. Visually, The Great Circle looks fantastic. I was playing with path tracing enabled and the game makes great use of it – at least until that somewhat rough final open-world hub.

Overall, Indiana Jones & The Great Circle is a great Indiana Jones game and easily one of the best licensed games ever made. It really does capture the spirit of the original films. But I certainly think there’s room for improvement here. It feels like a great foundation to build upon, to refine and then improve in a potential sequel. I don’t know if we’ll get one, but if we do, I think the license is in very good hands.

8/10