I think everyone has that one franchise that is their “thing”. The one they know the most about, collect the most memorabilia from, etc. For a lot of people, it’s something like Star Wars or Harry Potter, for me it was always Indiana Jones. Been a fan since high school, Indy was part of the reason I pursued a career in history. While not as prolific as Star Wars, there have been a few Indiana Jones games. Fate of Atlantis and Emperor’s Tomb are solid entries, but the most recent one we had before Great Circle was Staff of Kings, which was a pretty lackluster entry. When I heard there was a new one coming out, I was extremely interested. I picked up Indiana Jones and the Great Circle day one.
Great Circle definitely sticks out among the other games in the Indiana Jones catalogue and among the adventure game genre in general when it comes to gameplay. That’s because the Great Circle is played from the first-person perspective. I was initially leery about this when it was first announced, and the first hour or so of the game was a little awkward as I learned the controls, but I came around to it eventually. The first-person view does make you feel more connected to the action; you are the one exploring the tombs, not the character on screen, but with Indy being a character with an iconic look, I also kinda missed being able to see him during gameplay. There are more traditional trappings of adventure games here, like puzzles & traps. The one place I found the first-person view was a real downgrade is during the times Indy would have to swing across two poles or grab a ledge with his whip as he fell. During climbing and whip swinging sequences, the game does switch to a third-person perspective, but once he lets go of the whip it’s back to 1st person. So, while flying through the air, you have to quickly look up to get the “whip here” prompt to appear before falling to your death. I can see how it adds to the realism of you have to do it just like Indy would, but I found getting the prompt to appear could be finnicky at times. Outside that, the whip controls feel really good. Cracking your whip is bound to the R1 and you can use it to scare off animals, pull guns outta hands, and drag enemies towards you. The only thing it’s missing is an area clearing attack to keep from getting ganged up on.
When not solving puzzles or swinging around, most of the gameplay sees you exploring an open world looking for clues. Great Circle goes for an open world/linear style when it comes to level design, if that makes sense. Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, there are definitive levels in Great Circle, but they aren’t a linear puzzle or combat affair like Indy and the Emperor’s Tomb, instead each level is a small world space that you can explore from a variety of angles. The first major level is set in the Vatican City. There, you can make a beeline for the main quest or explore around the city some picking up collectibles and side quests. The same is true for Giza and Siam. In between these big levels are smaller set piece levels that are more linear. They help pick up the story’s pace after you spent 4 hours meandering around the desert. In these big levels, you spend most of your time sneaking around, Indy can collect disguises to enter restricted areas, otherwise you are crouching behind boxes.
This game has a much heavier stealth focus than I expected. They go down the realistic route in that Indy isn’t too sturdy and starting a fight with more than two goons usually leads to your death unless you can break away & hide. It took me a while to get ahold of the brawling system. It’s a simple punch, block, and dodge system, but I struggled through most of the Vatican. In true Indy fashion, you can pick up random items to use as weapons, like shovels, frying pans, guitars, and bottles. By the time I got to Siam, I could hold my own in a fight a little better, long as there weren’t any goons with guns in the fight. Indy has his trusty revolver and can loot guns off dead goons, but firearms are almost discouraged in this game. Indy is no expert marksman, enemies seem much more bullet resistant than Indy, and you can’t carry spare ammo on you for anything besides your revolver. The few times I tried to get into a firefight I almost always ended up dead. The heavy focus on stealth did start to grate on me a bit. Sure, Indy snuck around in the movies, but there were also fun moments of high adventure. With the game’s systems, I knew I wasn’t going to get a fun moment where Indy walks into the wrong bar. There were a few fun set piece moments, like running across a battleship sliding down a mountain or fighting a big dude ala a Pat Roach fight, but the adventure is overall light on thrills.
What doesn’t help Great Circle shake the feeling of dour realism is the lack of music. That’s one thing Emperor’s Tomb excelled, a great soundtrack that fit each moment. Seeing as Great Circle doesn’t really encourage combat, there’s no swelling instrumental scores, and most of the time solving puzzles or exploring doesn’t really have music backing. There are occasions when a very faint ambient track plays and the big story moment cutscenes have music, but outside that, the game is quiet on the music front. The Raiders theme is used as an occasional music sting but never played in full. While I do enjoy games that go for realism, I would forgive an Indiana Jones game for getting a little carried away with the soundtrack.
