A fun but flawed Indy romp
Indiana Jones is an IP that’s been through quite the turbulent time of it. After two excellent movies, Last Crusade slipped in quality a bit before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out 19 years later and made us all realize we’d judged Last Crusade a little too harshly.
With the franchise still kicking around in the shadows, between a Lego game, some point and click adventures and even action games released, there’s undoubtedly still life left in this aging adventurer. And that’sbefore even mentioning the Tomb Raider and Uncharted titles, which very clearly are inspired by Indiana Jones.
Fast forward to 2023 and Dial of Destiny continued the trend of releasing old IPs and trying to pushing aside the titular character in favour of a more progressive female hero. And it went down as well as you may expect. With apathy at an all-time high for various franchises, going into the end of 2024, Bethesda have just dropped a new Indiana Jones game.
Developed by MachineGames, Great Circle is a fun action adventure title, with a decent story, some nice exploration and, more importantly, Indiana Jones the focal point and very much in the driver’s seat. However, this is certainly not without its problems, and between janky combat, truly woeful AI and some hit or miss level design, Great Circle is a fun but flawed adventure that feels very reminiscent of those old movie videogame tie-ins we used to get back in the old days.
With gorgeously rendered cutscenes, the prologue wastes little time as you play out the Temple scene from Raiders of the Last Ark. It’s a neat way of introducing the game’s different mechanics, including traversal, exploration and puzzles (more on them later).
From here, the game then jumps into an original narrative, nestled between the events in Raiders of the Lost Ark (which takes place in 1936) and Last Crusade (which takes place in 1938). In keeping with the tone and feel of the game, the antagonists here are the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan.
After leaving his fiancee Marion Ravenwood, Indiana Jones is still teaching at Marshall College but he finds himself thrown right into the mix of a new mystery thanks to a monstrous giant called Locus stealing a precious artifact in the middle of the night. As a result of this, Jones heads off to the Vatican, intent on finding out what’s going on.
It doesn’t take long for Indy to realize there’s a larger conspiracy at work here, involving something called the Great Circle and artifacts across the world being taken and used for an unknown purpose.
As a result, it’s up to Jones and his new companion, reporter Ginetta “Gina” Lombardi (whom Jones meets in the Vatican) to try and get to the bottom of this before it’s too late. Of course, that’s easier said than done when the monstrous antagonist Voss is determined to gather all the pieces of the Great Circle and help the Axis powers take over the world.
To give much more away about the story would be a disservice to this one but suffice to say, the plot structure is in keeping with the Indiana Jones style, jetting off to different locations across the globe, and helping give this one some variety with both level design and overall content.
The game plays out in first-person perspective, except for certain gameplay elements like climbing up walls and traversing tight gaps, with areas that are semi-open and somewhat of a sandbox in the way you carry out your missions.
This certainly isn’t a stealth landscape like Dishonored or Metal Gear Solid, although the game does try (miserably I may add) to implement stealth in to try and mix things up.
Each area takes anywhere from 2-3 hours to complete, although there are a couple of missions midway through the game that feel like intermission inclusions; a way of breaking up the open world sections with more linear story-driven content which actually works pretty well.
The missions are quite varied, although they usually involve taking photographs of artifacts, exploring tombs, solving puzzles and engaging in combat. It’s all very Indiana Jones-esque and the game is all the stronger for it.
Exploration is simple enough, although the game has this really annoying way of never fully explaining which parts of rooftops and areas you can climb and which you can’t.
There’s obviously a fine line between splashing yellow paint everywhere and keeping things immersive, and Great Circle’s level design (especially the way open world exploration is implemented) lends itself to an annoying way of only giving the illusion of a sandbox to play with.
As an example, early on you get to explore Vatican City. You can climb up on some rooftops, but only at certain areas, while your bullwhip can attach to some sections of the roof but not all. You can shimmy across drainpipes but only some of them, while there are some invisible walls that actually prevent you from getting too close to the edge of the map.
When you’re trying to reach an area high up, especially after introducing these different mechanics that quite specifically show you climbing up onto rooftops or up scaffolding, to then prevent players from doing this around the open world sections does feel a bit of an archaic design choice.
This also extends out to the environmental puzzles as well. In one area, you’ll learn that fire can light dark areas and also be used to destroy wooden doors to let you progress further into tombs. Good stuff.
Unfortunately, the next area sees you in the freezing Himalayas but yet, you can’t use fire to put out ice blocking doorways or to unfreeze items stuck in different sections. These sort of inconsistencies to mechanics crop up numerous times throughout the story, and it does become more noticeable later on in the game.
However, these open-world sections do allow you to deviate slightly from the main story, breaking up side-content into Discoveries, Mysteries and larger Field World assignments. Each of these grant extra resources and experience points. Experience Points come in the form of Adventure Points or money.
Adventure Points are used to unlock different abilities and serve as the game’s equivalent of “levelling up”. These not only can be gained through Field Work though, as snapping photos, finding collectibles and progressing along the main mission path all grant you extra Adventure Points.
These points can then be exchanged for unlocking ability books, which can either be bought for money (or medicine) at shop booths or are dotted around the environment, encouraging you to search each section thoroughly.
It works pretty well for the most part, and some of the abilities are genuinely helpful throughout your adventure. Extra HP or stamina are obvious but additional moves like allowing you to continue after being killed by grabbing your Lucky Hat can make a massive difference during your play-time.
The Field Work doesn’t really add much in the form of story depth, and usually involves simple puzzle work or fetch quests at different areas across the chose Open World map section. There’s nothing here that really stands out as exceptional, but it does help to give some extra context around supporting characters and gives a break from more intense main missions.
