Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review

The opening of The Great Circle will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s enjoyed Indiana Jones’ exploits in the movies. What better way to open an Indiana Jones game than having you play through the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark? The familiar environments and events of the iconic tomb raid provide an excellent way to introduce players to the mechanics of the game, as well as help to establish the timeline of the game. Once you’ve made it out alive with the idol, the movie levels end and you find yourself at the beginning of a new adventure that shows you what Indy was up to before the events of The Last Crusade.

The title of The Great Circle refers to the game’s central mystery - if you plot several ancient sites on the globe, you can link them all with a line that forms a circle. It’s just the kind of mystery that Indiana Jones would be interested in investigating, and it also gives the game the opportunity to send you to a number of different locations around the world. And since there are legends which claim that activating all of these sites will trigger a supernatural event, it ensures that you’ll run into a lot of occult-loving Nazis along the way.

The game is essentially a first-person action/stealth game. Dr. Jones is no stranger to a pistol, but in general if you’re resorting to gunplay, you’re in serious trouble. You’re going to spend a fair amount of your time trying to keep out of sight and dispatching foes by sneaking up behind them and hitting them over the head with something that you’ve found in the environment. However, a lot of the elements that you’ve come to expect from modern stealth games – vison cones, radars, enemy tagging, etc. – are not present here. You’ll have to keep track of enemies and where they are looking on your own. The game does allow you to pick up your victims and stash them somewhere out of sight, but I soon found that this exercise isn’t all that necessary. When an enemy comes across a fallen colleague, they’ll start to raise an alarm that might catch the attention of a nearby ally or two, but they’ll never rouse the entire garrison. You can just keep out of sight for a bit and the alarmed enemies will calm down and just return to their normal activity.

Breaking cover doesn’t necessarily lead to total failure - you’ll usually find yourself in a fist fight instead. The game has a straightforward punch, parry, and counter system that keeps the fights from becoming either tedious or too challenging. The ability to use a wide variety of objects in the environment as weapons, and Indy’s signature whip, also serve to keep things interesting.

The game is not all stealth and fisticuffs, though. You’ll also be spending your time with the game overcoming traversal challenges, exploring environments, and solving puzzles. The traversal challenges are not overdone in the game nor do they try to channel games like Uncharted – they fit within the game’s story and feel appropriate for the character. The puzzles are particularly well-designed. Rather than opting for tacked-on mini games, you’ll need to pick up on clues from the environment, reference notes in your journal, and even listed to Indy’s thoughts on how to approach the puzzles. In short, they feel like the kind of puzzles Indiana Jones himself would need to crack on his adventures and you need to solve them as he would.

The games environments are remarkably detailed and filled with interactive objects and collectible items. While most of the game’s levels are fairly linear, but there are a few open world levels filled with side-quests and mysteries to explore. The open world levels are quite expansive and will take you hours to complete if you want to fully explore them and track down every side quest.

For all the attention to detail and work that went into crafting an Indiana Jones game that feels like it could have been a movie in the series, the game has a surprising number of glitches. Some can halt your progress, but the game is very liberal with its autosaves and so rolling things back so that you can move forward again isn’t too painful. I should also warn you that you really need a high-end system to play this game. I quickly realized that the Steam Deck is not up to the task of running this game when I saw that the system could only render the characters’ hair and nothing more of them. When playing on a gaming rig that was brand new only four years ago and manages to play other games without issues, environmental objects constantly blinked in and out of existence to the point that it started to give me vertigo. It wasn’t until I switched to a rig that was about three months old that I could actually play the game.

Glitches and processing hunger aside, I did enjoy playing the game. The devs have done a great job of capturing the fun, spirit, and adventure of an Indiana Jones movie, and they’ve done a lot of work to make The Great Circle more like an interactive movie than a video game. If you want to immerse yourself in a great adventure, and have hardware that can handle the game, you’ll have a good time donning a fedora, grabbing a whip, and traveling the world.