Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

If you think about it, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a rather strange cocktail of seemingly contrasting design elements. Yes, Swedish MachineGames has experience with the first-person perspective, but in tone, structure and gameplay loop they can't really draw on their experience with the octane-pumping and crazy Wolfenstein games, and furthermore, Indiana Jones doesn't have the same popular cultural significance as before, nor a strong gaming heritage to draw on.

But Great Circle is an excellent example of how these franchises are not always made to please investors or fulfil a quota. Given Phil Spencer's comments about borrowed IPs, this certainly bears the mark of a genuine passion project for MachineGames and Bethesda hat and leather jacket enthusiast Todd Howard. And it shows.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is not a perfect game. The AI model is just good-hearted enough, and my review build offered a bit of physics-based "jank", which doesn't mean the game performs below an acceptable technical standard in any way. Plus, some will still see the perspective itself as such a curious design decision that alone acts as a turn-off. But for me, this is one of the most surprising triumphs of the year, borrowing inspiration from unexpected quarters, mastering its stealth-based loop and presenting an Indiana fantasy I never dared dream of.

So where do we start? Well, perhaps it's best to state that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle starts off in a slightly controversial way, and if you're very sensitive about any narrative-based information, you might consider this a spoiler - we'll continue below the image!

Are you still there? Okay, the first moments of the game are pretty much a one-to-one rendering of the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Peru, 1936, the golden figure on the illuminated pedestal and Alfred Molina as a hapless tour guide - it's all here, and while it's brave indeed, it's also dangerous to present the game through a lens where the player has a pre-existing relationship with every scene, exchange or set piece. However, at the end of the day, it's all "just" a flashback, and the game instead takes place... in well, 1937, where a more experienced Indy experiences a break-in at Marshall College in Connecticut that results in the theft of an ancient relic from a dig in Siwa. This leads Indy on the trail of a secret that sends him first to Vatican City, and later, of course, around the world. What follows is a typical worldwide journey with Nazis led by a rival archaeologist in the form of Emmerich Voss and an unexpected companion in journalist Gina Lombardi. There's a bit of Nathan Drake-style introspection as Indy is forced to consider why he didn't choose a steady, fashionable relationship with Marion Ravenwood, and the historical, political and occult blend together in a seamless and sometimes clichéd mash-up that exists in a fairly seamless extension of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade.

Troy Baker does an excellent job here. I'm of the same opinion that it's a bit comical that this slightly self-aggrandising NFT enthusiast has to contribute to so many significant game launches, but at the same time it's hard to argue with the result. Baker is Indy here, and with music from composer Gordy Haab channelling the original John Williams score, this as a game is a pleasure to watch and listen to. It's not the most grandiose visual showcase for Xbox Series X, but it's certainly "fancy without being flashy". Indiana's face could have used an hour more in make-up, but compared to dramatic lighting, silky smooth, unbroken 60fps frame rate on Xbox Series X and generally expansive environments to explore, this is just fine by me.

Okay, back to The Great Circle's big idea that really caught me off guard - level design. While it would have been easy to imagine MachineGames drawing inspiration from Uncharted (which already draws inspiration from Indiana Jones) with a high-octane adventure filled with set-pieces and linear action, the studio chose a much bolder structural framework, the most obvious source of inspiration being... well, Dishonored. This is especially true when you land in Vatican City, which is a single area in a game, with several available, that easily houses 10 hours of content on its own. It's vertical, filled with excavations, locked doors, exciting side missions, fascist checkpoints and everything in between that requires common sense, logical thinking and precise positioning - truly one of 2024's best levels, if you will. There are costumes that give you access to new places, keys that create amazing "aha" moments where you remember a similar lock somewhere else in the open world, and often multiple ways to unlock a tricky challenge.