It’s worth noting though that the actual puzzles Indy encounters throughout this adventure are really well done. Personally, I could have done without so many hints from Gina, especially early on in the Vatican where she basically spells out how to solve each puzzle before you get a chance to properly investigate, but late on this does improve.
The puzzles range from moving pipes to sort the flow of water into drainpipes across to number puzzles that require you to solve different riddles. There’s nothing here that’s too difficult, although there is one very annoying puzzle late on involving a number code in an office that wasn’t initially obvious.
To try and combat too much head-scratching and waiting around in one area, the game allows you to take multiple photos with your camera if you’ve turned on the setting for Enabling Hints in the Options.
This allows you to get progressively more obvious clues each time you snap photos until you’re pretty much given the solution to a puzzle. It’s a small inclusion but certainly a welcome one here.
For the most part though, exploration is pretty satisfying, even with the gripes to moving around. Although it’s worth noting that Indy’s agility (or lack thereof) makes climbing and using the bullwhip way more cumbersome than it should be, especially if you’ve become accustomed to the agility of characters like Lara Croft or Nathan Drake.
The biggest problem you’ll have really is working out exactly where you need to go next within the environment. It’s not always obvious where you need to go (unless you just turn on waypoints and even then it can be confusing).
For example, one short section in Shanghai sees you navigating across rooftops to reach a plane. However, if you approach the plane from the wrong angle, or hop over to the other side of the rooftop without triggering your Bullwhip at a very specific point, you’ll immediately end up dying and will need to restart that section.
Similarly, an on-rails section forces you into progressing across tall railings using your Bullwhip, although a short drop down onto the hull of the ship looks possible and logically the right way to go. However, if you try this, you’ll also have to restart the section. As a result, sometimes you’ll find yourself scanning the environment for way longer than you should just to work out how to navigate what should be a simple platforming section.
This brings us along nicely to the worst part of the game – combat. Fighting comes in different formats here but mostly centers on melee strikes or gunfights. Enemies are pretty much bullet sponges, even on the lower difficulty levels, and mostly fall into the realm of charging at you or blowing a whistle and bringing in reinforcements.
The pathfinding is pretty atrocious and the line of sight for enemies is really bad. In fact, you need to be quite close to enemies for them to spot you and even then, there’s a time delay for when an enemy does make a move. Enemies don’t immediately spot you but instead, have a yellow timer with a question mark above their heads. When that turns to a red exclamation point, they’ve spotted you and will attack.
This makes stealth unnecessarily the easier option than outright fighting but even when you do initiate combat, the only issue will be your stamina. Punching and blocking both use stamina and when Indy gets tired, he can’t raise his fists to block blows. Generally enemies will take about 8 punches or so to go down (and that’s on the medium difficulty level), which results in much slower and methodical fighting than blasting through numerous goons.
Combat is generally quite methodical throughout your adventure, which should make group encounters quite difficult to deal with. Except it doesn’t. In fact, enemies won’t attack together unless they have rifles and guns.
If enemies have melee weapons, they’ll generally try and throw them at you if you’re already engaging in a fight with an enemy but most of the time AI will just stand around and wait for you to kill an enemy before moving in. If you’ve played the earlier Assassins Creed games, this plays very similarly to the way combat works there.
You can mix some of this up though by using your Bullwhip to lash enemies and make them drop weapons, but it does absolutely nothing to help the AI, which has a serious issue with vertical differences. There were times where I had a stack of enemies all on top of a ledge looking at me and unsure how to proceed other than throwing random items at me that I was easily able to dodge.
Another time, I found myself inside a tomb with an enemy literally one floor above me and unsure how to attack as he’d already thrown his melee weapon and just stood there, awkwardly waiting for me to reach the same level. I never did in the end and easily got through to the other side without much issue.
The game does include the ability to move bodies around the environment to hide from enemies, although given how poor the AI is, if you’ve got some patience, they’ll quickly lose interest and move on before raising too many concerns.
The only annoying aspect to combat really comes from attack dogs. The game has this annoying mechanic where you can’t harm these at all but you can fire your gun nearby or crack your whip to scare the mutt off. However, in doing so, this also attracts the attention of nearby enemies. It feels a bit unfair that you can’t at least incapacitate these dogs silently, rendering stealth with dogs around useless, as they’re nerfed to do a lot of damage if they get hold of you.
Speaking of nerfing, gunfights are immediately immersion-breaking thanks to the high HP of enemies. It’ll take a good 5 headshots from machine gun fire to take down goons, while revolvers take around 7 or 8 shots.
Melee hits are more powerful with stealth strikes, needing only 1 or 2 hits, regardless of weapon, while full-on melee strikes inside combat will take about 3 or 4, and usually involve those breaking in the process. When hitting someone with a flyswatter does more damage than a machine gun bullet to the face, you know something needs tweaking.
This is something that’s only compounded further on the higher difficulty levels, with extra HP for enemies and more damaging blows, but absolutely nothing here that makes enemies act smarter.
Generally though, the story and characters are good enough to get through the more annoying parts of the gameplay. The plot evolves nicely and there are some set-pieces and story twists that are certainly welcome. It’s just a shame then that the game has so many core components that feel rough around the edges that hold this back from being a more sure-fire hit.
This is one of those games that the longer you play, the more noticeable the issues become, and in an adventure that’ll take anywhere from 10-2o hours to complete, that’s not a great sign for replayability. The Achievements do offer a nice burst of different challenges, ranging from eating certain items or killing enemies in certain ways, and there’s nothing here that’s too challenging, save for collecting all the notes and letters across the levels.
With all that being said, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fun ride and there’s enough here to recommend if you’re craving a proper Indy adventure. It’s certainly not perfect though but it is a nice way of paying homage to those golden days of tomb raiding
Feel Free To Check Out More Of Our Game Reviews Here!
-
Verdict - 7/10
7/10