There it is, that distant and familiar mountain, viewed from a nostalgic place: the opening of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Somewhere out there in that jungle is a Golden Idol waiting on a load bearing pressure plate, along with a sizable boulder, and a thieving rival, but this time the camera doesn’t just watch the man in the hat. While the movie follows the archeologist at a distance, cutting around him until finally revealing him to the audience, this time you are Indiana Jones, walking through that familiar jungle in an ambitious tribute to the character.
The opening of the game also demonstrates, at a micro level, a lot of what doesn’t work. It wants to immerse you as Indiana Jones, while at the same time delegating his iconic moments to cutscenes over gameplay. You hit a button to pull out the whip to strike a would-be traitor’s gun out of his hand, a cutscene takes care of the rest. The game lets you pour out sand before you swap the bag for the idol, but it only allows you to pour out so much sand before a cutscene decides you’ve simply gone too far. The puzzles are expanded, but if you want to brush aside jungle overgrowth you need to press a button to start the action, and another to push it aside. It’s a short scene in the movie, but here everything takes longer.
It’s a start that’s nostalgic but unnecessary, and is also probably the only aspect of the story that’s a misstep: the game should have really begun at a dig in Siwa, Egypt, with the eventual discovery of a golden cat. If it had to be a scene copied and pasted from the film, then it should have been a scene involving snakes, but in the context of the story the golden cat is more relevant than Indy’s fear of boulders.
The rest of the narrative really works well, both as an adventure story on its own as well as tale to stand alongside the films. When the gameplay ends and the cutscenes begin there’s a tremendous amount of effort put in to match the tone of the films, with a stronger emphasis on slapstick in its fights that help to ground all of the characters. It’s an adventure that’s really well paced in regard to how it presents the story, introduces its main villain, and sets up its twists.
Troy Baker does an excellent job as the voice of a young Harrison Ford, with just the right amount of exasperation in his expression to couple Indiana’s highly specific shit eating grin, but what makes the story special is just how excellent the supporting cast is. Marios Gavrilis is a perfect Indiana Jones villain as Emmerich Voss, a villain whose combination of evil and proficiency is only matched by his pronunciation of the word “karate”. Alessandra Mastronardi takes the role of Gina, a female lead that stands tall alongside Karen Allen’s Marion, and, and it has to be said that it was bittersweet to experience Tony Todd in one of his final roles.
The story has expert delivery and presentation, but it’s not long into the game before there’s a pair of dialogue lines between Marcus and Indiana that showcase the developers understanding of the characters, while also ironically pointing out one of the game’s significant flaws.
While on his way out the door Marcus says, “You can’t just run away from your problems, Indiana.”
Indy slips on his hat slowly, and a grin creeps up on his face. “Watch me.”
It’s an exceptionally well delivered scene, but the message falls apart once the cutscene ends and the gameplay begins. The game was titled Indiana Jones and the Great Circle because that’s the direction you’ll be walking along in its three larger areas. Indy can run, but he doesn’t really have the stamina to maintain anything beyond a light jog for more than a few seconds.
This is one of several reasons why this is more a stealth game than an action game. While franchises like Uncharted and Tomb Raider often borrow a lot of inspiration from the Indiana Jones films, most of those games end up with their protagonists shooting a lot more bad guys than Indy does in any given action scene, let alone entire filmography. Even Indy is no stranger to action in his video game adaptations, and unless you’re playing The Fate of Atlantis (1992), or Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures (1996) you’re likely going to spend a lot of time fighting.
The Great Circle wants to strike a balance that reflects the kinds of things he did in the films. He snuck around. He punched a whole slew of bad guys. He shot one guy while suffering from dysentery (maybe they’re saving the dysentery for the next game). So instead of having Indy as a first-person action hero, he must take things slow. The result of this is a game that’s more of a Hitman Lite, a stealth game where the AI isn’t quite as strong, where the gunplay isn’t as interesting, and where disguises and knocking out fascists with disposable weaponry is preferred over a fight.
This is usually happening while exploring a larger region, filled with its own selection of main quests and side quests and things to collect and things to discover. The exploration is probably one of the game’s greatest strengths, in that there are very few superfluous quests. Going to a new area often discovers meaningful story that expands on the characters, and delves deeper into the mysteries.
