‘Indiana Jones and the The Great Circle’: Video Game Review

At his core, Indiana Jones is a character of conflicting traits. On most days, he’s a professor teaching archaeology at a fictional university in Connecticut, where his students sit either bored or enraptured (depending on how much of a crush they have on him). At other times, he’s called to action as a respected adventurer to investigate missing persons and MacGuffins, which generally leads to a series of globe-spanning scraps with members Axis Powers (sometimes cultists and commies too).

It’s the dual nature of Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr. that has made him one of pop culture’s greatest heroes. He’s reluctant, but headstrong; he’s the smartest person in the room, but prone to mistakes. But to play to that dichotomy is a tightrope walk: lean too far one way and Indy becomes boring, either as too normal or a superhero. It’s a trap that both of his modern film sequels, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Dial of Destiny (2023) have fallen into to some degree.

With that, it makes sense that any attempt at making the definitive Indiana Jones came comes with the same challenges of balancing all the disparate parts that make the character and franchise interesting. To its credit, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does an excellent job of evoking each aspect in video game form; it’s the balance part where it falls short.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is, at times, a stellar video game. It’s also often an excellent Indiana Jones story. When those two pieces meet, it easily clears the bar for the best game in the franchise and one of the most ambitiously designed games of the year. But like with any archaeological jaunt for our hero, there’s plenty of pitfalls along the way.

What is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle?

Developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks, The Great Circle is that last big Xbox title of 2024, and with it comes an avalanche of expectations. The first legitimate (read: non-Lego) Indy game since 2009’s The Staff of Kings, it needs to satisfy both diehard fans of the franchise, many of whom have grown sour after the latter films in the series, but also players who have zero attachment to the character (shockingly, they do exist).

On a more macro level, the game is also the fourth major title published by Bethesda for Xbox after being acquired by Microsoft in 2021. The first three — Redfall, Hi-Fi Rush, and Starfield — all released in 2023 with mixed results. Hi-Fi Rush was critically lauded but failed to meet nebulous sales goals, while Starfield was a financial success, but couldn’t quite capture the zeitgeist like Bethesda’s legacy titles Skyrim (2011) or Fallout 4 (2015). Redfall managed to fall flat across the board.

So, for a certain type of Xbox fan boy or a Microsoft shareholder, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feels like a hail Mary. This game kind of needs to be good.

In that regard, they’re in luck. The Great Circle is a cleverly designed homage to a very particular kind of old school gaming that does justice to Indy’s name with a story that feels in line with the original trilogy of films. The Great Circle was developed by MachineGames, whose lauded takes on first-person Nazi fighting, Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017), make them a good fit for a fascist-filled Indy romp circa 1937.

With those modern revivals under their belt, and team members who previously worked on games like the supernatural comic book adaptation The Darkness (2007) and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004) — widely considered to be one of the best licensed games of all time — the pedigree of the creative team is unquestionable.

But their particular design philosophies don’t always gel with the Indiana Jones DNA, at least, not in the ways you’d expect.

Donning the fedora and whip

Like their previous games, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a first-person action-adventure game, although it occasionally swaps to a third-person experience for sequences like climbing and swinging. Unlike the Wolfenstein games, which often lean more heavily into the “shooter” elements of its series’ history, The Great Circle is more of an exploration game that lets players take on the role of Indy as he investigates a mystery surrounding an artifact stolen from him by one of the game’s villains, a hulking giant named Locus (played by Tony Todd, who died just a month prior to the game’s release).

The bulk of the game revolves around exploring historically rich areas like Vatican City or Egypt, with some chapters playing in movie-like linear fashion while others opening to a more free-play experience. Vatican City is the first of those hub areas and sets the tone for the kind of experience players will have throughout, much of which feels like standard open-world or roleplaying stuff like completing side quests, tracking down collectibles, and finding ways to upgrade Indy’s abilities.

Although there are guns to acquire, most of the action is paced more methodically, with players sneaking around to avoid enemies or distracting them with bottles and thrown objects. Indy can pick up pretty much anything from broomsticks to batons to protect himself and can engage in a relatively complex version of POV fisticuffs that allows players to block, parry, and punch with either hand.

Of course, there’s also Indy’s iconic bullwhip, which can be cracked to stun enemies and force them to drop weapons. There’s plenty of ways to fight, but in true Indiana Jones fashion, situations will often go south quickly, leaving the player — and the everyman protagonist — improvising a way out.

In all forms of combat, the developers have gone to great lengths to remain true to the spirit of Indy; he’s a (somewhat) normal person with a conscious, and although he’s more than happy to kick a Nazi into an airplane propellor, he isn’t a mindless instrument of death. It’s extremely easy to be caught and killed, and the game affords players plenty of options for making their way in and out of precarious situations in ways that feel true to famous scenes from the films.

But the game isn’t all about blockbuster action. In fact, the vast majority of the it is spent walking around each locale, looking for ways to progress or solving minor puzzles and other menial tasks. It’s during these points that the game’s other inspirations come into view. The emphasis on first-person POV and its gated sandbox exploration are reminiscent of games like Bethesda’s own Dishonored (2012) and IO Interactive’s recent Hitman trilogy, although both of those games leans a bit deeper into their respective systems here than The Great Circle, whose entire premise feels like a both a middle ground between multiple conflicting game designs, while also feeling like a bait-and-switch from what players might’ve expected the game to actually be.

