Well, I had to do it, I had to review the new Indiana Jones game because I wrote a massive Indy game retrospective back in 2021. Developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda have brought the man with the hat out of gaming retirement (can you believe the last proper Indy game was in 2009?) for a new adventure with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

“Uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries in a first-person, single-player adventure. The year is 1937, sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power connected to the Great Circle, and only one person can stop them – Indiana Jones.”

I always aim to be honest with whatever I write on this blog – and honestly, my expectations for this game changed a fair bit. When it was announced, I was excited. Then I learned that it was being developed by MachineGames. As much as I loved Wolfenstein: The New Order, Wolfenstein: Youngblood was a bit shit. Then you have Bethesda publishing it too – whose games have been very hit & miss recently, and they are known as “Bugthesda” by gamers too. So I went into this with some trepidation. I wasn’t expecting Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to be a great game, but I also knew that it was coming from a studio with some decent pedigree. I’m not doing main story spoilers here, but there will be some very light spoilers as I vaguely outline plot elements.

So yeah, as with other Indy stories, the title kind of gives away what the famed archaeologist is searching for, the Great Circle… but what is it? Vaguely, the Great Circle is a real thing, but now with the added Indy-like mythology of a collection of powerful stones from God that the Nazi’s want to use to help them win the war. Taking place in 1937, after Temple of Doom (it was a prequel) and Raiders, but before Last Crusade, the plot throws in elements of Raiders with the “power of God” stuff, but it also mixes in some of the more super-super natural elements from the franchise, such as Temple of Doom with the Sankara Stones, and I’d even suggest that there’s a smidgen of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny here too. It’s a pretty decent story, and it does (mostly) feel very Indiana Jones… but there are a handful of times when the plot just seems to wander around aimlessly. But I guess this stems from the difference between a two-hour film and a many more hours game.

For my playthrough, I just stuck to the main story for the most part and only slightly dabbled in some of the side quests. According to my save file, I got to the end credits in a little over 13 hours playing on normal difficulty. I’m not sure if that playtime includes cut scenes or not, of which there are loads (over three hours). There are a ton of things to do outside of that story. There are secrets to find, hidden artefacts to discover, mysteries to solve (find clues, and more. You have a journal where Indy keeps his notes and any clues he has found, which you will need to cross-reference if you are going to solve some of those tricky puzzles. If you are going for 100%, you’re going to have a much longer playtime than the 13 hours that I had, and you do get a lot of game here with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Then there are different difficulty settings. You get a basic difficulty setting (easy to very hard) that changes how many enemies you face, how fast they react, how hard they hit and all that guff – this covers the action elements of the game. However, there is a secondary difficulty setting for the adventure elements. You can choose to have help with the puzzles and navigation, or you can turn it all off and have the game be much more immersive. Great Circle does a fantastic job of catering to everyone. You can set everything on easy and just enjoy the plot at your own leisure, you can up the difficulty and give yourself a tougher challenge, or you can play the game on the very hard setting, turn off all the adventure help and feel much more like Indiana Jones. Just as an aside, even though I have finished the game on normal and stuck to the main plot, I have started a second playthrough on very hard, with no adventure help and I’m going for 100% too. I don’t usually replay games immediately after finishing them, but I have with this one. For me, this is a mark of a great game.

I’ve not even got into the gameplay yet and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is already a very generous game. There is a ton of content here and the multitude of difficulty options allows you to tailor the game to suit your own play style. But then there’s also a good helping of accessibility options too. I do like to praise a game that heaps on the accessibility options as it makes the game… well, more accessible to others.

Right, the gameplay. As the two different difficulty settings suggest, there are two main elements of the gameplay. First, the action. With the game being first-person (though it does seamlessly switch the third-person for climbing, whip swinging, etc) I have to admit to not being won over by the action when I first saw the game. Having played it, I can happily say that the action works brilliantly. There are guns in the game and aside from Indy’s trusty six-shooter, you can pick up a variety of other guns. Shotguns, machine guns, rifles and more. The gunplay feels very solid, this is a title from MachineGames who handled to awesome Wolfenstein reboot, so you know the FPS elements are going to be good – and they are. But the guns are more of a secondary feature to the main hand-to-hand combat.

