Indiana Jones and the Great Circle comes to Xbox Series X/S, and Windows on December 9, 2024. It will be a day 1 release on Game Pass, and will eventually be ported to the PS5 in 2025. Publisher Bethesda sponsored the trip to Australia for the media preview of the game.
MANILA, Philippines – I’ll be the first to admit that I have never been the biggest Indiana Jones fan. It’s not that I have been critical of the series; it’s more that the original trilogy — Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade — all came out in between 1981 to 1989.
While the cultural impact of the series has never been lost on me — one among the greats that defined the Hollywood summer blockbuster on the level of Jaws and the Star Wars series — the fictional adventurer that I really grew up with was Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider series, which, of course, has never been shy to admit its Indy inspiration.
Then came Uncharted with hero Nathan Drake in the mid-2000s, which came to define the archetypal adventurer-on-the-hunt-for-treasure-and-artifacts for that generation of gaming and pop culture mavens.
With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, this is potentially indeed — pardon the pun — a great circling back to the original ophidiophobic (someone who’s scared of snakes; thanks, Google), whip-donning, behatted one.
And let me tell you, a quick 1-hour-and-a-half playtest of the game has truly gotten my attention — and that’s after the game not being on my personal radar since it was first announced back in 2021.
My big secret: I’ve only actually seen Raiders of the Lost Ark (which taught me the very important lesson of not bringing a sword to a gunfight) before getting to play this game, and now I have a hankering to see the two others in the original trilogy.
Let’s look at my reasons.
First-person makes it very immersive
It’s very refreshing to play an adventure game in the first-person perspective, going against the third-person norms of the genre. That alone makes it immediately unique.
Online, fans of the series have been divided, with a good portion saying that they would like to play it in third-person instead, because they want to see the character on screen. They want to see Indy in his usual garb, his hat and his whip, and Harrison Ford’s face.
(By the way, while they got the rights to Harrison Ford’s face for the game, the actor providing the motion capture and the voice is Troy Baker, who’s most famous for playing Joel, the hardy protagonist of The Last of Us.)
But actually getting to play The Great Circle, as opposed to just watching trailers, you immediately get a sense of what Sweden-based developer Machine Games is going for. It wants to truly put you in the shoes of Dr. Jones.
Machine Games is best known for the most recent run of Wolfenstein games: Wolfenstein: The New Order, nominated for Best Narrative in The Game Awards in 2014; and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, nominated again for Best Narrative in the same awards show in 2017, winning the Best Action Game category. It’s a pedigreed studio, made of people whose roots can also be traced back to the equally acclaimed Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay in 2004.
All of these games are first-person games which were well-received for the action and narrative. And The Great Circle is so far shaping up to that ideal.
In first-person, it’s lovely to look at artifacts, play around with interactive parts of the environment, which of course includes the franchise-staple sun mirrors that activate doors and such in ancient ruins.
Oh, and I’ve got to mention the map. When you bring up the map, you can actually see Dr. Jones holding it in his hands. You have to look down to look at the map, and then you look up again so you can walk while holding the map.
Personally, I don’t like games where you just look at the minimap on the corner to navigate the game. The Great Circle’s take on map use and navigation seems to be designed to address just that, and it works, and I feel more engaged with the world.
There is also some beautiful, cinematic lighting in the game, at least within the two main areas that we’ve been able to play — Dr. Jones’ alma mater Marshall College, and a dig site in Giza, Egypt.
While the game is a direct follow-up to 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, the dig site of The Great Circle takes place in a different part of Egypt.
This adventure is a globe-trotting one taking you to Rome, Thailand, Egypt, Shanghai, and the Himalayas — and hopefully each of the other locales we haven’t seen will look great.
