First off, let's talk about what we actually got to go hands on with earlier this month. After a brief presentation from developer MachineGames, we got to play more than two hours of The Great Circle on a PC build of the game. Following a short introduction to the man himself down at Marshall College (where your adventure begins), we were let loose across two sprawling levels - The Vatican and Gizeh.
The former of those was a tighter, mostly scripted affair - with a set goal and more linear level design. The Vatican level allowed the studio to flex its hand-to-hand combat muscle, and we have to say, the way grappling, punching and bonking blokes over the head with shovels feels in this game is bloody magnificent. Look, bludgeoning Nazis to death will always feel good, but there's a real weightiness to the way it's done in The Great Circle. You get a proper good feel of landing blows here, with a punchy sound effect to match. We were afraid that such a focus on hand-to-hand fighting might feel a bit weird from a team that's largely focused on long-range shooting in its Wolfenstein series, but those fears have been well and truly squashed in this preview.
Getting about the place feels rather good as well. You'll of course have your signature whip on-hand at all times - and here in The Great Circle it's mostly used for platforming. Verticality quickly came into play during our time exploring The Vatican level, and the whip was a necessary tool for progressing and seeing what came next on our big Indy adventure. However, even in a more linear level like this one, MachineGames managed to stuff loads of little secrets into the map's tight alleyways and grand old buildings. We love a good collectible hunt, especially in a game that's all about heading out there and finding cool sh*t, and the team has us covered here in The Great Circle.
You'll also probably want to do some thorough scrounging if you're the type of player that likes to engage in combat when the opportunity arises - that'll be us, then. Shovels, planks of wood, random ornaments and whatever else can be picked up are great when things get hectic in hand-to-hand fighting. They all break quite easily and you'll often have to rely on Indy's chunky old fists to get the job done - but it's always worth knowing where your nearest instrument of death is to make the scrapping a little easier. The team made clear that using brains over brawn was their chosen way of tackling The Great Circle, but the good news is that when things get down and dirty, Indy usually has the tools at his disposal to get the job done.
Before we move on to Gizeh, we just want to talk about how darn good the Vatican level looked. MachineGames sets this one at night time, with a deep blue hue to the night's starry sky. Contrasted against the level's towering buildings and high-up balconies it all looked absolutely fantastic, and of course, the team threw in a few of those 'woah, look at this lovely landscape' moments that we absolutely appreciated. Top marks to the environment artists here - they cooked.
Right, Gizeh. This second level, which we got to hang around in for well over an hour, was a big change of pace from the Vatican, and we're curious to see how the game balances those different styles throughout. Gizeh is a big open map with multiple objectives, nooks and crannies to explore, markets to visit and so on. This is where we got to play around with The Great Circle's 'disguise' mechanic as well - Mr. Jones can acquire different outfits throughout the game to blend into his environment a little better, and one certainly came in handy here where multiple Nazi patrols guarded important areas. During the preview, grabbing this disguise was explained and felt built into the game's progression, but we're curious to see if this feels more like an optional mechanic in the full game. It certainly appeared that way, with quite a few outfit slots packed into our inventory for later on.
This second level was a lot more adventure-y, and it focused on grabbing multiple artifacts and solving puzzles over doing much fighting. The map was vast too - it felt like something from the more recent Uncharted and Tomb Raider games where modern tech allows for more seamless open areas. You could tackle the objectives here in whatever order you pleased, and we liked the level of freedom afforded by MachineGames in this area. For such a big map it would have been cool to find a few more side objectives and collectibles tucked into it, but we were limited by time at the event, so there's every chance that when we can chill out with The Great Circle at home we might find more to do in the game's big open levels.
As we mentioned before, the team wants Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to be more adventure than action (they're dubbing this an 'adventure-action' game), with puzzling solving a big focus of the title. Initially, we were a little worried about all of this puzzle talk, but getting stuck into the game, it quickly became a non-issue - and we felt the examples presented were more than fair. Also, alongside standard difficulty options, it has two different settings for puzzle difficulty - which we really like to see, as getting stuck on one particular brain-scratcher can get frustrating if you just want to see the story to its conclusion.
When our almost-three-hour Indiana Jones preview session came to an end, we didn't want to put the controller down, which is a ringing endorsement of MachinesGames' latest effort. There were very few bugs in this early code, which is another great sign, and all-in-all, this Xbox adventure is shaping up rather nicely indeed. We're curious about how the story will all fit together (demos like this are a bit disjointed), and how the game will effectively mix in more linear levels with wide open maps, but the early signs are very good. We always had faith that Bethesda's Wolfenstein team could deliver the goods, and if the full game is as enjoyable as this early preview, MachineGames will have done the Indiana Jones name justice - and then some.