And while everyone might have their own personal idea of what an Indiana Jones game should be, there’s some clear examples of what it could’ve been, with series like Tomb Raider and Uncharted effectively defining the “Indiana Jones-like” experience in gaming for over the last few decades. Both series are modern takes on the Indy formula, with different shades of good guy adventurers searching for relics and righteously kicking bad guy ass to prevent dangerous artifacts from falling into the wrong hands. At this point, there’s likely younger players who’d think of the Indiana Jones series as the real rip-off of the games it inspired.

And there’s some similarities, given their shared premises. Like Tomb Raider and Uncharted, The Great Circle is puzzle-heavy, requiring players to match up levers and cogs at frequent intervals to open doors or boxes. Some of the puzzles can be quite complex, while others can be solved easily by trying X-number of combinations in rapid succession — although both means are still true to the character.

There’s also climbing, swinging, and jumping in platforming sections, although The Great Circle falters heavily here compared to its peers. While the game has couple of tricks like sliding and leaping over objects that allow players to smoothly glide around open areas, any kind of verticality forces the perspective into the third person for stiffly animated and poorly designed traversal. Climbing walls or swinging over caverns requires locking on with the bullwhip, before being ripped out of Indy’s consciousness for a slow animated sequence that feels clunky to control and often results in simply plummeting to death — or worse — being forced to replay the same molasses-like sequences repeatedly.

This issue, among others, feels like a symptom of The Great Circle’s biggest problem: it’s trying to be too many things.

A tale of two Indys

The game’s biggest misstep comes right at the beginning, which opens with a short prologue that serves both as a tutorial level and a retelling of the boulder chase sequence from 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. As players creep through the jungle into the depths of a Peruvian temple, they’re taught the basic commands and inputs. At first, it’s a fun little surprise that provides a nostalgic rush when the realization hits of what’s to come.

To his credit, voice actor Troy Baker (of The Last of Us fame), does an incredible impression of Harrison Ford, and to some degree, it really feels like playing a section of the movie. But once players inch their way toward the golden idol, dumping sand from their pouch to make the ill-fated swap, there’s a sense of hollowness that takes over.

Once the cut scene begins, with a near 1:1 recreation of the sequence of the boulder dropping, things start to get ugly — literally. From the lighting to the stiff character animations to the eerie, soulless eyes that shine like a raccoon’s in the night, the virtual roto-scoping of one of cinema’s greatest scenes mostly just shows the lack of parity between video game cinematics and the celluloid films they emulate. With a jittery cut, players once again have control and must sprint from the cave, although all the tension is lost with the boulder behind them, completely out of sight.

From here, the game kicks into gear with its own narrative as Indy wakes up from the bad dream. And to be fair, it doesn’t often dip its quill back into the nostalgic ink often, opting instead to tell its own story. The game’s greatest strengths — mechanically, visually, and narratively — are when it’s doing its own thing, either being a strong, old school-style FPS adventure game or the long-lost Indiana Jones sequel people wanted, but rarely is it accomplishing both those feats at once.

Think about what everyone knows about Indiana Jones: He’s a scholar and a fighter, a thinker and charmer. But at any given time, he’s one or the other until the situation goes awry. To embody that, to let players become Indiana Jones, The Great Circle has them doing it all, from exhilarating chases and fights to the mundane legwork that must be what fills up all of Indy’s time while he’s occupying the little red dot that’s chartering around the globe. But that doesn’t make it fun.

To put it simply, there’s just too much to do in the game that drags down its momentum substantially. In each area like Vatican City, one mission begets another, and then another, as unlocking the map and gaining money to purchases tourist pamphlets opens even more to do, with dozens of relics, books, and junk to collect as side quests. Some of it can be fun, as players sleuth their way into restricted areas, or suss out how to solve riddles.

Each area feels highly detailed, and there’s some fun roleplaying as Indiana in a brainier way than just non-stop action. And unlike games like Arkham City (2011) or Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018), which boil down their heroes’ prowess to a few simple button presses, The Great Circle spends a lot of time allowing players to go beat-by-beat through small mysteries at their own pace.

The game’s mechanics work best when the story is on rails for its more scripted main sequences, all of which feel like they belong to a true Indy feature. But the benefit of the movies is their brevity. In the span of two hours, audiences got the set-up, all the twists and turns, and climactic excitement. The swift pacing of the Indiana Jones films is essential to their brilliance; they keep the energy high whether Indy is cracking his whip at Nazis or skimming a book for an ancient clue. In The Great Circle, you can spend 10 or more hours scouring the rooftops while taking photos of cats. It just doesn’t match up.

By making Indiana Jones into a video game, there obviously needs to be changes to fit the medium. When that works, like in the story missions that push things along while feeling like an interactive take on the franchise, it’s great. But when things slow down for padded open-area exploration and gumshoe investigations, it begins to feel like a waste of time.

These sections aren’t bad — in fact, they can be fun if checklist completionism is your bag — but they feel like a relic of late Nineties, early-2000s design from an era where a donning a famous franchise’s license was more about Trojan horsing in high-concept design than being true to the source material’s tone.

If anything, it’s admirable that the developers were so gutsy, rather than trying to chase the series’ own tale by competing with its modern gaming counterparts.

In the end, The Great Circle does often feel like Indiana Jones but takes too many breaks to feel like other things, too. Some might enjoy sifting through the nooks and crannies for every discovery, others might want to race through to experience the game without all the bloat. Either way, it’s true to the promise of letting players be Indiana Jones, even if that means doing the boring parts too.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is now available for Xbox Series X|S and PC. It will be released for PlayStation 5 in spring of 2025.