‘Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’ Review: This Rip-Roaring Adventure Should Have Been a Movie

You can predict what a person’s reaction will be to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle by what they see as the most iconic image of Indiana Jones from the films. For some, it’s the rugged adventurer stepping into the light in the South American jungle after his whip disarms an attacker. For some, it’s the silhouetted figure at sunset overseeing a dig for the Ark of the Covenant. For others still, it’s the shot of River Phoenix receiving the iconic fedora and transitioning to Harrison Ford defiantly grinning at a common hood before taking a punch. For my part, it’s the moment in Temple of Doom where Indy goes into the Thuggee temple and a mine cart’s light illuminates his bloody, sweaty, and absolutely pissed face.

For that reason, Great Circle felt like something of a strange fit for Machinegames. There was never any doubt, based on their CV, that the Swedish video game developer would take every opportunity possible to make killing Nazis and fascists as cathartic as possible. Indeed, dozens of hours into the game, it never gets old to uppercut a swastika-wearing stooge in his stupid face, cued by that delicious Ben Burtt “thwack” sound effect, or beat one over the head with a random object from the environment. But while the Wolfenstein games can skate by on letting players kill Nazis as part of a squadron of emotionally damaged, anti-fascist weirdos and little else, becoming Indiana Jones on one of his great adventures requires more from a storyteller.

It’s not that Machinegames is bad at the “more” of it all. The surprise here is how much Great Circle feels less like Wolfenstein and more like a Dishonored/Hitman crossover. Much of the game involves stealth, studying environments for infiltration points, and finding ways of killing fascists that aren’t shooting or stabbing them in the streets. The innovation needed for traversal here, especially in the more ancient, crumbling parts of the world, scratches a very particular itch. That’s bolstered by the fact that Indy, as ever, is very much human here. Bullets are scarce, it costs stamina to throw punches, and every feat of acrobatic derring-do feels exhausting.

The strange irony of a new Indiana Jones game, though, is in the tension between the property’s place in pop culture versus its place in the video game pantheon. This is very much a globetrotting adventure that puts Indy in harm’s way as he tries to steal back a mummified cat that he previously stole, only to find out that the Nazis want it out of a belief in another bit of obscure Catholic lore—the titular Great Circle, tied to the Noah’s Ark legend.

Indy is written well, and Troy Baker, who’s backed up by an excellent cast of character actors (including the late Tony Todd, in his final game role), delivers a more-than-passable Harrison Ford imitation. The locales and mysteries therein are expansive, detailed, and worthy of the property. Were this a film, it would rank a few notches above Dial of Destiny.

But as a game, while the stealth has its charms, the gentle puzzle-solving gets the job done, and porting over Wolfenstein’s perk system was a smart move (i.e., you level up skills based on how often the base skill is used), it finds Indy returning to terrain well trod by Lara Croft and Nathan Drake. Great Circle feels oddly conservative when it comes to letting you have full power over the most dynamic parts of the game the way that Indy’s heir apparents in the gaming space do. The obstacles that do exist either aren’t ingenious enough to make the player feel like a world-famous archaeologist for solving them, or don’t allow you to feel enough like a shady scoundrel to feel clever or heroic, despite all the right ingredients being here to allow for such things.

It all, again, depends on who Indiana Jones is to you. Great Circle is a wonderful Indiana Jones game if your Indy is a man keeping history sacred while jet-setting to beautiful remote locales with God, or gods, on his side. If your man is one who’s frequently outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched by forces natural and supernatural, where every encounter may end in failure, you might still have a good time, but by and large, you’re digging in the wrong place.

This game was reviewed with a code provided by fortyseven communications.