Review | Indiana Jones and The Great Circle - Sacred, Ancient And Special
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is an absorbing globetrotting adventure that shines in putting you in the shoes of cinema’s greatest action hero and mostly nails the tone of his exploits despite the absence of the films’ peanut-butter-and-jelly-like Ford-Williams-Spielberg tag team, but—ironically—often feels like it belongs in a museum in the process. But no matter what turns this adventure took, I found some new mystery to scratch my chin at, fascists-a-plenty to whack with a big hammer, and new historical locations to gawk at like a slackjawed tourist in between dodging gunfire and swinging around on Indy’s whip to reach some arcane artefact.
Set between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, The Great Circle falls smack dab in prime Indy territory. The year is 1937; the shadow of war looms over the globe as fascist powers in Europe are shaking down all four corners of the world for every last relic with historical or religious significance in an attempt to strengthen their fetid reign. Indy’s dragged into this conflict after a mysterious figure breaks into Marshall College and steals a cherished relic before dragging it back to the Vatican. Naturally, Jones tugs on this thread, which then yanks him into an adventure that spans continents.
You’ll visit a handful of cool, magnificently realised locations like Giza, The Vatican, and Sukhothai. While some places take on a much more linear structure as you rush from Point A to Point B as part of a setpiece or quick story beat, you’ll spend most of your time in big, open-world areas. Each of these zones is set at or in a major historical landmark and lets you run wild, collecting medical supplies to help local doctors, hiding strange, ancient relics from a bygone era, and discovering all sorts of secrets. There are plenty of side missions to take on in each location that help unspool the story’s thread or show you more about one of the game’s characters.
His adventure puts him in cahoots with a charming, memorable crew of allies like Gina, the spirited Italian reporter looking for her missing sister, Antonio, Indy’s inside man in the Vatican, or Pailin, a badass Siamese freedom fighter. It also pits him against secret orders, crooked priests, and—yes—fascists of multiple varieties. The biggest and baddest of which is Emmerich Voss, a Nazi archaeologist who sees himself as Jones’ foil and never misses an opportunity to make that clear.
Like Wolfenstein: The New Order and The New Colossus, MachineGames playfully flexes its fascist-writing muscles in The Great Circle by conjuring up the most snivelling, hateful, self-superior bastards imaginable, with Voss bearing the standard. He’s more subdued than The New Order’s Frau Engel, but just as conniving. He manipulates and pushes the buttons of everyone around him, and sees himself a cut above for understanding how to do so. Watching him abuse his fellow fascists is almost as funny as watching him try his best to prove himself to Indy, whose abject disgust only makes Voss try all the harder to get Indy to relate, Elon Musk-style.
MachineGames cooked with The Great Circle’s script. It’s distinct and still touts the studio’s narrative strengths, but just about every character’s written in a way that feels aligned with the series' tone. That fine-tuning rarely feels synthetic, imitative, or Flanderised, though. And in our current media landscape, that’s a feat worth celebrating.
I never felt pandered to in the way that, say, the recent Dial of Destiny made me feel. And thanks to its pulpy origins, alt-history-meets-magical-realistic trappings, and generally self-contained stories, Indiana Jones is almost universally exempt from many of the pitfalls that similar franchises would fall into when adapting such a beloved character or story. That is, of course, aside from two key factors: Harrison Ford and John Williams.
As an action star and comic powerhouse, Harrison Ford is near-irreplaceable. His distinct blend of rugged, sexy bravado and dry-but-expressive sense of humour has proven a kingmaker for many of cinema’s greatest series. But no movies have leaned so heavily on his singular talent as the Indiana Jones films, which employ just about every tool in Ford’s repertoire as Spielberg masterfully frames his cartoonishly expressive visage and imposing form.
Although the talented artists at MachineGames can digitally reconstruct Indy’s iconic silhouette with millions of pixels and polygons, they can’t recreate his voice. But Troy Baker sure can try. And honestly? The man in the arena did a pretty solid job. Don’t let recent headlines mislead you: this is Troy Baker doing his best to sound like Harrison Ford in his late 30’s/early 40’s, playing Indiana Jones. And that’s more or less exactly what he did. It’s obviously not pitch-perfect, but it’s about as good as you could ask for; Baker even speaks in other languages with a similar cadence to Ford’s.
With The Great Circle’s score, I would argue Gordy Haab has even bigger shoes to fill than Troy Baker does in replacing Harrison Ford. I can refer to him as The Maestro—or even refer to Him with the written mechanics reserved for God or royalty—you’ll know who I'm talking about without seeing his name, to not only hear the soaring joy of flight, the brooding sense of unseen terror lurking underwater, the beckoning of the alien unknown, the bombastic thrill of an operatic prelude, or a motorcycle chase that ends in a joust but feel these things at the mention of John Williams should speak to his genius. Without Williams' touch, there is no Indiana Jones.
