Ah, stealth games. The pinnacle of roleplaying. Who doesn’t wanna be a conniving little rat, sneaking up on unsuspecting victims and bashing them over the head with an old shovel? Well, statistically speaking, a whole bunch of you. I don’t understand you, to be frank, but I accept you for who you are. Luckily, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does too. If you’re really not into cloak and dagger (or cloak and whip, as it were) then you can essentially opt out of it completely. Here’s how.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is formulaically (pejorative) organized into two distinct game modes. First, you’ll play through a couple of linear action-adventure levels. This is where the big set-piece moments happen and when Great Circle is at its most Indy. After that, you’re dumped into a big open-world area filled with collectibles and side quests where you’re free to explore and pursue different goals.
Those open-world sections have two linear segments where you’ll explore some tombs and ruins looking for magic stones. When you finish an open-world section the process repeats: a couple more linear action-adventure levels, and then a new open world to explore (and do all the exact same stuff).
How To Dodge The Stealth Sections So You Don’t Have To Dodge The Nazis
After the Raiders of the Lost Ark prologue, the story begins at Marshall College. Following this short intro, Indy sets off for Vatican City. This section is pure stealth, and unfortunately for the stealth haters, there’s no way around it. The game has to teach you how to sneak up on a fellow and ring his bell at some point, after all. Luckily this section is pretty short, and then you’re into the first big open-world section in the Vatican.
As soon as this section of the game starts you’ll be given priest robes to disguise yourself. This keeps the Nazis off your case in most areas of the city, but you still won’t be able to walk freely through any of the restricted zones. To do that, you’ll need the Blackshirt Uniform, which allows you to disguise yourself as a German officer and go wherever you wish.
There is a version of this in all three of Great Circle’s open-world zones, and in the latter two, you can easily make a beeline straight to the disguise as soon as you get there. Vatican City makes you work for it. It seems MachineGames wants you to get a handle on its stealth mechanics and prove you can do it before you decide you hate it and bypass it completely. You’ll need to progress the main story quest until you meet Gina, which happens after you escape the Necropolis before it drops you right on top of the Blackshirt Uniform (quite literally, via zipline).
If you prioritize finding the Nazi disguise in Gizeh, it can practically be the first thing you do. Each of the three Nazi disguises are tied to an underground fight club quest line (another of Great Circle’s perturbingly repetitive missions) and as soon as you locate the entrance to the fight club, the location of the disguise will be pinned on your map. In Gizeh, the fight club is located in the main Gizeh village on the east wall along the main road. It’s almost impossible to miss. When you find it, you’ll get a marker in the northeast corner of the map – the closest possible POI to your current location – where you can retrieve the Nazi disguise (and the Wehrmacht key). Now you can walk around wherever you want and no one (other than a couple of random Nazi captains) will bother you.
Note: There is also a Digsite Outfit to find that will let you disguise yourself as a local, but you don’t need it if you have the Nazi disguise, which feels like an unfortunate oversight.
Indy’s Sukhothai costume, called the Royal Army Disguise, is the easiest one to find of the three. The entrance to the fight club is right next to the village where you first start, it’ll be the first thing you see when you take the boat out. The costume is sitting on some boxes outside of Voss’ camp – which just so happens to be where the main story quest is already taking you. The game practically drags you by the hand to this disguise as if it’s acknowledging that by this point you’re probably pretty fed up with crawling through very obvious gaps in fences and whipping sleeping fascists in the back of the head.
As a stealth appreciator, the existence of these disguises creates a strange dilemma. On the one hand they’re a useful upgrade that makes you feel rewarded for finding them, and this game is desperately in need of those. On the other hand, it completely eliminates one of the core mechanics of the game, allowing you to do whatever you want out in the open without having to worry about drawing unwanted attention. It’s equal parts immersion-killing and time-saving. Using disguises actively makes the game worse, but once you have them, it would be silly not to use them.
For you stealth haters, on the other hand, this bypass will probably be received like a welcome approachability tool. Now you can live out your fantasy of loudly walking around Nazi camps stealing cash and comic books right in front of their faces like a big dumb dope. A classic Indiana Jones experience if there ever was one.
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.