This was where I was a bit worried about the action, first-person hand-to-hand combat can be very hit-or-miss. Thankfully, Great Circle’s fisticuffs are brilliant – it is both basic and involving. You just use the trigger buttons to throw a left or right punch. You soon get into a rhythm of putting combos together. A quick right, left, right and finishing uppercut becomes the norm. I would’ve liked to have seen a bit more variety in the moves though, maybe move the stick in a direction to throw different punches, as an example. But there is some variety to the hand-to-hand combat. Hold down either trigger button to build up a haymaker, there’s a dodge and block button. You can parry and counter-attack. Oh, and yes, you can use the whip too. If an enemy is coming at you with a weapon in hand, just give him a whip-crack and knock the weapon away. You can hold down the whip attack to pull an enemy closer to you and deal out a nice combo punch to the face.

The melee combat is a real highlight and it works far better than I thought it would. There’s also a wide selection of melee weapons at your disposal. Pretty much anything reasonable can be picked and used as a weapon. Iron bars, brooms, fly swatters… I even knocked out a Nazi with a toilet brush. If you can pick it up, you can use it as a weapon. It’s not all about going in fists (and whip… and toilet brush) swinging though. There is a heavy reliance on stealth. In fact, it is often better to take your time and survey the area, to then sneak in and take enemies out silently. You’ll need to move any unconscious bodies so that they don’t get found and blow your cover.

Just looking at the trailer, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle comes across as an all-out, action-packed title… but it really isn’t. I guess it all depends on how you like to play. Yeah, you can go in fists swinging and guns blazing if you so wish – but that’s a surefire way to have a ton of enemies come down on you. Now that I am doing a playthrough on very hard, I have to be much more methodical in how I approach the different areas and how I handle certain situations. As an example, you can choose to go into a building through the front door – but the chances are that you will be spotted pretty quickly. So it may be best to have a look around and find an alternate route and strategy. Maybe there’s an open window you can climb through or another way in via the roof, etc. Great Circle is a slower-paced game than the trailer makes it out to be, as it is not all about action and combat. This is where the adventure angle of the game comes into play.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is not what you would call an open-world title, but it is a sandbox-type game. There’s a mix of hubs that offer various things to do and more linear sections. Avoiding major spoilers, but one of the first locations that you go to is Rome and it is a semi-open place where you are free to explore and look around. There is the main story mission to do – which is linear, but you can also find a multitude of other things to do while in Rome. Aside from the side-quests and such, you can just wander around and enjoy the sights. You can explore the Castel Sant’Angelo (which I have done in real life), you can go into the Sistine Chapel and (digitally) admire Michelangelo’s frescoes, explore the Vatican and more. This is just one of several locations in the game too. It is very easy to get distracted while playing and you can escape the action by just exploring and seeing what you can find, a bit like Indiana Jones really.

Outside of the exploring, there are puzzles to solve. These come in a variety of flavours too. There are puzzles that you can find while just taking a casual look around the maps, and then there are puzzles that are linked to the main plot. Again, depending on your chosen difficulty settings, these puzzles can be as easy or as hard as you want them to be. You can get generous hints, or you can have no hints. Pretty much all of the puzzles rely on some lateral thinking and playing on normal setting, I never got stuck for more than a few minutes. Throw in some devilish and fiendish traps too, and you have a real Indiana Jones atmosphere running all through the game. Do you know how Rocksteady did for Batman with the Arkham games? This is what MachineGames have managed to do for Indy with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. You do feel like Indy and playing in first-person really adds to that immersion. In third-person, you play as Indy, in first-person – you are Indy.

