It’s been over 30 years since I wore out my VHS copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Since then the film franchise has been in a state of escalation. Where do you go after uncovering the literal Holy Grail? Aliens, then time machines, apparently. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the perfect antidote to all of this; one that uses its own figurative Dial of Destiny to propel us back in time to Indy’s prime. The result is easily one of the best Indy stories across both the games and the movies, with painstakingly detailed environments, wonderfully atmospheric tomb raiding and puzzle solving, a pitch-perfect score, and quite possibly the greatest punch sound effect in the business. While it does stumble occasionally as a stealth-focused sneak ’em up, The Great Circle is an otherwise grand and gorgeous globe-trotting adventure that left me giddy as a schoolboy. Yes, it’s true that bringing Indiana Jones back to the big screen (twice) after he literally rode off into the sunset was probably a poor choice. But having MachineGames craft an Indy experience inspired by all the best games in that development team’s past?
Bethesda chose wisely.
MachineGames’ most immediate legacy is the modern Wolfenstein series, and there’s certainly some of that on show in The Great Circle. Like The New Order and its excellent prequel and sequel, The Great Circle is first-person and highly story-driven, and I’d wager if there’s anyone who hates Nazis as much as Indy, it’s the Gestapo-gutting, SS-slaying BJ Blazkowicz. The Great Circle is not, however, a bloodthirsty exercise in double-fisted, lead-flinging fury. Unlike Wolfenstein, The Great Circle’s focus is patient and slower-paced exploration and stealth – where guns are rarely (and barely) a viable option.
That said, with the founding members of MachineGames all hailing from fellow Swedish studio Starbreeze, MachineGames’ DNA admittedly runs much deeper than Wolfenstein. For many of the team, it dates back to 2004’s outstanding and highly acclaimed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Riddick’s first-person fisticuffs and adventure elements appear to have been a huge inspiration on The Great Circle, and it’s refreshing to be playing a game like Butcher Bay again – particularly when it’s done with this much verve and commitment to a storied franchise.
For clarity, I doubt anybody would’ve been shocked to see an Indiana Jones game in 2024 arrive as a clone of the blockbuster Uncharted series. It certainly wouldn’t have been unprecedented. After all, both 1999’s Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine and 2003’s Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb both followed a fairly strict Tomb Raider template. Pivoting to pay tribute to the man who usurped Lara as the premier grave-robbing vagabond of modern video games would hardly have been surprising – particularly as games today have become increasingly homogenised overall.
But The Great Circle isn’t an Uncharted clone, and it’s all the better for it. It’s an Indiana Jones game I didn’t even know I wanted, and sometimes that’s the best surprise. I like highly cinematic, quality third-person shooters as much as the next man, but not every game needs to be one. And besides, you can do a lot worse than taking notes from Butcher Bay – another licensed tie-in with the extremely rare distinction of being even better than the film upon which it was based.
Genius of the Restoration
The first-person perspective blesses The Great Circle with a fantastic sense of scale. Looking up in awe of the Great Pyramid – or staring out at a giant Nazi battleship perched atop a mountain in the Himalayas – simply has a more pronounced effect at eye-level. It also does wonders for immediacy, with puzzle solving in particular benefitting greatly. Picking up and poring over documents and clues, directly manipulating and placing objects, and watching the results unfold in front of your eyes makes it feel like you’re personally inside some of the world’s most expensive escape rooms. Puzzles come regularly, and they’re mostly light lifting, but I’ve encountered at least a couple of slightly curlier ones that left me smugly satisfied that I wasn’t stumped. If you do hit a roadblock, there’s a baked-in hint system that will only interject if you take an extra photo of the offending puzzle with your in-game camera. It’s a smart and courteous way of offering aid only when asked that will keep players off their phones and in the game.
On top of this, it’s really the best showcase for the incredible amount of granular detail MachineGames has stuffed into seemingly every surface in The Great Circle. From streak marks on freshly wiped glass to the slow trickle of wax from a candle lighting your way down an ancient stairwell, these are things that wouldn’t be noticed from any other viewpoint. Are they entirely necessary to make The Great Circle a great game? Maybe not, but they do paint a picture of a project where no flourish is too small if they make the world look and feel even a fraction more authentic.
After beginning with a short flashback to Raiders of the Lost Ark as a tutorial – one that might’ve been a tad indulgent had it not been so utterly well done – The Great Circle’s second level is a wonderful (and equally nostalgic) trip through Connecticut’s Marshall College. It’s a magnificent rendition and draped in layers upon layers of bespoke details that distracted me constantly on my way to the objective. Busts and other paraphernalia related to the history of the school. Cabinets full of exotic items. Notice boards cluttered with handmade signs. If you’d shown this version of Indy’s famous school to the eight-year-old version of me who cut his teeth aimlessly point-and-clicking his way around Marshall College in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, I might have had you burnt at the stake. Or at least lowered into a sacrificial lava pit without a heart.
The eye-catching environments keep coming: The ornate Italian architecture and crusty catacombs of Vatican City; An ancient town and multiple Nazi dig sites in the shadow of the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Sphinx; Sukhothai’s winding waterways and flooded temples, which are being reclaimed by the jungle. It’s all excellent stuff, and bolstered by exemplary ray-traced lighting to boot. I love the huge contrasts between the levels, and “the great circle” as a fanciful archaeological concept is an admirably effective premise to justify Indy hopping all over the globe during a single story.
