Game review: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PC)
Indiana Jones is back! Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a brand-new adventure set between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle starts with an interactive retelling of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, allowing players to experience the original introduction to the legendary explorer first-hand. While fun at face value, that the developers felt the need to ride on the coattails of one of the greatest movie openings ever filmed set off alarm bells for me.
Of course, the game sets out to capitalise on nostalgia, perhaps relying on it a little too much at times. In any case, it had me hook, line and sink. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a defining moment of my childhood, after Star Wars.
Unlike Indiana Jones movies, which have you gripping your seat from the start, the game takes a while to get going. After retreading the Raiders intro, we join Indy as he is awakened from a slumber by an intruder in Marshall College. The theft of a mummified cat by an assailant carrying a Vatican seal is the catalyst for an adventure that will, literally, take Indy around the world.
A curious choice has been made to make this a first-person game. This does serve to differentiate the game from the likes of Uncharted and Tomb Raider, and it is more in keeping with Wolfenstein developer, Machine Games, usual fayre. The Bethesda marketing line is that this places players right in the shoes of the famous archaeologist rather than just controlling him. And I can see that if it wasn't for the camera zooming out whilst climbing and swinging or during one of the many cut scenes. Whilst there are good arguments for first or third-person views, I think that first-person is great for a shooter, but anything else is probably better suited to the third-person.
There's a lot of picking up stuff and looking at it in the game that feels a bit clumsy at first with the controller, but you get used to it. You'll find yourself inserting keys in mysterious doors and rotating objects to solve puzzles in mysterious ruins. The puzzles are just right, though some may say that they are too easy. But this is an adventure game in which puzzles are only a part.
When Indy isn't solving puzzles, he does tend to be fighting Nazis, mainly in punch-ups, but occasionally using his revolver. The melee combat is fun, though not particularly taxing. Similarly, the shooting does the job, but no more.
The game's pacing is a bit of a roller-coaster, as well. At times I found myself going through the motions only to suddenly be thrust into a breathtaking situation straight out of the movies.
The game is based around a series of open-world areas, much of which is out of bounds to the likes of Indiana Jones. With the game being a race against the Germans to uncover the secrets of the Great Circle, many of the areas are patrolled by Nazis.
Just as in the movies, Indy makes good use of disguises to traverse the huge mission areas. Officers can see through the disguises, so you must be careful. Indy also doesn't have access to his trusty revolver when out of his fatigues.
The areas contain clues that tend to lead to subterranean vaults with fiendish traps and puzzles. Along the way, Indy will be tasked with optional side quests that earn credits that can be spent unlocking abilities. These abilities are obtained by finding books, allowing Indy to use bandages better, improve brawling skills, etc. There's even a second chance if defeated with the "lucky hat" skill, whereby finding his hat when he has fallen allows Indy to dust himself off for another round of fisticuffs.
A lot of time has been spent getting the digital Indy looking like the 1980s Harrison Ford, at the expense of some of the other finer details. It gets my goat up when a triple-A game has objects passing through one another (Indy's hand carrying a touch will go through bars). At times, the visuals can be just a bit rough around the edges. Trying to force an adventure game into a first-person perspective is not an easy task. But this is a big-budget tent-pole game, and I expect better.
To its credit, whilst assembling this rather tardy review, the day one patch was released. This fixed an array of bugs on both Xbox and PC versions. PC gamers with a suitably impressive Nvidia GPU were also given access to ray-tracing options. With the RTX 4090 in the review rig, I was able to pretty much max out the visuals with proper path-traced ray tracing. Nvidia's DLSS 3 smoothed out the visuals, making the game's 4K graphics a huge step up from the passable look of the game during the pre-release early access.
I feel obliged to give a shout out to voice and motion capture actor extraordinaire, Troy Baker (The Last of Us), for perfectly portraying Indiana Jones circa 1937. The late Tony Todd (Candyman), sadly in his last role, brings his powerful stature to the game as the giant Locus.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn't excel in any one aspect of the game. For that reason, it is best viewed as a whole. It feels authentically an Indiana Jones adventure, like a missing movie. To be fair, given the scale of the game, it's more like a missing Indiana Jones matinee serial, each location a chapter in a tale larger than any one movie. The elements are all here: the cracking yarn, the action and the adventure.
Pulling in the player and making all this an interactive experience is no mean feat. You ARE Indiana Jones. You are not the one-man army that is Wolfenstein's B.J. Blazkowicz, you are a college professor moonlighting as an adventurer, all the while paraphrasing Indy, making it up as you go along. Add in the obligatory Nazi fighting, the mysterious and exotic locations, the ancient traps and puzzles, and it all comes together surprisingly well.
The subject matter and nostalgic callbacks, as well as John William's fantastic musical motifs, arguably make this a better game than it deserves to be. But, at the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a good game and one that does the legendary movie franchise proud.
Verdict: 8/10
