There’s a fantastic action-adventure game in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. It’s one made of thrilling heroics, daring escapes, loathsome villains, and larger-than-life moments. It’s a globetrotting adventure worthy of the Indiana Jones title, going to great lengths to maintain the style, tone, and iconography of the pulp blockbuster classics. When I close my eyes and imagine what a great Indy game would be like, this is what comes to mind.
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But then there’s this other game in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. It’s polluted by checklist-style quest logs, over-stuffed 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 suddenly stops and you’re dumped out into a big map filled with countless things to do, but no good reason to do them.
Indy’s To-Do List
It’s a bizarre way to construct any game, but especially an Indiana Jones game. It starts out incredibly strong. The opening sequence is a nearly one-to-one recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s opening, complete with the iconic boulder chase. As fun as that sequence is to watch, it’s even better to play. It immediately sets the tone and pace of the game. What this opening is communicating can’t be misconstrued: you’re playing an Indiana Jones movie.
Over the next hour, it follows through, starting at Marshall College with an inciting incident (and some narrative connections to the events of Raiders) before the adventure begins in earnest with Indy sneaking into Vatican City hot on the trail of an artifact thief (played by the incomparable Tony Todd, who unfortunately 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. So far, so Indy.
Vatican City is the first open-world zone, and my first indication that something was amiss. As my quest log quickly filled with tasks and my map became covered in dozens of markers, that Indy feeling started slipping away.
It’s the kind of open-world bloat that was already outdated when Marvel’s Spider-Man had us collecting lost backpacks all around New York in 2018. But at least that made sense for Spidey’s personality. Here, Indy’s preoccupation with collecting comic books and taking Polaroids certainly doesn’t. I can practically see the studio’s whiteboard with the words ‘player retention’ circled in big bold letters. It may pad your play time, but it certainly doesn’t make it a more authentic Indiana Jones experience.
I was still sort of on board with the open world of it all throughout the Vatican City sequence. It has an interconnected layout that allows you to discover your own routes across the city and approach exploration in interesting ways. These shades of Dishonored help keep things interesting at first, but once I got to the second open-world zone in Gizeh and realized it was going to be the exact same experience again – right down to the comic books – I was ready to write off the entire open world half of this experience.
Less Would Have Been More
In between all that filler is a very tight Indiana Jones story that hits all the right beats and, ironically, doesn’t waste any time. It’s got everything you want: globetrotting, Nazi-punching, creepy crawlies. Tombs, traps, ancient artifacts. Indy is equally gruff and charming (Troy Baker plays him to a tee) and has just the right amount of sexual tension with his scrappy sidekick, Italian journalist Gina Lombardi. Nazi Villain Emmerich Voss is as sinister as he is corny, with all of the unearned bravado you expect from an Indy villain.
MachineGames’ devs are obviously huge fans of the character and demonstrate a deep understanding of what makes an Indiana Jones story work, which makes it even more confusing that they chose to sandbag that story with so much open-world fluff.
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It didn’t need to be so complicated. The linear sequences have all the ingredients necessary. You travel around the world in search of MacGuffins hidden away in ancient tombs. Along the way you solve some puzzles, avoid some traps, and swing on your whip. Uncharted established the perfect formula for an Indiana Jones game, and when Great Circle is aping Uncharted (which itself is aping Indiana Jones movies), it’s a blast. There’s a particular set piece moment in Shanghai that rivals any of Uncharted’s most iconic scenes, and had MachineGames focused all of its energy on creating more of those moments, it would have been a much stronger game.
One might make the case that all that extra stuff is optional, and just there for the people who want more, but the trouble with having so much low-effort side content is that Great Circle reveals its flaws over time. The more side quests I completed, the more unimpressed I became with the storytelling. The more Nazis I fought, the more I realized how lousy the combat is. The more puzzles I solved, the more it seemed like MachineGames isn’t particularly good at designing puzzles. Classics like turning mirrors to reflect light or moving statues to open secret doors are only classics if they’re supplemental to fresher ideas. That’s kind of all Great Circle has to offer though, and you won’t find anything deeper across dozens of hours of side quests.
Unless you’re the type that gets a lot of satisfaction from checklist-style open-world games, I highly recommend you ignore everything that isn’t on the critical path in Great Circle. If you focus solely on the main story I think you’ll get a lot out of the experience. It’s a fun story with some decent gameplay variety that’s authentically Indy. You won’t miss much by strictly sticking to the main quest, and in fact, your experience will be better for it. It’s a shame the rest of it falls so flat.
Uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™, a first-person, single-player adventure set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. The year is 1937, sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power known as the Great Circle, and only one person can stop them – Indiana Jones. You’ll become the 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 set-piece moments befitting of Indy.
- A fun story that?s authentic to the series.
- Punching Nazis.
- Filled with too much fluff.
- No innovative or especially clever puzzles.
- Pace is ruined by intermittent open-world segments.