Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review: A Striking Adventure

Despite not being able to get hooked on anything MachineGames has worked on the past, I was determined to give Indiana Jones and the Great Circle its fair shake. My appreciation for the whip-cracking, backtalking Indiana Jones trumped any preconceived ideas I might’ve had about the game, and after spending quite a bit of time with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I’m glad it did. Bethesda’s new Indiana Jones game stands out as a supremely faithful and painstakingly careful adaptation of the character that’s going to be hard to top if and when this franchise is picked up again by any other studio.

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Troy Baker plays Indiana Jones in the Great Circle game, a voice actor who seems to be in everything all the time but somehow manages to still be the perfect choice for this character, too. Though the game’s version of Indiana Jones is based off of Harrison Ford’s physical appearance, you’d be hard-pressed to rule out Ford as the voice if you didn’t already know Baker had the role.

Nearly every interaction Indiana Jones has with a character be they a cutscene-worthy NPC or just a passerby tells you that MachineGames studiously rewatched Indiana Jones movies from the past few decades to discern exactly how Indiana Jones would respond in any given situation. Early on in the game, a disguised Indiana Jones meets another archeologist and can barely hide his disdain when the other character reveals himself to be a fellow archeologist. That unique blend of deserved cockiness and wit permeates the rest of the game in a way that only Indiana Jones could, and the faithfulness infects other characters as well. After you see the devilishly evil Emmerich Voss who oozes Indy villain aura, you’ll be checking the Wiki more than once to confirm he’s a totally new character and not someone you’ve met before.

Just as the case in the movies – and perhaps even more so here in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – the game asks of the player some degree of a suspension of disbelief. Indiana Jones is crafty, sure, and he constantly accidently finds himself in precarious situations like under a collapsing statue or in a fascist boxing club, but the game definitely takes some liberties with how clever he is. When investigating ancient Egyptian sites while avoiding Nazi gaze, I was sometimes swinging from the bullwhip in clear view of enemies who for some reason can’t see past more than a few meters. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle relies heavily on the idea that players would want to play as Indiana Jones would: sneaking about behind enemy lines unnoticed while maintaining a relatively low killcount compared to most action heroes. If you decide to play otherwise, there’s nothing really to stop you from waltzing into a compound and clobbering everyone.

What you will find, however, is that if you choose the stealthy, true-to-character route, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle can feel like it drags at times. There are so many cutscenes which can’t be skipped even if you wanted to that your actual hands-on playtime is constantly interrupted, so it’s best to approach the Great Circle game as a blend of movie and game rather than solely the latter. For those who appreciated Red Dead Redemption 2‘s methodical exploration style where anything and everything is of interest and must be approached accordingly, you’ll appreciate Indiana Jones’ desire to pick up ever letter, read it carefully, flip it over to make sure there are no hidden messages, and triple-check your surroundings before moving on from a room, if you so choose to play that way.

And inspect everything you shall, or at least you will if you have any desire to accomplish side quests. True to the nature of Indiana Jones adventures, nearly everything you have to do is a puzzle be it a “how do I get in that room?” scenario or something as cliche as a reflecting-light-off-mirrors challenge. You can make the puzzles easier thanks to some robust difficulty options that involve combat, exploration, and puzzles, but I’d rather be stumped than ask for help, so some codes and riddles had to be left behind. Exploration and navigation, however, I was happy to change. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a game where you have to walk around with your map out if you want to get anywhere, and as much as I appreciate that dedication to realism, I found it much more enjoyable to tweak the settings so that a more traditional objective marker was constant as a guiding light.

Despite the occasional frustration with pacing that’s remedied either by immersion, some altered settings, or forgoing stealth and sprinting through a Nazi camp, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the Indiana Jones game fans have been waiting for. There’s still more for me to do (and redo) in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but the methodical appreciation for the source material makes it evident that Indiana Jones games have found their home with MachineGames.

Rating: 4/5

A PC copy of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was provided by the publisher for this review.