In the graphics department, Great Circle is no slouch. There are a few times where, in the right lighting, Indy looks like a real person. I was impressed with how good the pyramids of Giza looked up close. There is unfortunately a lot of noticeable clipping with foliage and clothing. There was also an occasional glitch where everyone’s hair was wafting like it was in a wind tunnel, even in places with no wind. The nice graphics come at the cost of performance. I had an issue with the shadows and reflections in-game. Anywhere outside with shadows were rendered as a bland gray, including the NPCs under the shade. It gave large sections of the game a cell-shaded, artsy vibe that reminded me of the Saboteur. I had to turn on the accessibility outlines to help navigate these areas and avoid enemies. It turns out my laptop doesn’t have the hardware necessary to run Great Circle at even 30%.
Before the new patch, the game ran fine with no lag, just really terrible lighting and particle effects. After the patch, the game crashes trying to load my saved game. On one hand, it’s not the game’s fault my computer can run it, they decided they wanted to have a really pretty looking game. On the other hand, the fact this game can only run well on higher end equipment is a bit elitist of the developers. If I wanted to speculate, I’d accuse them of trying to help NVIDA sell their newest graphics card or whatever. I am eagerly awaiting the PS5 release so I can play through the game again with the proper lighting & textures with no risks of crashes.
When I played through Emperor’s Tomb recently, I realized it was a decent pulp adventure, but didn’t really succeed at being a distinctly Indy adventure. The Great Circle does feel like a proper Indy adventure. First, I owe Troy Baker an apology. In the trailers, I was a little put off by him voicing Indy, because in a lot of the trailer clips his voice just sounded like the typical “Troy Baker as Troy Baker”. In the actual game though, he nails the Harrison Ford impression. He does that low grumble of Ford’s voice so well I forgot it was Troy Baker at times. It was only when he raised his voice in panic that the Troy Baker voice came out. He has some good one-liners and they really take advantage of his snake phobia in this game. His sidekick/love interest for this game is Italian journalist Gina Lombardi. She’s tagging along to find her sister, a famous anthropologist. Gina takes a bit to warm up to. You first meet her in the Vatican and she’s a bit abrasive. I was worried she’d be a one-note character, like Mei Ying, but as you spend more time with her, she develops into this fun character who is a bit chaotic, but cares for Indy. She helps in a few missions, but usually hangs out at your base, except in the last main area where she goes boating with you. I get companions can make gameplay or certain story moments awkward to create, but I would’ve preferred to have Gina around for more. Uncharted & Bioshock Infinite proved they could work.
The two main German baddies are fun to hate characters. Voss, the Nazi archeologist, is really into psychology and, I think, phrenology. He’s that classic smug German villain that you are just itching to see get his comeuppances. His 2nd in command, Gantz, is a meathead goose-stepper who likes to think he’s a German uberman. The two personalities play well off each other. All of these characters feel ripped from an Indiana Jones story and they have personality beyond, “the bad guy” or “the professional, no-nonsense woman”. There’s some other side characters that show up in each locale, including an appearance by Marcus Broady, but they are a little more one note. You do meet Dame Nawal, a wealthy aristocrat working for the Cairo Museum in Giza. She’s an ally, but when you first meet her, I got this feeling she was secretly going to be a turncoat bad guy. Just how Indy was seemingly skeptical of her and her sorta ‘charming villain’ vibe made me think she couldn’t be trusted, but nope she’s just another ally in your journey.
This game is set a year after Raiders of the Lost Ark and the story is one of the more introspective Indiana Jones tales. A lot of the story forces Indy to evaluate his life decisions, why he chooses to chase history across the globe to the detriment of his newly rekindled relationship with Marion and his responsibilities as a professor. The story doesn’t lay it on too thick and there’s still plenty of humor, but it’s a nice angle to examine Indy. I remember thinking as Indy packed up to leave Marshall College “With all his adventures, he must only teach about 2 days a year.” and the game does bring that up later, when Indy gets a call from Marcus, who tells him the college fired him for running off during midterms. People also question Indy about Marion and his intentions with Gina. It adds a nice layer, making Gina more than just another girl in a port for Indy. He’s fresh off his relationship with Marion deteriorating, but he’s too charming and so a romance hesitantly forms between him and Gina. This story is very much about an Indy in denial as he hyper focuses on chasing Voss around the globe.
And as mentioned, Gina is searching for her sister, Laura. She’s a non-character in this story really, more a motivation for Gina. We are told about her, but never shown, so there’s not much investment on our end to find her. She was captured by the Nazis because of her anthropological knowledge. There is some intrigue that maybe she wasn’t kidnapped by the Nazis but was willingly working with them, but they don’t really capitalize on that plot thread.