There is an upgrade system, which I have to admit to not being on board with – at first. It just didn’t sit right with me that Indiana Jones needs upgrades. He goes out on his adventures in tip-top form from the off and the idea of Indy getting upgraded felt off. But, the upgrade system works well because it’s not like Indy starts learning new skills, he just fine-tunes the skills he already has. You can upgrade basic stuff like your stamina, health, etc – but there are also upgrades to improve what Indy can do right from the off. As a quick example, just going back to fighting and how you can use the whip to pull people towards you, you can only do this with smaller/weaker enemies at first, but you can upgrade that skill for the bigger enemies. You have to work to get those upgrades too. You earn adventure points whenever you complete a task, be it a main quest or a side-quest. However, you also need to find the skill books needed to buy those upgrades. So the game gets you working to earn the upgrades and the mechanic is implemented very well.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fantastic title and melds together all the elements that make the films and characters fan favourites. You’ve got ‘yer action, you’ve got ‘yer adventuring, you’ve got ‘yer puzzle solving. You even get the humour of the films too. The sound effects are spot on as well, that whip-crack is iconic and then there’s the very Indy crunch/slap sound when you punch someone. If you’ve ever watched one of the Indy films, then you know exactly which sound effect I mean. The attention to detail is amazing and it is very clear that the devs are fans of the franchise and wanted it to be as faithful as possible.

But, getting back to my honesty. For me, the last quarter of this game was rather tiresome. The story kind of peters out and I felt the finale was a bit of an anti-climax. To go from the grandiose of exploring Rome, the Vatican, etc early on – to then (avoiding spoilers) having the last part of the game take place in a location that is tiny and over in 15 minutes just felt a bit of a downer. I think the final needed a bit more of a build-up to it. The final boss is dealt with via a classic fistfight and that’s fine as it fits with the Indiana Jones universe… but I think it just needed a bit more excitement before it. A Last Crusade-style series of trials you need to pass – maybe an exciting vehicle chase or something.

Then, I did hit several bugs (Bugthesda, eh?) even after the, now standard in gaming, day one patch. Most of them were graphical glitches. There are zip-wires and Indy will use his whip or a weapon he is holding to slide down them, but more than once I had Indy using the zip-wires and the graphics of the whip/weapon were not there – so Indy had this gap between his hands. I knocked out a Nazi that got stuck in a wall. I had Indy swing over a gap, but his whip wasn’t there. For one bug, I had to solve a puzzle and I could see how it was meant to be done, but I couldn’t physically do it. I had an AI-controlled companion, but they were in a different room. The puzzle was easy, but I knew that I needed help and I spent about 40 minutes trying a variety of things. That was when I realised that my AI-controlled companion was supposed to be in the same room as me, but they refused to move and stayed in the other room. I had to reload a previous save (not a checkpoint, that didn’t work), which took me back half an hour or so, and play back to the point where the puzzle was. This time, my AI-controlled companion actually did follow me into the room to help. I guess that more patches are needed. Welcome to modern gaming. In fact, this AI companion bug happened three times at different points. Oh, the AI of the enemies is pretty terrible too.

Bugs and glitches aside, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is still a fantastic title. The opening/tutorial is an almost perfect recreation of the opening from Raiders of the Lost Ark where you get to grips with the basic controls and mechanics. The game never really lets up and even though I feel the main story was a few hours too long and ends with a bit of an anti-climax, it’s really only a minor niggle and just personal opinion. The positives greatly outweigh the negatives here. The gameplay is solid, there’s a wonderful melding of action with exploration and puzzle-solving. There are nods and references to both Temple of Doom and Raiders (the other films have not happened in the timeline yet), without feeling like forced fan service. PlayStation owners and Indiana Jones fans have a lot to look forward to, they’ll probably work out all the glitches by next spring too…. maybe.

This is a game that, due to the plethora of options, you can tailor it to suit your own specific play style. But for a true Indiana Jones experience, you really do need to play on very hard and without any puzzle help. Is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle the best Indy game ever? Not for me, my heart still belongs to the adventure game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Not only the best Indy game, but the best adventure game too.- but this is the best Indy game since then and most definitely worth a play. A game + mode would be nice…