Dishonored gives you a pretty accurate frame of reference too, both in terms of the first-person perspective, the open level design that accommodates both linear jumps and horizontal and vertical exploration, and the inherent focus on stealth as a central gameplay formula. If you hold Corvo Atano's epic adventures throughout the two games in your mind, and Dishonored 2 in particular, then you pretty much know what you're in for. Indiana has a journal that acts as the central main menu, anchoring all the structural elements of the game, from navigation with a physical map that is also your actual map, upgrades that are cleverly found through books hidden around the game and unlocked with Adventure Points, and the main and side missions you continuously complete. And don't worry, no matter what you do, you'll need to use your head - the journal is also the hub for the letters, notes and other important information you gather.

No, this is not The Witness, nor is this a point n' click adventure game where you combine a variety of objects to form complex solutions. But you have to sift through the information presented to you via your journal, and the solution isn't always straightforward, although you shouldn't expect any real brain teasers.

For the most part, it's the tactile dimension of the game that really enhances your immersion. The aforementioned books as skill upgrades, the notes you pull out to calculate the solution to a puzzle, or just the fact that a key has to be physically pulled out of your bag to be placed in a lock and manually turned in the same lock makes the game so infinitely manual, tactile and alive. As an "Indiana Jones Simulator", this is such a resounding success primarily because you do everything Indy would do, and in a mechanically seamless way. On the whole, the game's physics are decidedly excellent, presenting every object you pick up as being believably weighted and manufactured. Everything needs to be picked up, touched, interacted with in a way that few games manage, and again it's all about the inspirations, and Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex games seem to have been closely scrutinised here.

It would be too much to call Indiana Jones and the Great Circle an immersive sim, but at times, the amount of freedom to access targets in the open levels, the verticality, the possibilities are so alluring that one is inclined to call it an action game with clear immersive sim aspects. It makes this game quite different to what I thought it would be.

There's so much more to say about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but given that the game is available via Game Pass, I'd rather recommend that anyone who feels even slightly tantalised by my descriptions of the game's mechanics and structures give it a shot. But we can't avoid touching on the combat system before we wrap up. It's important to emphasise that although the game presents a far more robust combat system than, say, Dishonored, it's underplayed, de-prioritised and appears as a set of skills you can fall back on if your clever positioning fails. It's entirely functional, and thanks to the excellent, responsive physics and fantastic sound design straight out of the films, placing an uppercut on the jaw of a battered Nazi is mostly just satisfying. That's not to say that the melee combat here offers much mechanical depth, and the firearms you find seem like a last resort. The game wants you to live the Indiana Jones dream, and while they give you the tools to fire a revolver if necessary, it's clear that they want something different for you as a player - I respect that.

I've had ongoing discussions with my colleagues about whether the mildly less intelligent AI in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a dealbreaker, but I agree 100% that it's not too clever. You can easily beat the crap out of an enemy without a comrade 15 metres away being able to hear it, nor do they comb an area very effectively. I've argued that in stealth games, enemies are primarily their patrol patterns, and that they collectively become a puzzle for the player to solve. Enemies in Dishonored aren't too smart either, because they're not designed to be. In Destiny 2, Elden Ring or any other action game, enemies aren't puzzles, they're targets, and thus their ability to flank, resist or think creatively becomes much more of a focal point. Whether you agree with me or not, I don't know, but that's my take - summa summarum; the enemies here are just as stupid as the average Nazi is in an Indiana Jones film. It's all about context - if Alien: Isolation didn't have a smart central AI then the tone and challenge of the game would fall apart, but if Nazis appear dumber so you as Indy can live out the dream of a single archaeologist repeatedly foiling the plans of a worldwide evil empire? So be it. It must be said that there are several harder difficulty levels I didn't try, so it may be that the game changes significantly as a result.

My main complaint is that the game doesn't quite recapture the magic that occurs in the first 10 hours in Vatican City. Among other things, you get to Egypt, which does offer the classic tombs and explorations of the remains and mysteries of a mildly rich civilisation, but the verticality is also lost, and with it some of the freedom the game otherwise has so much success with. But beyond that, this really is a success story, a story of a studio that could have gone a different route, but chose to use a different, more daring structural genre framework with unexpected sources of inspiration, giving us something that we really need in general. Respect to MachineGames for going all in, because this is a no-brainer for me to recommend.