Story plot time, so spoilery time. The main story kicks off with a recreation of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a fun way to start the game, and an easy appeal to nostalgia that endear the game to you, still I had a big dumb smile on my face as explored the Peruvian jungle. That scene ends revealing it was a dream. Indy wakes up in his office to find the college is being robbed by a giant of a man. The giant steals a cat mummy Indy found on a dig last summer. After getting his ass beat, Indy tracks the robber to the Vatican where he meets an old friend and Gina. Turns out, much like the idol of Kuru Watu, the cat mummy was actually hiding an even more important artifact, a stone tablet. After finding it in the Vatican Secret Archives and fighting the giant again, Indy learns the tablet is part of the Great Circle, a line of historic sites around the world. Of course, the Nazis are also interested in these tablets because they promise unlimited power.
Leaving the Vatican as stowaways on a blimp, Indy & Gina end up in Giza. Each level feels like it’s riffing on a different classic Indy film, not exactly ripping off, more alluding to. The Vatican felt like the scenes in Vience from Last Crusade, and Giza has that feeling of Cairo from Raiders. You are exploring a dig site in the shadow of the Great Pyramids. There’s a small village and a large Nazi encampment. One of the fun classic tomb traps that’s used in Giza is rooms of scorpions, it’s a pulp adventure staple that you don’t see much anymore that I really enjoyed. Here Indy is looking for another seemingly random statue that may hold a Great Circle stone. Turns out the Giant is part of an ancient order of giants who speak in the first language. The language humanity spoke during Tower of Babel times before God got all jealous. It adds an extra air of intrigue to this rock collecting story. During the Giza adventure, there’s a train that runs in and out of the Nazi camp & I 100% expected we’d be leaving Giza via that train and get a video game level staple, the train level. Unfortunately, I was wrong. You never interact with the train, it’s just set dressing, which feels like a real missed opportunity. Instead, you & Gina hitch a ride from Dame Nawal to the Himalayas.
The Himalayas are one of the shorter, linear levels to serve as a break between the bigger world spaces. Here we learn that speaking in the ancient tongue while holding one of the Great Circle stones unlocks wild magic powers & find Gina’s sister’s corpse. While falling off a mountain, Indy & Gina use the stone to teleport to Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese War. As you escape the destroyed city, you get a Cairo Swordsman scene where a downed Zero pilot comes at you with a katana. You leave Shanghai via plane and there’s a recreation of the biplane shootout from Last Crusade, but this time, Indy’s manning the tail gun, and there’s a great callback that I won’t spoil, but it gave me a laugh.
The final main world space is the ruins of Sukhothai deep in the jungles of Siam. Here, the game takes a quick breather when Indy & Gina check into a hotel. Indy touches base with Marcus and there’s a romantic tension scene where they almost kiss. It is a bit of awkward scene, because Gina starts out still understandably shooken up about her sister & Indy talks about how his relationship with Marion ended and his reluctance to being tied down. Apparently, that gets Gina hot under the collar. It feels like they were trying to play catch up with romance plotline as we near the end of the game. Sukhothai is a less busier world space compared to the Vatican and Giza. You navigate the world via a boat as you and Gina trek into the jungles. There’s a temple complexes, a village, and Nazi compound to explore. When you dock, Gina will follow you during main missions, or sit at the dock and wait for your return. Voss has brought some Italian fascists with him, because he has a friendly officer in the Siamese military, that’s referred to as just “the General”, that lets him run amok in the country. It feels really weird they don’t give him a name. Indy & Gina join up with a group of rebels. This is where we also get the most awkward writing in the game. The local rebels are obviously very leery of Westerners coming into to loot their historic sites. Indy tries to assuage their concerns, but his dialogue comes off a little too tryhard. I don’t mean to sound like a Boomer, but Indy exclaims “I love Siamese history, I’ve even taught several classes on the subject”. I understand that sensibilities have changed since 1984, but I think Temple of Doom showed Indy being respectful to the friendly villagers without it feeling like overcompensation like it does here. But once that’s over, Indy & Gina find a hidden temple guarded by a giant snake. Unfortunately, this is as far as I got in the story before my save crashed because of the update. So, I don’t get to see how this story ends, but I’ve started a second playthrough to see if maybe my old save was corrupted, but a new one will work. I’ll update my thoughts on the story once I get to the ending.
All in all, Indiana Jones & the Great Circle is a great entry into the annals of Indiana Jones games. It nails the feeling of the Indiana Jones series, and the story is a fun one that is great for the video game medium as it lets you travel the globe. The gameplay is fun, but I would’ve preferred dialing back the stealth. The lack of music is a mark against this game when the source material is known for it. The graphics are nice, but way too demanding. This game is definitely better than Staff of Kings, but when comparing it to Emperor’s Tomb? Great Circle obviously does a lot of things better, but I enjoy that classic 3rd person adventure game. Still, if you are someone like me who loves Indiana Jones or are a fan of the adventure genre, I can recommend this game, but maybe on the console, unless you’ve got a computer that could keep the space station afloat.
