Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review

We have had many excellent Indiana Jones games over the years. From the Tomb Raider series to the Uncharted series, they all oozed Indiana Jones excellence. Well, now we have an actual Indiana Jones game, and I was expecting more of these style games. Instead I was given a first-person adventure game, and I was pleasantly delighted.

Indiana Jones is living his usual life as an archaeologist in the 30s. This is thrown into disarray when a big, terrifying man called Locus breaks in and steals a cat mummy. Indiana follows clues that take him to the Vatican, and they discover the cat mummy contained a mysterious stone. This stone kicks off the discovery of the mysterious Great Circle, which is teeming with power. 

Now, it isn’t Indiana Jones without some good old-fashioned bad guys. What better bad guys are there than some Italian Fascists and Nazis? Well, one of the baddies is a Nazi named Voss, and he is a nasty piece of work. In his travels he meets a reporter who is investigating Voss to find out what happened to her sister, and so the two team up to find out what the hell is going on.

The journey takes you from the Vatican to Cairo to Thailand, with some short stops in other places like the Himalayas. It’s an Indy journey to go on, and the whole thing felt like I was enjoying a great Indiana Jones movie.

From a gameplay perspective, I wasn’t sure what to expect going into Indiana Jones with the first-person perspective. Well, it turns out I had nothing to worry about. MachineGames has made some amazing first-person shooters like Wolfenstein, but you don’t want to approach Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in the same way. Instead, the game focuses more on adventure and puzzles than combat. Don’t get me wrong, you get to kill plenty of Nazis, but it’s a far smarter idea to take them out quietly with objects lying around than with a gun. Almost every time I fired a gun, I got swamped and killed by Nazis so fast. Also, with the wide range of melee weapons and not weapons that are around to take out Nazis, it’s more fun to do it that way. Tasking out a Nazi with a broom or fly swatter is so much more delightful.

Level design here is amazing too. The three main areas you will spend time in are the Vatican, Cairo, and Thailand. In each of these, there is plenty of space to explore, with heaps of side missions that are open to explore. I spent way more time on these than I have with other games because it was so fun and intriguing. The other locations, like Shanghai, are super short and relatively straightforward, but so much fun. They actually wind up breaking up the pace in a way I found so satisfying. 

The only niggly thing I found was holding items. You can eat food to boost stamina, but they are segmented into different groups like food and bread. The amount of each item you can hold is limited to those groups. So if you eat some bread to free up space, you may not be picking up that prickly pear if your fruit is filled up. 

Aside from that minor gripe, there is so much to love about this game. The story, the beautiful scenery, the gameplay, the vibes. It screams Indiana Jones and is a fantastic journey that is well worth your time.