Haab knocks it out of the park as usual, nailing Williams’ style and energy with originality and depth. Soaring, energetic movements make full use of each string and brass and wind in the orchestra during some of The Great Circle’s most action-packed moments while mischievous plucks and puffs punctuate a hammer colliding with an unsuspecting fascist before dragging their unconscious body into a swamp. John Williams has been in my Spotify Wrapped, and Haab may be joining him after The Great Circle’s soundtrack hits streaming.
It’s complemented by masterfully cartoonish sound design that feels ripped straight from the mind of Indiana Jones and Star Wars sound director Ben Burtt. Guns crackle and boom when they fire, ladders creak softly as Indy clambers up them, and that whip sounds as good as ever. Mallets ping and then snap as they fracture hollow Nazi skulls, the hammerhead clattering to the ground while the splintered handle falls with a ka-thunk. You can use so many things to bash fash in this game—fly swatters, frying pans, brooms, gun butts, hammers, shovels—and they’re all brain-ticklingly satisfying to hear connect with the deserving jackass at the receiving end. Each collision is perfectly exaggerated to maximise a sense of impact, too. Smacking an Italian mechanic with a bamboo rod transforms the game into Tom and Jerry in the best, most satisfying way possible as he flies off a ledge or into a wall.
That’s a necessary strength considering just how many bad guys you’ll stealthily knock out with construction tools and then drag into a dark corner. The Great Circle is an adventure game through and through, with tons of puzzles to solve and traps to dodge, but combat is largely stealth-based. You can go in loud, guns-blazing and whip-cracking, but you probably won’t find much success as fascists will quickly gang up on you and beat you down once you’re detected. Instead, you’ll need to crouch and sneak around bad guys, bang ‘em on the back of the head with a bottle of wine, and drag their bodies out of view so their buddies don’t sound an alarm.
Sneaking around enemy bases in full stealth can get a little grating, though as the first-person combat wears thin pretty quickly and the gunplay is nowhere near the level of polish found in MachineGames’ Wolfenstein games. And it’s definitely where The Great Circle feels the most flawed. Unforgiving checkpoints can rob meticulous Nazi-knockers like me of tons of time spent carefully weaving a path through tents and secret tunnels, taking out everyone in their path. I’ve lost at least two hours of progress to confoundingly unforgiving checkpoints, including one instance where I messed up, reset to an autosave, and went even further back than I did when I died during a failed attempt at the same encounter, losing about half an hour’s worth of progress. And even when a checkpoint does stick, enemies that you knocked out before reaching that checkpoint are revived when you die and try again.
Tons of small issues like these compound on each other to make for some really frustrating moments that make The Great Circle feel like a game from 10 years ago. But for every rough edge, The Great Circle hides something really cool. I was pretty close to rolling credits on the game when I discovered that you can burn propaganda posters by lifting your lighter to them, for example. It doesn’t do anything or affect stealth, but it’s definitely cool as hell.
Most of these flourishes set out to prove why The Great Circle had to be a first-person game instead of a third-person one. Tons of stuff in this world is interactive in ways that couldn’t work in a third-person game. You don’t just press a button to turn a key, you move a stick to turn the key and open the door. You can turn desk lamps on and off by tugging on their chain. You don’t just interact with moss-covered relics, you brush the moss away yourself with a flick of the left stick. I know this sounds silly, maybe even annoying for some players, but it lends a sense of tactility and interactivity that help to put you in Indy’s shoes throughout the game. Solving puzzles and platforming around as the camera switches from first to third-person and back to first again works flawlessly.
Puzzles and traps are exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect to find guarding precious artefacts in a centuries-old dungeon. Pressure plates that activate booby traps, big wooden gears powered by water move hidden doors, and mirrors that concentrate and reflect the sun into light-sensitive spots on a wall pepper The Great Circle’s crypts and caves, and mastering these ancient contraptions is constantly satisfying again thanks to the masterful sound design in this game. The puzzles range from simple, might-as-well-just-hold-forward stuff to things that had me staring at my TV for half an hour trying to decipher a tough code. The really hard stuff is mostly found in side content, though the main story has one or two challenging puzzles of its own too. And in case anything’s too hard, Indy can point his camera at puzzles required for the critical path, take a picture, and get a hint from Dr. Jones himself. It’s a welcome alternative to that annoying trend in AAA gaming where a character blurts out the solution to a puzzle as you’re in the midst of solving it.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a lovingly made Indiana Jones simulator, and I mean that in the best ways possible. It’s an absolute thrill to travel the world as Indy and take part in a story whose quality measures up to the stuff I love the most about the films. Even when I’m shaking my fist in anger at some frustrating, outdated design decision in a combat encounter, you had better believe I’m picking my controller right back up so I can make a mad dash to the next mysterious puzzle or fun story beat. I can’t wait to hop back into my finished save file and go scrounge every nook and cranny for more cutscenes, lore, and Nazi-punching action.
Pros:
Pitch-perfect Indy story and vibe
Gorgeous historical landmarks from around the world
Killing fascists, duh
Cons:
Occasionally frustrating combat and checkpointing
