In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the famous whip-toting, fedora-donning adventurous archaeologist returns for an adventure not in film but in a first-person action adventure game.
Developed by MachineGames in collaboration with Lucasfilm, the Great Circle’s gameplay bears some similarities to the Uncharted and Tomb Raider series with traversal challenges and puzzle-solving, stealth and combat, but in a first-person perspective and an open-world concept.
International man of ancient mystery
The game is set in 1937, a year after the events of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Great Circle is a treat to fans of the film, with a prologue similarly set in Peru, as well as a short episode in Marshall College in Connecticut, where Indiana Jones teaches archeology.
The adventure begins when a mysterious intruder breaks into Marshall College, attacks Jones and steals a cat mummy that Indy found in Siwa, Egypt. Left behind is a clue that leads Indy to the Vatican City, and unravelling the mystery of the Great Circle.
The Great Circle refers to the geographical positions of the world’s holy sites aligned in a circle around the world, which serves as the premise for Indy’s globe-trotting adventure.
The game brings him to grand historically significant sites like the Vatican City, the pyramids in Gizeh, Egypt, and closer to home, Sukhothai in Thailand. Although some areas are rather brief and linear, the Great Circle is an immersive and thrilling story grand adventure, worthy of a place in the Indiana Jones adventure series.
The Great Circle’s gameplay includes what you would expect from an Indiana Jones adventure — crawling around dark and creepy catacombs, avoiding booby traps, traversal challenges as well as solving puzzles using mirrors and light reflections, connecting pipes, weighted mechanisms and ciphers.
He faces many risky situations and hazards like fire, falling from height and stinging scorpions. Also lying in wait are plenty of hostile enemies whom he deals with using melee weapons, hand-to-hand combat and firearms.
To access areas without suspicion or participate in certain activities, Indy can use disguises for infiltration. However, disguises are useless in restricted areas where enemies attack on sight, and they can also be seen through by high-ranking captains in common areas.
Indy can acquire new skills and abilities by finding or buying books and spending Adventure points to level up. These can help increase Indy’s health and stamina, improve combat abilities and carrying capacity for consumables.
Adventure points can be gained by completing missions, taking photos and performing side quests and favours for NPCs (non-playable characters). In addition, Indy also needs to find money to purchase key quest items as well as guidebooks that indicate all collectibles on the map. The best way to get money is to steal from the Nazis and fascists.
Exploration, excavation and collection
Although not all of The Great Circle’s locations are open-world, those of the Vatican City, Gizeh and Sukhothai are well developed with loads to explore and many NPCs to interact with. These locations feel very alive with NPCs engaging in lively conversations, going about their lives and greeting Indy in their native languages.
The game rewards the attentive explorer with insightful NPC chatter that can shed some light on the political situation and background on the myths and mysteries. Some of the chatter also leads to optional side quests that Indy can perform as good deeds. You can earn Adventure points by finding lost items, gifting food as well as taking and sharing photos.
One memorable side quest involved helping an old lady who missed a beloved goat she gave away — it took me a long time to find the right goat to photograph but it was satisfying to witness the old lady’s happiness when she received the photo of her goat!
To find his way around the larger areas, Indy can hold up maps to navigate, but quest markers will disappear when the map is stowed, which makes navigation rather cumbersome, especially when hunting down an artifact deep underground and holding a light source.
The Great Circle requires Indy to traverse a wide variety of obstacles, including tall buildings, catacombs and tunnels. Indy’s iconic bullwhip plays a huge role in the game, where he can use it as a rope to climb, swing across a chasm and yank objects that are out of reach.
I found Indy’s climbing rather clunky, but that is understandable since he is a professor and not an assassin in Assassin’s Creed games. He has limited stamina which means he cannot climb continuously and needs to rest; otherwise he will lose his grip and fall.
Another issue is that there isn’t any means to control Indy dropping from and clinging onto a ledge. Players can only control Indy by literally having him walk backwards over the ledge in hope that he catches on, which didn’t happen all the time for me, causing him some unnecessary injury.
This is where the consumables are handy — Indy can replenish his health using bandages, as well as eating bread for a health boost, and fruits for a stamina boost. Fighting, climbing and running will deplete his stamina quickly, which can lead to his demise if he’s not careful.
On some of the larger maps, there is an option to fast travel using signposts. The game also encourages players to revisit previous areas to complete all the optional side quests, activities and collectibles.
