Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review - Screenshot 1 of 7

Okay, look, let's get this out of the way right off the bat - Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feels very Indiana Jones, and you've got nothing to worry about if you thought those classic Indy vibes might be off with this new adaptation. The teams at Bethesda and MachineGames have nailed that aspect of this 2024 take on the franchise; from the look of Indy himself to his signature quips and the series' epic soundtrack - it's all here and it all matches up to the famous movie saga. Unfortunately though, the Wolfenstein developer seems to have lost its way a little bit when building an actual video game around the Indiana Jones concept, resulting in a disjointed experience that never quite figures itself out across a roughly 15-20 hour runtime.

The game leaves a mighty fine first impression though, we must say. You start off by experiencing a fast-paced set piece segment (no more spoilers beyond that, but if you know you know) before it slows things down and introduces the familiar surroundings of Marshall College. It's here where the experience begins feeling very Indiana Jones, and we adore how this all looks in a modern video game environment. We recently got to experience a real-life rendition of the famous archeologist's study halls too - and we're happy to report that The Great Circle does just as good a job at recreating this iconic location as that preview event managed to do.

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At this stage the game is all very controlled, but once you figure out what your next artefact-hunting, Nazi-smashing adventure is going to look like, you're quickly whisked off to The Vatican - and it's here where MachineGames begins opening things up. Starting off small but slowly revealing itself as a wide open play space, The Vatican level is maybe a little different to what you'd expect from this sort of game - but you should probably get used to it. Aside from the game's gorgeous cutscene work and the odd cinematic set piece moment, this is the bread and butter of The Great Circle; big sprawling levels that involve lots of sneaking, snapping pictures and finding wee things that help you justify jetting off to far-flung locations in order to punch baddies. Sorry, find artefacts... right.

When this game flow initially started to take shape, we were really enjoying what The Great Circle had to offer. The Vatican level is absolutely gorgeous, and once we'd been directed to a local vendor to pick up a rickety old camera, we were enjoying some chilled out exploring and picture-taking as the game's main quest began to unfold. However, even as just the first of these big open areas, The Vatican level eventually began to outstay its welcome, and that's something we felt through a lot of this new Indiana Jones adventure.

Rather than keep things moving at a brisk speed — much like the movies, and other game series' inspired by them often do — Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is rather slow paced. You'll find yourself doing lots of meandering, backtracking and avoiding Nazi patrols in these big levels, and something about that whole concept just doesn't quite work with Indy's 'go-get-'em' sense of adventure. Prior to launch, MachineGames talked about this being an 'adventure' game rather than an 'action' game, but to be honest, we feel like this whole mantra has been taken a little too far in The Great Circle. We totally understand the desire to avoid combat and actually think that's a commendable approach, but crouching around for hours in big open levels doesn't feel like the right way to go; in what's supposed to be a swashbuckling, globetrotting journey.

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This approach to level design also uncovers combat mechanics that largely fail to satisfy, especially when The Great Circle is trying to be sandbox in nature a lot of the time. Stealth is clearly the way you should tackle this game (it feels like it was designed that way), but beyond literally avoiding enemies, you don't really have much at your disposal here. Spades, shovels and sledgehammers that dot the environment are neat ways to bonk Nazis on the back of the head, sure, but that quickly gets boring across multiple big open levels that take up a good 10-15 hours of the experience. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle needed to introduce more interesting ways to be stealthy for how much it forces this approach to combat.

On that note, the game does contain plenty of firearms for you to go loud and proud with - but they always have tiny amounts of ammunition, and once you start firing, you're always so overwhelmed by enemy forces that shooting was never the right choice to begin with. Make no mistake, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn't want you to use force, but as we've already mentioned, it doesn't make stealth varied and interesting enough either. On reflection, we reckon providing the proper tools for players to take on either a stealthy or an all-guns-blazing approach would have been a much better way to go - you could even move into Dishonored territory; enabling totally different gameplay styles depending on how much fighting you engage with.

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One area where you can be more upfront in combat is during the game's various boss fights - in fact, you have to jump in and throw a punch or two here. Yep, The Great Circle's bosses all revolve around hand-to-hand combat, and, well... they're all basically the same thing. You're sectioned off in a little arena-style area — Indy's big chunky fists primed and ready for fightin' — and you basically have to land punches, parry and dodge until your enemy drops. These aren't particularly tough or anything, but they feel a little strange, and do very little to offer any real variety across the game. Even the final boss fight is only a slight variation on what you'll have become used to throughout the rest of the experience.

