Indiana Jones & the Great Circle

There’s a moment in Indiana Jones & the Great Circle when I suddenly realised that exploring tombs filled with mummified remains on your own with only a lighter for company must be a pretty terrifying thing to do.

I was already feeling uneasy as I inched my way through darkened corridors, brushing cobwebs away, and hearing a slightly unnerving unintelligible voice on the strange wind that seemed to rush through.

I carried on regardless, eager to see what lay at the end.

I eventually found myself in a wide open, pitch black cavern, the only source of light created by three pressure plates. In the centre of the cavern was a slightly unnerving stone statue. Muttering some ancient Egyptian text, the room suddenly went dark and igniting the lighter to illuminate my surroundings I came face to face with a blind giant of a man, forcing me to skulk around in near darkness to defeat him. I just about had to change my underwear and it bought home to me just how freaky exploring ancient tones and undiscovered remains must be.

I won’t talk about it any further for fear of spoiling things, but it’s a interesting quest in an action adventure game set in 1937 that sees Indiana Jones racing to beat the Nazis who are seeking to use the power connected by the Great Circle, which refers to mysterious sites around the world that form a perfect circle around the globe.

I have always been a fan of Machine Game’s story-driven games – Wolfenstein The New Order, The Old Blood and The New Colossus and are some of my favourite FPS in recent times and they have also form with games that take the fight to the Nazis – and they have recreated what I imagine it would feel to be Indiana Jones and smack bang in the middle of Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking original Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark – perfectly.

The game even opens with a recreation of the opening sequence of Raiders where archaeologist Dr Henry “Indiana” Jones searches through the Amazonian jungle for a famed idol with two double-crossing guides. It almost plays out the sequence beat for beat, even revealing Indiana’s face for the first time when he uses his famous bullwhip against one of the guides – it and sets the tone nicely for what is a rollicking adventure, exploring the globe.

The Great Circle is a first person game but switches to third person for climbing, something I found quite jarring the first time it happened. I wasn’t quite sure if I liked it or not, questioning why they couldn’t have just made the game third person completely. I soon realised that third person view would have lost some of the magic in making you feel like you were Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones is synonymous with rollicking adventures, just like this

Fans of the movies will know that Indy loves to punch himself a few Nazis and it’s no different here. Indy can punch, block and push enemies, as well as use items he picks up as melee weapons. Weapons aren’t indestructible, mind you, and will break generally after a few hits but you can find repair kits that will restore weapons to their former glory. Indy also isn’t a superhero: He gets tired so you have to watch your stamina and timing as get your parries wrong and Indiana will quickly go down like a sack of potatoes.

It’s not all punching and climbing: The Great Circle has environmental puzzles that are clever enough to make you think but not hard enough to make you throw your controller in frustration, and early in the game you get a camera that is not only useful to take pictures of your discoveries that earns you adventure points that can be used to upgrade skills but can also provide value hints when a puzzle has you scratching your noggin for a little too long.

You can also upgrade your skills such as stamina or fighting by collecting travel books, which is a novel way to increase abilities, and you can collect disguises that will make your infiltration of things like enemy compounds or The Vatican that much easier as you tend to blend into your surroundings, although you can still get spotted by foes if you hang around somewhere you’re not supposed to be for too long.

Special mention must be made of the voice work in the game, especially Troy Baker, who for the most part is unrecognisable in his voice work of a young Harrison Ford. Close your eyes sometimes you’d actually think it was Ford it’s that impressive. Visually, too, The Great Circle is a highly detailed world, whether it be Vatican City in Rome, the outskirts of a dig site in Egypt, or the rocky outcrops of an underground cavern, and Machine Games have done a remarkable job of capturing the likeness of Indiana Jones.

While some of the other characters are a little wooden, overall it’s a fine looking game that looks great on my original PlayStation 5 with an almost rock solid frame rate.

It’s not all perfect, though.

The biggest being the companion AI of sidekick Gina, an investigative journalist who joins Indy and is looking for her sister who went missing while searching for artifacts that help find the Great Circle, which is a little questionable at times. During one mission in the snowy Himalayan mountains Gina once ran right in front of then through a patrolling enemy, who didn’t notice her, and other times she would stand between me and an enemy, negating my ability to fire a weapon at foes. I died a few times in that short sequence just because of the AI.

Another time Indiana pulled Gina up a wall using an invisible whip. Small things, granted, that can no doubt be patched easily.

Overall, as someone who loved the first three Indiana Jones movies (Raiders, Temple of Doom, Holy Grail), Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is probably the closest video game yet that lets me feel (sort of) what it would be like to be iconic swashbuckling adventurer searching for lost treasures, something gamers have been waiting years for.

Four whips out of five.