With newly unlocked tools in later maps, revisiting previous areas allow for actions that were not previously possible. For instance, after Indy obtains a lighter in Gizeh, he can bring this back on a revisit to the Vatican City and vandalise fascist propaganda posters to gain more Adventure points!
Completists will have a field day with plenty of collectibles in the form of comic books, ancient relics, artifacts, tarot cards, and even recipes!
Headbangers and nutcrackers
Thwarting evil villains planning to harness occult powers for world domination requires Indy to knock out fascists and Nazis standing in his way. Although he is armed with a revolver and can pick up firearms dropped by enemies, relying on stealth is usually a safer way to go, especially in enemy camps.
Indy can pick up tools and objects lying around as improvised weapons, such as brooms, shovels and even fly swats. These tend to break after smashing a few skulls, but there are plenty of objects lying around that can be used. In a pinch, Indy can also use a melee weapon that comes with his disguise which can be repaired with repair kits, and even his fists, when all else fails.
Indy can perform stealth takedowns on enemies using improvised weapons for whacking them over the head and also hitting their vulnerable family jewels, which is kind of cruel but pretty fun to execute.
Besides straightforward combat, Indy can throw objects to distract enemies before taking them down, disarm them using his whip, and hide enemy bodies to avoid detection. Occasionally, Indy has to deal with aggressive guard dogs but thankfully, Indy doesn’t have to kill them — instead, he just has to push them away or scare them off by cracking his whip.
Unlike games where the protagonist has a special sense to see through obstacles, Indy doesn’t have a special way of sensing enemy presence, so sneaking involves peeping and creeping around to see if any enemies are nearby, and hiding before being spotted.
Enemies who detect Indy will have a circular awareness indicator above their head, which takes a while to fill before they are alerted to Indy’s presence. Thankfully, allies who accompany Indy do not trigger the enemies’ awareness indicator, and can even lend a hand in fighting when the need arises.
If all else fails, you can either have Indy try to fight his way out or simply run away, as the enemies are quite forgetful when Indy stays out of sight and out of mind.
Cinematic magic
The Great Circle features Hollywood-quality cinematography with cutscenes that emulates the look and feel of Indiana Jones films, packed with thrilling action sequences that keeps you at the edge of your seat.
Viewing in the first-person perspective makes everything feel much closer. This is great for studying hieroglyphics, carvings and paintings up close, but the downside is that the view and perspective are limited, making it somewhat inaccurate for climbing and jumping puzzles.
The Great Circle features stellar motion-capture and CGI. The character you play bears amazing likeness to Harrison Ford, who portrayed Indiana Jones in the movies, and the likeness includes his trademark lop-sided smirk.
Indy is performed and voiced by renowned voice actor Troy Baker, whose memorable performance as Joel Miller in The Last of Us and Nathan Drake in Uncharted left a deep impression. Troy does a great job emulating Indy’s rather gruff and grumpy tones really well, and also the different languages that Indy has to speak in the various locales.
The Great Circle’s graphics look great on my new AMD RX 7900 XTX graphics card, with beautiful lighting effects of flames, water and reflections, bringing to life the creepy catacombs, hazy deserts and rainy tropical forests.
Objects and notes can also be closely examined for clues, which show an amazing attention to detail. I did observe some minor graphical bugs like Indy’s map being blocked from view by objects behind when being held up, enemies partially disappearing behind walls and objects floating above the ground.
I also experienced a couple of crashes to desktop which required me to restart the game, but thankfully, the game autosaves quite frequently so there was little loss of progress.
TL;DR
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a blockbuster-quality and thrilling action adventure game full of grand archeological mysteries, evil fascist villains and globe-trotting adventures.
Armchair virtual tourists, fans of Indiana Jones films as well as gamers who adore the Uncharted and Tomb Raider series will love this game. The Great Circle’s larger open-world maps packs in lots of exploration, activities and collectibles that will satisfy completist gamers.
During my play-test, there were some minor annoyances in terms of the clunky climbing controls, limited camera angles in the first-person perspective, as well as occasional crashes to desktop, but these have little impact to the immense enjoyment of Indy’s excellent adventure.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is free to play on Xbox Game Pass, and is also available for purchase at the Microsoft Store at S$99.75 and on Steam at S$99.90.
