I can count on one hand the number of movie-related games ever made that have been truly faithful to (and worthy of) the celluloid that begat them. For best-in-class examples, my mind instantly runs to Rare’s GoldenEye 007 and Terminal Reality’s Ghostbusters: The Video Game—outta-nowhere gems that fleshed out their amazing original articles and provided fan-service chances to inhabit heroes of mine.
Today, I’m here to tell you that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle joins the absolute upper echelon of that incredibly rare club. Even if you’re not versed in Indy and are simply looking for a (whip) cracker of a first-person adventure, Great Circle will deliver you nothing but fortune and glory. Let there be no doubt on that front.
But if you are a fan of Lucas’ and Spielberg’s iconic acquirer of rare antiquities—duuude…Great Circle represents the holy grail of all Indy games. Cross my Coronado and hope to die, as a connoisseur of every Jones jaunt ever made, it’s true. Developer MachineGames captures the je ne sais quoi of this character—his rugged likeness, laconic personality, and swashbuckling antics—more faithfully than any of the LucasArts point ‘n’ clicks or Emperor’s Tomb platformer I was raised on.
Cross my Coronado and hope to die, as a connoisseur of every Jones jaunt ever
I simply cannot give this a higher compliment than that.
No, wait, I can. I should also say that when I was going into this review. I had little doubt that MachineGames would deliver anything less than a good game. This outfit, of course, is responsible for the Alt-History Wolfensteins, cumulatively one of the most technically excellent and surprisingly intelligent reboots our medium has ever received.
Moreover, parts of the Great Circle team were drawn from StarBreeze Studios, the proto-MachineGames, which produced some seminal FPS titles, including The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, The Darkness, and Syndicate. All of those briefs could have been pumped out as mindless FPS blasters, but every single one of them bore uncommon graphical polish, slick scripts, and mechanical innovations that pushed the genre forward—important studio pillars that are clearly still alive and well in Great Circle.
With a great pedigree also comes confidence, it seems. Instead of timidly trying to ingratiate its artificial Indy (voiced by Troy Baker) and awkwardly leap into a new chapter set between Raiders and Last Crusade, MachineGames boldly takes on a near-perfect facsimile of the former.
Basically, the opening tutorial is a more or less pitch-perfect recreation of the opening scene of Raiders, and, like the savvy archaeologist depicted, it doesn’t put a single foot wrong. You’ll quickly wrap your head around what to expect in the hours to come—slick 3D platforming that seamlessly shifts between first and third person, clever environmental puzzling, and some lovely kinetic whip play, which can be leveraged for exploration and combat both.
like the savvy archaeologist depicted, [Great circle] doesn’t put a single foot wrong.
From here you’ll soon get to grips with something else MachineGames very much wants you to know—this ride isn’t non-stop boulder dashin’, fascist bashin’ action. Great Circle is never afraid to pump on the brakes, hand you a large and richly detailed hub area, and let you off the leash to find some side shenanigans.
If you’re not usually a stop-and-smell-the-roses type, Great Circle may yet convert you. It’s less a video game and more a 1930s time machine. The level of research and attention to detail wedged into every square inch of these spaces is frankly absurd. Hell, I was on an incredibly tight deadline to finish this, and I still wasted hours snooping through the opening section of Indy’s college campus. You can only imagine how many more hours were then spent picking through Vatican City and then a generously sized Egyptian dig site…
As if the OCD levels of detail weren’t enough, you can just as easily lose yourself in the many journals, notes, and the auto-scribbles Junior makes in his own diary as you sticky beak about. This is a world fit to burst with additional info and depth; an uncommonly rich playspace for what could just as easily have been a shallow, fascist face-masher of an FPS for the CoD crowd.
Speaking of, I should probably confirm that the action is indeed as rock solid as the abs of an Anubis statue. Mind you, some of your expectations will probably need to be recalibrated on how the combat gets done. For many opening hours at least, the approach to gunplay is that of The Last of Us—guns have low ammo that will punch way harder than usual but gets rarely replenished. Honestly, you’re better off hitting the button to flip your boomstick around into “makeshift bommy knocker” mode.
Indy is way more about the fisticuffs and improvised melee weaponry pilfered from foes or some nearby desk. There’s a reasonably complex system here of blocks, parries, dodges, combos, pushes, and grapple breaks, not to mention generous stealth windows to one-shot semi-suspecting guards.
I’d be lying if I said things aren’t a little thrashy when you’re first learning the ropes, but once you learn how to disrupt people with the whip and wrap your head around some combos, a pretty sweet science emerges. It also has to be said that Great Circle features some of the best, over-the-top-and-then-some punch sound effects.
It also has to be said that Great Circle features some of the best, over-the-top-and-then-some punch sound effects.
And the good news is that it proceeds to get deeper and deeper with an Adventure Book perk system. The essential gist: your nosing about will pay dividends when you discover special tomes. However, in order to acquire the passive buff hidden within the pages of these 70 odd books, you’ll need to spend Adventure Points that are earned in a trickle from something as innocuous as photographing a rooftop cat or a flood by completing a multi-layered side-mystery (of which there are tons).
I should also mention that MachineGames makes great use of said camera. At minimum, it streamlines the puzzle process by forcing Indy to document stuff (and often provide a subtle clue on how to proceed) in his diary. On more casual difficulties, you can keep snapping the same puzzle to make the game cough up more and more hints. This is invaluable for preventing the bottlenecking moments I’ve seen occur in games like Uncharted 4.
It’s also worth noting that Great Circle is much more inventory-centric than you might imagine. To keep Indy breathing, you’ll need to hoard a range of food and bandages that you’ll steal from anywhere you can. His magic, near-bottomless man-bag is also home to any disguises you find. Amusingly, these can be swapped with an almost magician’s wave of his hands and are an imperative if you wish to move without stealth in the many restricted areas in these overlarge levels.
Honestly, I’m not sure which dynamic I loved more—the Dishonored-esque infiltration and outsmarting of patrols in the vast topside sections or the claustrophobic thrill of Great Circles’ many, many catacomb dungeons.
Because it has to be said, MachineGames’ nous for clever labyrinthine death-trap design is right up there with the Uncharteds and/or Tomb Raider reboots for creativity and atmosphere. The lighting system in the Stygian gloom of these mausoleums is top-notch, and you can almost taste the grit in the air and smell the oil, sulphur, or rat shit through your screen.
you can almost taste the grit in the air and smell the oil, sulPHur, or rat shit through your screen.
To be perfectly truthful, I want to stop talking about the fine adventure ahead, lest I spoil the delight of discovery for you. All you really need to know is it looks, sounds, and plays phenomenally well. And the biggest fear I had—Troy Baker trying to impersonate Harrison Ford to middling or woeful effect—was for nothing.
As I said earlier with the tutorial section, from the second that mountain range and fedora filter into view, Baker nails an almost exact mimicking of an intro I must have watched a hundred times. By the time those known and familiar scenes blended into new and unknown ones (which, admittedly, take seeeerious inspiration from a few iconic Indy film set pieces), my brain had simply accepted that this was Harrison Ford.
That’s how exceptional the writing and VO talent is here. I highly suspect that this game was planned, written, and produced by nothing short of superfans at every level.
In the interest of not revealing too much more, let me round this off here with a verdict. Underestimate Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and it will suck you in harder—and blow your mind more thoroughly—than a pissed-off Ark of the Covenant poltergeist. Abandon any scepticism you may have of it being a soulless cash-in that’s milking a beloved brand for cash. Just buy it, play it, and realise it’s a serious contender for Game of the Year 2024.