Great melee, funny improvised weapons
Melee feels very good, and carries that visceral, weighty feeling. When I think of melee in first-person games, I drift back to the Elder Scroll games, which can sometimes feel like you’re hitting air, and there’s a stiffness to how it looks. The Great Circle’s hand-to-hand melee — granted, Skyrim as the last Elder Scrolls game is more than a decade old — feels a whole lot more satisfying.
My favorite part of that is that it has a familiar parry system. Press block at the right time, and you parry and stagger the opponent to give you maybe 2 or 3 uninterrupted strong hits.
There’s an element of hiding bodies you’ve downed, but I wasn’t able to test what the game does if you carelessly leave bodies around.
Something I love just as much as the hand-to-hand is your ability to use improvised weapons from naturally devastating ones like shovels to mallets to… more questionable choices such as a violin or a broom or something even less intimidating. It just cracked me up using the latter.
A bit of slapstick is part of the Indy humor, and that’s how the game incorporates that into the gameplay. Take that as a positive sign; the devs look like they’re having fun doing the game, and often that bodes well for the gamer.
And of course, there’s the whip, which you could use to stun enemies. There are some guns, but there seems to be less focus on those than say the Uncharted games.
Stealth, so far, seems par for the course.
Indy’s witty quips (“Off to dreamland!” as he smacks a Nazi) are in the game as well, and the classic musical flourishes and stingers that truly add to the vibes.
Indy doing what he does best: Raiding really old places
Other than those, the best moments are when you’re raiding deep inside ancient ruins. There’s a nice sense of mystery when you find these underground sites of interest, and there’s a nice sense of you wanting to find things out, and a nice feeling of intrigue that there might be something mystical just around the corner — or maybe a sea of venomous scorpions. (More often the latter.)
What happens if you take that artifact or you push a lever? Of course, most of the time, those lead to traps that you must then escape — and that’s just simply a core Indy experience.
Remember when I mentioned the map? There’s no minimap to rely on, so when you’re trying to get somewhere, it’s often a matter of taking note of your direction and bearing, and just looking down at your map from time to time.
The various quests carry a similar type of minimal handholding. You are given a general idea of where to explore when you’re doing a quest, but the instructions are not spoon-fed. You gather clues photographing points of interest, talking to people, or discovering an item. And those are put in a journal for you to eventually put together.
For example, one quest has you looking for a bunch of thieves. You receive a clue as to where they may be, and once I got to the area, I had to look around for a few minutes. Eventually I saw a suspicious area where red paint had spilled, eventually leading me to look for footprints with traces of red paint.
I found one thief eventually, and it felt rewarding that you have to use some measure of observation to figure it out rather than just direct quest markers. It’s doubly rewarding because you know Indy will be that same type of guy who’ll be able to track things down using his smarts.
The game also portrays a more realistic adventurer in the climbing sequences. Dr. Jones still has videogame athleticism, but it doesn’t feel like it’s superhuman athleticism like the majority of adventure game protagonists. Also, the game switches to third person when climbing or when using the whip as a rope. The whip’s physics look great too, by the way, snapping tight just as you pull on it.
There’s a skill point system, wherein you get skill point currency solving side quests like the one above.
Visually, I like what I’m seeing. There’s a nice heatwave effect in Egypt, the lighting in the evening Marshall College sequence looked cinematic, and overall, there’s strong art direction that’s faithful to the Indy look. But one gripe is that there were a few moments when the characters seem to have this wide-eyed uncanny valley look.
Just based on the short time we’ve had with Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, this has potential to be the most memorable Indy game in a very long time. Fans have mentioned the likes of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (N64, 1999), Indiana Jones and The Emperor’s Tomb (PS2, Xbox 2003), and Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (PS3, Xbox 360, 2008) as the better games, but none have really been considered a classic.
Let’s see if this latest effort can change that. The potential of it is something exciting I’m looking forward to. If this goes on to be great, it might just open the franchise up to a new generation of fans, myself included, and gain appreciation from gamers who grew up with the franchises it inspired, from Tomb Raider to Uncharted. – Rappler.com