Thankfully, puzzles in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are more varied than the game's combat sections, and these are one of the highlights of the experience. There aren't that many of them — puzzles tend to crop up in-between the game's bigger areas — but they're mostly different enough that whenever one appears, you're looking forward to figuring it out. There's nothing too head-scratching either, and with separate difficulty levels for puzzles alongside a camera mechanic that gives further clues, the game is quite flexible in this regard - meaning you'll never be hung up for long on a particular puzzle.

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Back to stealth for a minute though... beyond the fact that it's just not a satisfying experience to engage with in those more open levels, it's also a bit broken. For instance, throughout the game you can find character upgrades (some useful, some not-so-much), and one of them enables a mechanic where if you die in combat, you get the chance to magically revive yourself with Indy's dropped hat. And, well, if you use this after breaking stealth, you can magically stand back up and be hidden to enemies again. Yep, you could have a horde of Nazis on your ass that saw exactly where you got taken down, only for them to have no idea where you are when you stand back up. To top it all off, there's a fun little cutscene that happens as you retrieve your hat which makes for interesting viewing; as Indiana grins while completely breaking the illusion of stealth in this game.

Finding those character upgrades does at least give you something extra to do across the more open areas, alongside scouring for collectibles and side quests to take part in. We didn't engage with too much of this — especially because it felt like we spent enough time in these areas simply finding all the bits and bobs needed to progress the main story — but yeah, those collecting elements are certainly in this game if you want to explore every single nook and cranny of The Great Circle. We just wish the gameplay and combat made finding all of these a more enticing undertaking!

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Thankfully, character performances are much less disjointed than the overall structure, and they really do carry quite a fun Indiana Jones tale from beginning to end. There's nothing revolutionary in here, but The Great Circle provides exactly the sort of story you want from an adventure like this; fun and light-hearted. You've got nail-biting last-minute temple escapes, high-octane vehicle shootouts, mid-air leaping and grabbing as WW2 planes dogfight in the skies, and a slew of big bad Nazi bosses to boot; all punctuated by those famous old Indiana Jones quips and a fantastic soundtrack as well. The Great Circle really does feel like an Indiana Jones adventure, and that's its biggest win.

The visuals here are fantastic too, and it all performs at a blistering 60FPS on Xbox Series X - something we've come to expect from pretty much anything running on Bethesda's id Tech engine. The texture work is sublime, some of the lighting looks really good as well - and yeah, generally speaking this one really does look the part. There is some stuttering on camera movement during cutscenes (which we hope gets smoothed over to be less of a distraction) but that really is a minor complaint in the technical department. Oh, and we have to give a shoutout to one of the game's coolest features - when you load the game back up, it dynamically switches the main menu image to wherever you're up to in the game. It literally overlays the main menu onto the scene, and when you hit continue, it seamlessly transitions to gameplay. Very, very cool!

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One last thing we want to touch on here before we wrap up is the controversial camera perspective. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is largely a first-person experience, with certain platforming elements pulling out to reveal a third-person POV. While we understand MachineGames' pedigree in making first-person shooters, the choice to stick with that here does feel a little forced. First-person doesn't ruin the experience by any means, but certain elements of traversal feel a little clunky because of it, and we admit that by the end, we did question why third-person wasn't used throughout. Put it this way; those of you who are questioning the move to go first-person likely won't be feeling any different by the end of the game.

Conclusion

Ever since we caught wind of MachineGames making an Indiana Jones title, we've been very excited by the prospect, but ultimately, we're a little disappointed in the final product. The overall experience isn't bad, and it successfully sells the Indiana Jones fantasy, but the gameplay elements here just don't match up to the vibe of a fun-time Indy adventure. The pacing is all out-of-whack, the open stealth-driven levels don't work in the context of an Indiana Jones romp, and the game just feels at odds with itself overall. We're always up for trying something different and for teams breaking genre tropes, but in the end, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is at its most fun in fleeting moments - which is a shame considering the amount of care and attention that's been put into adapting this famous old franchise.

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