It’s by wandering and exploring that enables Indy to find items to upgrade his skills, and points to pay for those upgrades. The Great Circle isn’t an RPG, but there is an upgrade system for Indy to learn new moves and a few passive skills. Explore to find these upgrades, get points to pay for these upgrades by exploring.
Indiana Jones has to sneak around most of the time, creeping and crawling through the back alleys of Venice to the deserts of Egypt and beyond, often in plain sight, in broad daylight. The bad guys have terrible vision. As long as Indy is sneaking, crouching along with his hands waving in front of him as though he’s practicing swimming in a drought, he’ll be mostly able to make his way past a Nazi looking directly at him, if he’s a decent distance away.
Like Agent 47, Indy does manage to find an array of disguises which make traversing the areas much more tolerable. It doesn’t mean Indy can’t get found out. There are certain individuals who can see through his disguises, but for the most part there’s safety in the right wardrobe.
If he does get caught, he can fight. Combat in the game is functional at best, but most of the time it feels like it wants to be as good as the fighting in Condemned 2 (2008) while never quite reaching the status of Condemned 1 (2005). There are specific aspects of the combat that do work: specifically, the parry/counter. It has an excellent weight to it, with a specific pace where each movement feels appropriately choreographed.
He has a light punch that doesn’t have a combo, making for a melee attack that comes across as a rapid-fire flurry that rapidly drains his stamina. He also has a heavy punch that’s slow and rapidly drains his stamina. Every fight often devolves into scrambling around for loose objects to hit bad guys with or mashing the same punching animation until Indy runs out of stamina or the fascist is knocked out.
Jones does have a gun (depending on the disguise you’re actively using), and can pick up the guns his enemies drop (hopefully you saw where it was dropped). There were a couple of instances in which I was able to turn the game from a slow stealth mission into a first-person shooter, when the larger regions gave way to smaller, more specifically directed areas. The amount of enemies was fewer, the size of the areas was smaller, and it was easier to move from Nazi to Nazi, shooting one and then picking up a new gun and shooting another. His revolver is useful in a pinch, but it takes so long to reload that once its cylinder is spent the gun might as well be stashed away for later.
There are no good boss fights in this game. There is one okay fight, a boss fight that feels like that classic fight in which you’re given a set of weapons and the enemy has an expected weak point, but the rest of the boss fights largely suffer because they’re dependent entirely on how enjoyable you find the melee system, forcing you to pummel away at villains who have double extended health meters, easily bleeding your stamina dry multiple times over.
That’s the thing that doesn’t really fit in this game: the stamina meter. At the best of times it’s a means of preventing Jones from throwing a hundred punches nonstop. He’s not a superhuman fighter, he’s an archeology professor that’s picked up a few skills while he’s not reading books and studying languages. That said, he gets pretty winded knocking out a single Nazi, let alone worry about fighting a tougher regular enemy, and especially a boss.
Want to get around the map? You won’t be running much. At his starting stamina Indy can barely run a few feet before needing a breather, and when you consider that the same meter judges both your ability to run and your ability to punch, it means that running can easily be a sacrifice leaving Indy temporarily defenseless.
The presence of the stamina meter while climbing is strange for many reasons, one of which is because no matter what you’re trying to climb, it needs to be climbable within six stamina bars. You can upgrade your stamina in the game (as well as your health), a feat I didn’t discover until I was halfway through the desert, but the climbing sections have to be designed around the idea that you haven’t upgraded your stamina, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to complete the game.
It’s for that reason that different actions while climbing use different amounts of stamina. Sometimes it’ll use no stamina. Sometimes you’ll suddenly get a stamina refund mid-climb. You’ll be shuffling along, about to run out of stamina and it’ll just come back for no apparent reason, because the game wants you to climb a longer distance than your stamina would be capable of.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an ambitious game, and there are aspects about it that are impressive to see in a modern triple A experience. It’s a big game that doesn’t coddle. It offers freedom over restrictions. The writing is great, treating its nostalgia like frosting on a cake: there’s more to the game than what’s sprinkled on the surface. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle wants to do a lot of things. I wanted to enjoy the things it does well, but I often found myself confronted by the things it doesn’t. It’s an ambitious title, but highly unrefined.
Reviewed on Xbox