The strength of that story here is one of The Great Circle’s true assets, and it’s been brought to life with some very impressive performances. For the most part, Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford impersonation is close to spot-on, and Baker’s otherwise distinct voice disappears in the role. Credit too must go to voice actor David Shaughnessy, whose unerring version of Denholm Elliot’s Marcus Brody may go criminally unnoticed in Baker’s shadow. This could have very much felt like a gimmick considering Elliot passed away back in 1992, but Brody’s small role feels meaningful and respectful, and not like a stunt. Marios Gavrilis also kills it as the slimy and sinister Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss; he spits his dialogue with such venom I imagine his microphone may have required a tiny umbrella. Most of the meaningful conversations occur in well-directed cutscenes, which are on par with those in modern Wolfenstein, albeit punctuated with an appropriate amount of slightly slapstick Indiana Jones humour when the fists start flying. There are basically two movies worth of cutscenes here, but it never felt like too much. This is Indy in his prime, and I’m on board for every extra minute of it.
As a rule, the Indiana Jones series is always at its best when it involves a desperate race to track down an artifact before the Nazis can nab it for what they believe will be an unbeatable, world-conquering advantage. Those movies were video game fetch quests before video game fetch quests, and The Great Circle naturally embraces it, immediately beginning on the right foot by setting its action in 1937 – directly between the events of Raiders and The Last Crusade, as the world simmers towards the Second World War.
It’s honestly quite remarkable how convincingly The Great Circle fits into the hole between those two impeccable films, successfully exploiting the odd chronology of the original Indy trilogy. That goes far beyond just providing a little extra context on Indy’s separation from Marion Ravenwood, too. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I can pay The Great Circle is that it may well be the best Indiana Jones movie you’ve never seen. The music, too, is a victory on all fronts, and I love how in sync it feels with Raiders and The Last Crusade. I was especially thrilled to see The Great Circle crescendo to a showdown that follows tightly in the footsteps of both of those films – yet still managed to knock me out with a brilliantly unexpected twist.
Aid our own resuscitation
On the topic of knockouts, combat in The Great Circle is satisfyingly brutal without being gratuitously violent, which is in keeping with its family-friendly, swashbuckling adventure serial roots. I love the deeply impressive sound design, which makes every strike sound like a golf club being slammed into a huge bunch of celery, and I love how visceral the fighting is in first-person. You block and parry blows with the correct timing, and deliver quick jabs and loaded up power punches. On top of that, Indy’s bullwhip can be used to quickly disarm enemies, and stun them long enough to either wade in and whack them or scoop up their dropped weapon and bludgeon them with it.
I enjoy how Butcher Bay-adjacent the fighting is but I’m a little unconvinced by the stamina system that rules over it, which depletes as Indy exerts himself climbing, sprinting, and throwing hands. It just creates pauses throughout the action where you’ll be compelled to wait for a beat, or jog backwards as a gaggle of goose-stepping morons march towards you with their dukes up. I can’t really detect what it adds other than something to be arbitrarily upgraded to the point where it’s no longer an inconvenience.
Combat escalates with your actions so, if you do grab a gun and start blasting, expect all armed enemies in your vicinity to respond with hot lead of their own. Indy can’t survive this kind of barrage so, for the most part, the best thing to do is forget the firearms. This does, admittedly, create a bit of silliness if you stir up a large enemy response and park yourself anywhere your attackers need to climb to reach. You can, for instance, stand at the top of a ladder and clobber the crap out of everyone who climbs it for some time, and no one will figure out that they have guns and can simply shoot at you (on regular difficulty, at least). But you’d be colouring outside the lines here, playing like this. Indy doesn’t mind leaving bodies in his wake when necessary, but he’s not some moustache-twirling mass murderer. You can always fire up Wolfenstein if you need to get some of that out of your system.
On the topic of guns, though, Indy’s personal revolver is sadly a big disappointment. I used it all of twice, but both were still total anticlimaxes. The first was an early boss battle where Indy’s pistol really should’ve been written out of the fight before the showdown began. After placing several bullets into a man’s unarmored head, it became clear that shooting this bloke wasn’t the way MachineGames intended me to clear this encounter. The second was late in the story, where I thought, ‘There’s no point rolling credits with revolver rounds in the cylinder!’ and figured I’d quickly plug two Nazis that suddenly appeared ahead of me in an open elevator. They simply took too many shots to go down. It seems like a weird fumble, when the scene of Indy actually using his pistol and taking out the Raiders swordsman in a single shot is one of the most memorable moments in the whole film franchise. Revolver rounds should absolutely remain exceedingly rare, but the pistol itself really should have shipped with the consistent stopping power of its cinematic counterpart.
It also rarely feels logical that high-ranking enemies within the levels can automatically see through disguises, particularly in Vatican City. It is a mechanic I’m accustomed to thanks to the likes of Hitman, which I’ll be clear is another game I love, but it’s definitely a little sillier here. It really is total nonsense that a random Italian officer would physically attack a stranger who is, for all intents and purposes, a visiting priest.
This is only a mild annoyance though and, to be fair, The Great Circle actually has a very smart approach to difficulty overall. There’s a lot more fiddling you can do than just adjust a single setting from easy to very hard. Enemy attributes are split into several categories, meaning you can tweak it so that there are tougher enemies, but fewer of them. Maybe you want to pump up their awareness, but make them weaker than wet newspapers. (This is something I think I may try for a second run.) It’s good that these options are here because, on regular difficulty, the stealth is quite basic; enemies have pretty limited vision and they’re easier to sneak past than I first assumed. I definitely became progressively less cautious once I realised I could sneak across seemingly dangerously open places as long as I did it fast enough.
That said, The Great Circle does allow us to return to previously visited locations to complete all the extra side missions, even after the main adventure is complete, so I may focus on that instead of starting over. I suspect I have many more hours of auxiliary objectives to keep me busy; I only got around to ticking off a handful of them on my first run through the story, which took me about 17 hours.
