It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to be reviewing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – that’s Jason’s job. Yet, as Jason refused to shell out for hardware good enough to play the game he wrote conservatively fifty news posts about… Here we are: A casual review written by a casual fan – likely for casual fans.
Don’t call me a hero unless you really feel like it.
So, The Great Circle. Let’s start from the start:
Set between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, the game sees Indy on the trail of an artifact stolen from the Marshall College museum. The trail leads him to the Vatican, where he finds that the theft is connected to a Catholic conspiracy, Italian Fascists, and (wouldn’t you know) the Nazis. It’s the fodder Dan Brown made a career of, but never mind. As for the titular Great Circle? It’s not an artifact as much as a map of mysterious sites connected through a perfect circle around the globe.
All in all, a typical day for Indy, and as the Domino bricks start to fall, you’ll find what is a huge – yet surprisingly manageable – game.
An Exercise in Ups and Downs
Having intermittently watched the trailers as they dropped, I had expected The Great Circle to be an exploration-type game primarily focused on action with some stealth and puzzles thrown in for good measure. As it turns out, it’s the opposite – punches are secondary to both sneaking and puzzles.
Looking at the stealth component, it is implemented slightly more simplistically than I had hoped. Slightly. It’s entirely possible to avoid combat by sneaking around, but compared to something like Hitman, it’s not very sophisticated. Maybe that’s not a bad thing for those unfamiliar with Agent 47, but I consistently reached for the “instinct” button – a Hitman feature that gives you an x-ray-style overview of the area – just to find it is nonexistent.
Even compared to something like Deus Ex which, in stealth mode, switches from first-person to third-person, The Great Circle isn’t quite up to snuff. For all intents and purposes, it does not have a stealth mode at all, which is particularly frustrating when the game seamlessly switches to third-person when climbing ladders, swinging with the whip, etc.
That’s minor in the big picture of things, and as the Fascists and Nazis are lax in their duty, you can avoid fist-fights and shoot-outs fairly easily. When you do get into scrapes, though, it’s again a mixed bag.
I do find fist-fighting to be fairly fun. The controls are simple, and you can toss punches effortlessly; a whip snap makes the enemy drop their weapon. What is less than ideal is how Indy apparently has been sitting behind a desk for too long. Throw a few punches and block an incoming kick, and his “energy” meter will completely bottom out. This means the only remaining move is to tiredly push the enemies away. Until you power up through the game’s RPG-like system, the combat feels out of character.
Again, though – it’s not that big of a deal, and it gets better as you move through the Vatican and beyond.
As for the puzzles, they are very Indy-like and reminiscent of those in the movies: Trials, contraptions, and all what you’d hope for. Their complexity, though, is, for the lack of a better word, banal. On the off chance you can’t figure out a simple cipher puzzle, you can just point Indy’s trusty camera(!) on it and gradually get clearer hints, all up to the actual solution. If you remember the hint book in Return to Monkey Island you know what I’m talking about.
A quick digression: Weirdly, Indy can’t just translate Latin writing by interacting with it. Rather, he has to point his camera at the writing, which begs the question: Does it have a 2024-era AI for translation purposes?
All of this might sound like death by a thousand cuts, and in many other games, it would be. But, as a whole, the aforementioned game mechanisms mainly work well enough, largely because they are also incredibly cinematic. As is the game as a whole. And there are a lot of factors that play into that.
Sound and Vision
As most know by now, the graphics are fantastic. Indy moves and gestures nearly identically to Harrison Ford, flawlessly animated. The environments also give the feeling of being dropped into the movies, with the freedom to explore their surroundings. “Immersive” is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but with The Great Circle, it’s an apt description.
A cool feature is how you can play the game in either regular mode or a cinematic widescreen mode. I prefer the former, but I can see why people would go with the latter.
The sound design, too, gives the locations a vivid vibrancy, with a subtle soundtrack always humming along in the background, saving bombastic cues for the truly dramatic moments. And, all respect to Troy Baker – pulling off a Harrison Ford impersonation is difficult, but Baker comes as close as one could hope.
On a Mission
Just as clear and streamlined the main mission is, the side missions play directly into the story, providing additional details to Indy’s quest. Want a grander arc? Move around, and you’ll find missions that will give you just that. You can race through the main story, of course, but looking around for minor tasks and larger side missions is well worth it.
Intuitive controls also help those of us who are less than awesome at action gaming. The button and stick movements execute actions as one would expect, preventing wild button mashing. There is a pre-story tutorial which is a lot of fun, but not needed. If I can figure out the controls, so can anyone.
All this is to say that those thousand cuts The Great Circle suffers from are sufficiently band-aided. And to push it over the top, you have a grand story being the healing tonic.
I’m one of those who enjoyed Dial of Destiny a lot – as the norm is around Mojo’s offices – but if more of a religious-bent Indy-in-the-prime-of-his-life story is your jam, The Great Circle hits home. It never reduces itself to pandering, with references to past games and movies feeling either subtle or properly integrated into the story. (OK, Marcus’s first line is full-on pandering, but it’s also quite funny.) In terms of what we’ve seen of Indy games over the past thirty-odd years, The Great Circle is second only to Fate of Atlantis from a story perspective. In gameplay, it sits on top. (All respect to Fate of Atlantis but those puzzles were shaky.)
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but I’m glad it was. Had it not been for the virtual gun to my head, I might have skipped on The Great Circle. That would have been a mistake, and looking at the games we’ve covered here in the swinging twenties, Indy’s latest outing is close to sitting up there with ReMI and Psychonauts 2. If that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is.
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We stopped handing out scores long ago, but seeing as our vintage skull rating feels somewhat pertinent here, we’ll make an exception.
A review by Remi, a hero amongst his tribe who reviewed this game on an Xbox.