Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: One of this year’s greatest adventures

Indiana Jones has deserved a game this good for a very long time. While Lucasfilm’s more popular sci-fi brother has had more video game adaptations than there are stars in the galaxy, Indy has had to suffer in relative gaming obscurity.

A few PC adventures and a console game or two simply haven’t been good enough for one of cinema’s most iconic heroes. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle puts that to rest with an adventure game that’s not only presentationally top-notch, but packed with entertaining scenes.

The Great Circle takes place in 1937 between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, right in the middle of peak Dr Jones. A mystery intruder leads Indy to The Vatican on the trial of an artifact that both he and the Nazis are keen to get their hands on.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a first-person game that splits its time between puzzle solving, hand-to-hand combat and stealth. There are linear story missions, but the game really comes into its own during its massive open levels.

The first of these, The Vatican, begins as what seems to be a fairly small courtyard with some corridors to explore. As we progressed through the main path, we quickly realized that all of the balconies that looked down at us and all the papal hidey-holes that we walked by were actually explorable.

While the game will point you in the direction of the main mission, there is a significant amount of fieldwork to complete, which are the game’s sidequests. These quests often have long cutscenes and extended, multi-part objectives that feel just as meaningful as the game’s main quests. There are tons of things to be missed if you’re not thorough. Beyond that, there are smaller mysteries like trying to work out the code to a safe, or unlocking a door to an armory.

None of this feels like padding, either. The inclusion of full cutscenes, extra side characters, and worthwhile rewards means that if you were to complete absolutely everything in The Vatican, the expansive Gizeh section, and the other open areas, the game could easily balloon past 30 to 40 hours.

While exploring The Vatican we wandered down a random staircase and were greeted by a locked door. We were told that only Mussolini’s finest can enter. So we found the appropriate fascist garb and were suddenly in the middle of an underground boxing ring.

We spent hours in each of the open zones completing as many of the quests as we could, and we know there’s still more to excavate. If you’re keen to see all of the game’s secrets but don’t consider yourself a dab-hand at archaeology, you can purchase in-universe guidebooks that show the general locations of the secrets.

Similarly, with puzzle solving, which you’ll spend a lot of time doing, the game is keen to let you get on with it yourself but offers guidance for those who need it. If you’re stuck, you can take a picture of the puzzle with the in-game camera, with each subsequent picture you take offering a more and more obvious clue, until the game tells you the solution.

This is a great alternative to some recent blockbuster titles that have basically shouted the answer to puzzles at the player before you’ve even had a chance to think. The puzzles themselves are well-designed and never stray into busywork or frustration.

The hand-to-hand combat is the only area where the game stumbles somewhat. Indy has his whip and a revolver, as well as the huge number of items that can be picked off the ground. More often than not, getting into a one-on-one fight is a result of you messing up the stealth, but there are a few forced combat sequences that interrupt the pace.

Punches don’t feel like they do much damage at all, and when you’re faced with more than one enemy, things break down somewhat. There are some great natural moments where we’ve whipped a gun off an enemy’s hand and then pushed them off the side of a balcony, only to spin around and catch the candle stick that the other foe was trying to concuss us with, but the way enemies engage makes these moments rare.

Speaking of stealth, there is a mix of traditional stealth gameplay of hiding behind things and monitoring vision meters above enemy heads, and Hitman-style dress-up where disguises give you access to off-limits areas. This all works well, but we’d have liked the disguise system to be somewhat less rigid. You can’t just knock out an enemy Nazi and take their uniform, you have to find a specific uniform somewhere in the world, which breaks the immersion somewhat.

“The greatest compliment that we can pay Troy Baker is that the only way you’d know it wasn’t Harrison Ford is the fact that Ford is 82 years old. Baker’s impression is so good that to call it an impression feels unfair”

The game’s main mystery is well-paced and plays out like a classic Indiana Jones tale. Indy’s joined by Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi), a whip-smart reporter with a quest of her own. The chemistry between Indy and Gina is well measured, without being saccharin. The coterie of Nazi bad guys are absolute pantomime dame stuff, but they’re exactly the type of freaks you’d like to see have their faces melted off.

What ties this all together is Troy Baker’s year-best turn as Indiana Jones. The greatest compliment that we can pay him is that the only way you’d know it wasn’t Harrison Ford is the fact that Ford is 82 years old. Baker’s impression is so good that to call it an impression feels unfair, it is a faultless performance. The serious side, the sarcastic side, everything about Indy in The Great Circle is exactly how it should be. It all contributes to the feeling that Indiana Jones in The Great Circle really is the lost sixth Indy film.

Great Circle is also one of the year’s best-looking games. A high-water mark for visuals, the character models deliver Naughty Dog-style realism, and the environments are so impressively rendered that ‘photorealistic’ doesn’t do it justice when compared to other video games that are awarded that title.

It’s a blockbuster that’s befitting of the franchise. Big setpieces and huge gameplay areas are introduced in a blaze of glory, then quickly discarded as the story races along. It feels like a movie not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that you can almost picture the behind-the-scenes featurette about how the crew demolished a city block for a flying sequence that lasts 5 minutes. Appropriately, not since the Uncharted series have we seen such Hollywood excess translated to video games.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the franchise’s definitive video game. MachineGames has nailed the tone, humor, sense of adventure, and presentation to such a degree that it feels like it could stand toe-to-toe with the original trilogy. MachineGames’ Nazi-punching expertise has been married to a clever puzzle game, and a deep, genuine adventure game in what is one of 2024’s best.

A copy of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was provided by Microsoft for this review.