The last Indiana Jones video game without the word Lego in the title came out in 2009. Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings for Wii, Nintendo DS, and PS2 made about as little of a splash as The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. Since then the adventurer-come-archaeologist brought his iconic whip and hat back to the big screen—never to quite the rousing success needed to reignite fans’ interest in the character. Indeed, it has been a long time since we’ve had excellent, ass-kicking Indiana Jones fare in our lives. Whatever your favorite episode of the Young Indiana Jones adventures was, that was probably the last time the character made you feel joy. Or, ya know, it was 1989’s Last Crusade.
With this weight on its shoulders, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle steps into the ring and delivers a knockout punch. With standout performances and a story that stands head and shoulders above those of either of the past two movies, The Great Circle hits all the right marks without feeling like cloying fan service. Oh, and it’s also a great video game. The title is a forgiving stealth-action sandbox that takes influences from classics like Thief, Dishonored, and The Chronicles of Riddick. It occasionally stumbles in its breadth, but by staying true to not just the iconography of Indiana Jones but his very soul, The Great Circle is one of the strongest adaptations of a Hollywood IP in years.
The Great Circle is a single-player narrative action-adventure that puts you in the shoes of Indiana Jones. Literally. With the exception of actions like climbing, swinging, and, of course, cutscenes, the game commits to a first-person point of view. In a world where this could have easily been another Uncharted clone, The Great Circle succeeds by having a singular perspective. And punching out a shitload of fascists.
It’s fitting that after a decade of over-the-top Nazi punching in the Wolfenstein series, Swedish studio MachineGames finds itself with America’s other favourite fascist-smacker, Dr. Indiana Jones. The Great Circle sports roughly half the same team that worked on Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in 2017. Now that’s a game that didn’t pull its punches, with a story that stacked one outrageous thing atop another like a bloody, hilarious layer cake. The Great Circle isn’t quite as extreme as The New Colossus, but the storytelling chops are still there.
Taking place between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, The Great Circle opens with the theft of an ancient relic from Indy’s collegiate archive—which ropes him into a search that takes him across the globe. Eventually he finds himself in pursuit of the lost pieces of the ancient and titular “great circle,” matching wits with cunning Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss. After leaving Marshall College, Indy heads to the Vatican and meets Gina Lombardi, who has her own share of problems with Voss. She is perhaps the strongest love interest in the series since Marion, and she winds up saving Indy’s ass as much as he rescues her.
Vatican City is the first of three open, Dishonored-style levels in The Great Circle. It is packed densely with secret artefacts to find and tombs to uncover. In these small yet dense open spaces, you can complete Adventures (the main story), Field Work (sometimes optional but often required narrative side content), or Mysteries and Discoveries. The last two are scattered throughout the areas, often leading you to optional puzzles. In just under 20 hours, I completed the story and all of the Field Work, but there was so much more to do. It’s easy to see myself putting another dozen hours into the side content.
The Great Circle’s puzzles are often pretty intuitive, but the game even has an easier difficulty option for puzzles, if that kind of reasoning is not in your wheelhouse. It’s a nice touch, considering how exploration heavy the game is. Early on in the Vatican, Indy gets a camera. Photography is not a challenge in The Great Circle, but it quickly becomes a primary way of interacting with the world. It’s mechanically simple but is another touch that lets you put on Indy’s archaeologist hat. This title isn’t all about punching bad guys. Photography is the easiest way to gain adventure points, which you can spend on upgrades (once you find the corresponding Adventure Book). Taking photos of specific puzzle elements will unlock hints, which proves another helpful system for the puzzle uncoordinated.
Don’t worry, though: The game has its fair share of giving the business to Nazis and Italian fascists both. It is World War II, after all, and you’re Indiana goddamn Jones. Coming in hot with Indy’s revolver is rarely the right move. Most of the combat arenas have multiple paths to your objective, letting you sneak whichever way you like. Along the way, the environments are littered with “weapons.” I use quotes because the game’s improvisational combat system lets you use anything as a weapon. The expected amount of sledgehammers and pipes are lying around, but there are countless other items, too. Guitars, frying pans, hairbrushes, brooms, you name it. It was my self-given goal to knock out a Nazi with a flyswatter. And I fucking did it.
In that way, improvisation is your greatest tool in The Great Circle. Thinking on your feet is often rewarded, and breaking stealth is forgiving. The game wants you to panic, use the tools you have at your disposal, and in doing so create the tense and hilarious moments that litter the original film trilogy. The Great Circle isn’t quite an immersive sim on the scale of Thief or Deus Ex, but as a stealth experience it’s closer to those than to Star Wars: Outlaws.
Indy is voiced by Troy Baker (the actor behind Joel from the Last of Us games) doing the most mumbly yet spot-on Harrison Ford impression I’ve ever heard. Indy himself looks great, too; he’s the spitting image of Ford in the ’80s. It helps that The Great Circle is one of the best-looking games I’ve played on my Xbox Series X.
Faces, places, they all look stunning running at 60 fps. And the load times from the main menu and when fast traveling within an area are nearly instantaneous. A stylish zoom-out showing Indy stroking his chin or adjusting his hat eases you back into first person to hide what little load time there is. On occasion, this led to some rough edges. Enemies would sometimes notice Indy while I was still loading into the level, which would completely break titles with less forgiving stealth detection. Here, it was more of an annoyance.
It was my self-given goal to knock out a Nazi with a flyswatter. And I fucking did it.
By the end of The Great Circle, all the requisite Indiana Jones boxes are checked. Religious myth and history, a reluctant love interest, snakes, and a touch of the supernatural. It’s all here, and each moment is as clever as the last. Voss is the most incisive villain Indiana has faced in quite some time. Voss isn’t just a foil to Indy, a man of history; he also takes advantage of Jones’s defining character traits, like his weakness for the fairer sex and eventually even his reliance on the iconic whip.
Speaking of iconography, the hat and whip are integral to The Great Circle’s gameplay. You can use Indy’s whip in combat to disarm and, once upgraded, stun and trip enemies. It will also help you swing across gaps, scale various cliffs, and interact with the environment in a multitude of ways. The whip tactic I found most compelling was using it as a loud distraction. As in any good stealth title, having a way to make noise helps you manipulate enemy patterns and stay undetected. It’s another tool in your belt that helps the game feel even more immersive.
I won’t say much more about The Great Circle’s story—which has a fantastic ending—but it succeeds in not trying to be more than a blockbuster. The writing and performances are authentic to the character, even more so than in Dial of Destiny. The epic tale hits all its marks and then some. Now, the title de-emphasises some of the more unseemly and colonialist aspects of Indiana Jones (read: the racism) but doesn’t necessarily challenge the colonialism at the heart of the character and his history. But MachineGames does as good a job as I could imagine at crafting an Indy story with modern sensibilities.
That authenticity extends to the gameplay, which is aided by a fresh approach that reminds me of some of my favourite long-dead stealth games. The Great Circle is the type of game we don’t see a ton of anymore. But hell, reviving history is what archaeology is all about, isn’t it?
