Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the year’s finest game | review

There were 21 Indiana Jones games before this year’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle debuted on December 9. I didn’t remember any of those prior games, and so you may forgive me for being skeptical early on about No. 22.

But after playing through this year’s game (which came out on the PC and Xbox Series X/S consoles) to its finish, I’m amazed at how much I enjoyed it. In fact, it’s easily my pick for Game of the Year. It a game full of stealth, action, story and exploration.

Microsoft and Bethesda’s Todd Howard have come up with an interesting cross-generational strategy, catering to older gamers and their offspring or just brand-new fans. This is also a very strategic game as it is one of the biggest games of the year for Microsoft at a time when there aren’t any blockbuster adventure titles in Sony’s lineup, aside from Astro Bot, which is a far different game.

As I have pointed out before, there is a circular heritage to the Great Circle. When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981 as the first film adventure for Indiana Jones, it inspired so many games. It inspired Tomb Raider and its Lara Croft hero (1996) and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Nathan Drake (2007). And now those game series are clearly one of the inspirations for 2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Back to the beginning

When I first started playing the game, I wasn’t impressed that the first scene had you replaying the very beginning temple-raiding scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I suppose the devs only did that because they realized most people among prospective gamers hadn’t seen that movie. I thought that this was a sign that the game devs had not learned that gamers don’t want to replay a movie; they want something fresh.

It turns out that Machine Games, which mastered the gaming art of slaughtering Nazis in the Wolfenstein series, had plenty of fresh stuff. Sure, Machine Games had to dial down the violence level to suit the mainstream Indiana Jones audience. Machine Games was the perfect game studio to make a game out of taking Nazis out with some sense of humor.

The game — the first one since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 2003 — is set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). After the prologue from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Great Circle game begins in 1937, before WWII, at Marshall College, the school where Jones teaches archaeology when he isn’t out raiding tombs. During this time, Jones has left his fiancée, Marion Ravenwood, the lead female character in the first Indy movie. As his friend Marcus Brody says, Jones tries to run away from his problems.

Someone breaks into the school’s museum of (stolen, or, uh, acquired) archaeological treasures. Jones confronts the thief, who turns out to be a giant. After a struggle, Jones is knocked out and the giant escapes with a cat mummy. And he leaves behind an important clue: a medallion from the Vatican.

Even though it’s midterm season, Jones sets off on a journey to the Vatican. We see the familiar plane move along a map like in the Indiana Jones movies. It was a small bit of charm from the movie. Upon arrival, Jones has to infiltrate Castel Sant’angelo and then take the secret pathway into the Vatican. Along the way, you learn how to sneak up behind the Italian army guards and knock them out.

Sometimes it’s a little too annoyingly hard to catch them off guard, and you have to get in a fistfight with them. But usually, the other guards won’t notice the racket and you can take them down. The trouble is if they land a blow on you, you have to use a precious bandage to heal yourself. The melee combat is the most used in the entire game; if you use your revolver, you draw a huge crowd.

Once you get close enough, you can see the Vatican and the cardinals in their pre-war moral gray zone, where they allow the Nazis into the Vatican as they conduct a search for unknown relics. It’s unnerving to see the holy place crawling with soldiers of the Third Reich. Little do they know that Indiana Jones is on the case, and he is joined by an investigative journalist, Gina Lombardi (voiced by Alessandra Mastronardi), who is also searching for her missing sister. The relationship between them starts out frosty, but it develops over time in a way that does not leave Gina as your typical heroine in a sexist story.

The Vatican is really one vast level where you can feel like you’re exploring an open world. Searching for clues, Jones stumbles on some massive catacombs under the Vatican and encounters a nemesis: Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis), a rival archaeologist who is working with the Nazis to uncover ancient artifacts to help Hitler conquer the world. It turns out that archaeological sites of interest around the world form a perfect circle around the globe. As Voss arrives and takes off on a blimp, Jones hitches a ride and that leads them to the next great open world map, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

The anti-Nazi formula

These are familiar tropes and environments in Indy land. But the devs did a good job with the anti-Nazi film and game formula: Make them evil, make them interested in the occult, make them stupid and clumsy to the point of humor and ultimately make it easy for them to be outwitted. While Voss is not a true Nazi, he tries to fiercely out-compete Jones when it comes to raiding tombs and scavenging lost artifacts.

Most of the time, you take the enemies down in stealth, or one-on-one in punching battles. You stun enemies with your whip and then pound them with a shovel or a stick. If you pull out your gun and fire, it’s an invitation for a Nazi horde to descend on you. I only used my sidearm — or a weapon stolen from the Nazis — a few times in the game. Each time I did so, I felt like a failure.

While the whip is fun in spicing up the combat, it’s especially entertaining in movement. With the Tomb Raider and Uncharted games, you have to do a ton of climbing. But it’s easier climbing upward with the whip and it’s fun to swing on the whip, like on a rope, over huge chasms. It changes from a chore to a charm.

Troy Baker (who voiced Joel in The Last of Us and many other games) does a great job with voice acting for Indy, so much so that I can mistake him for a younger Harrison Ford. (Ford, who appeared at The Game Awards, joked that Baker did so great that Ford himself should have done the role instead).

You can turn up the difficulty on both fighting and puzzles to make the game more difficult for hardcore gamer tastes. In my rush to play the game, I decided to play it on “moderate” difficulty for the fighting but “easy” mode for the puzzles. This allowed me to get hints, using the very useful camera (which is part of a pretty good user interface for communicating with the gamer). This gave me a navigation indicator for where I had to go to fulfill my mission, rather than spend hours looking for items or pathways in a massive landscape. I liked how I could level up my character over time, using things I collected or experience that I developed. This helped prepare me for more difficult enemies later on.

The missions are intriguing and take you to exotic places like the Pyramids of Giza, the Vatican and Castel Santangelo, the ruins of Shanghai, Thailand, the jungles of South America and more. But just when you think that the game is about to end, it turns out you’re just moving on to something that is an even bigger part of the grand adventure and a wider conspiracy that surfaces more ancient legends.

And this is where the game moves from a typical movie adventure to a much longer tale that can be told in a video game that can last for 15 or 20 hours. It’s also where the narrative becomes a great story. Not only for a video game. It even feels better than the recent Harrison Ford film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. You travel around the world to scratch your itch as a traveling gamer, and the environments are incredibly detailed. And then you find one clue after another in a grand tale.

The team spent time understanding the narrative beats when it comes to capturing the comedy of the Indiana Jones series, Machine Games game designer Jens Andersson told me in an interview. The tone has to shift between scenes that have a lot of action or suspense to those that have a lot of humor.

“This time around it’s more of a Machine Games adventure, rather than a Machine Games shooter. It’s still very much a Machine Games game,” Andersson said.

Conclusion

This game does the job of creating a mainstream action-adventure game that balances hardcore gameplay like fighting Nazis and solving difficult puzzles. But it’s also accessible with a good sense of humor and a sense of mystery and awe.

You come out of it with an appreciation for ancient secrets and moral quandaries. There’s a love story with an unexpected ending and a familiar character who, after 21 so-so games, finally comes out of the cold into your living room with spectacular entertainment. It’s an adventure that seemed to go on for a longer than expected time and I didn’t want it to end.

That’s why I’m giving it a five out of five stars. (Disclosure: Microsoft provided me with the game for the purpose of this review).