[Review] Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
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Bethesda Softworks
PC, Xbox Series X
December 9, 2024
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Indiana Jones, much like George Lucas's other massive hit film series Star Wars, has a mostly favorable video game history. I haven't played any of them personally, but aside from a handful of duds on consoles older than the Playstation, I've heard good things about the point-and-click PC titles, the Zelda-like early-3D-era action adventures, and the perplexingly juxtaposed series of LEGO games. Bethesda and MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle aims to be the best Indiana Jones game to date, and it may well have hit that mark, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Great Circle is a great game.
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One thing is clear right from the get-go: The Great Circle absolutely nails the presentation. Troy Baker takes up the voice role of Indiana Jones and does a solid job. He doesn't perfectly sound like Harrison Ford, I'd say he's maybe 80% of the way there, but his performance is more than serviceable. Among the supporting cast are Italian actress Alessandra Mastronardi as the requisite female lead, Gina Lombardi, a reporter on the search for her missing sister, and the recently late Tony Todd as someone known only as Locus, a mysterious and imposing giant who crosses paths with Indy multiple times over the course of his travels. Rounding out the main cast is Marios Gavrilis as the antagonist Emmerich Voss, a high-ranking Nazi archaeologist who, like most Indy villains, is out to find an ancient artifact of great power for the Nazis to abuse and always manages to be one step ahead. The Great Circle's voice acting is frankly excellent, involving several languages and with next to none of the cringy "Marvel" style writing that is plaguing Hollywood and the AAA game industry that constantly seeks to replicate it. Great Circle's presentation is on par with titles from the likes of Rockstar Games and Hideo Kojima.
If it's not the acting, The Great Circle's biggest strength is probably the visuals, as it's easily one of the best looking games released last year. Utilizing ray tracing on all platforms, the lighting in every scene has that subtle, yet appreciable touch of realism, and is even more of a treat in HDR. Add loads of scene detail, ranging from dense foliage to the minute coarseness of sand and stones, as well as some top-notch facial features and character models, and you have a game that looks pretty damn close to the movies it's trying to immitate. Indeed, the game starts with a retelling of the opening from the first film in the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and if you were to compare the two side-by-side, it is easy to spot differences and tell which is the game and which is the film. However, as a game in 2024, it does a remarkable job matching its source material.
Staying on the subject of graphics, let's talk about performance. I primarily played on an Xbox Series X, and for a game released more than four years after said console's launch, the Great Circle's visuals are hardly what I would consider compromised. Digital Foundry determined that it runs at around 1800p the majority of the time, and having played it on a 4K OLED myself, I can safely say that resolution is not a concern. It does use upscaling to hit 4K, and ghosting is occasionally noticeable, but I never considered it overly distracting (the video clip above was recorded on PC, but the DLSS ghosting seen here is similar to what you'll see on Xbox). In addition to looking as good as it does, it also runs at a near flawless 60 frames per second. The only times I ever noticed the framerate hitching was during autosaving, which the game does regularly but usually not during intense action sequences, as well as in a few cutscenes, but when it matters most, it's virtually always 60 FPS.
Note that The Great Circle doesn't have performance modes like most console games tend to have. The Series X doesn't really need one, but its small-form-factor brother arguably does. Series S also targets 60 frames per second, but at the cost of looking very smeary and with worse lighting - see the Digital Foundry video linked earlier for more info. It's also worth noting the togglable features present include motion blur, chromatic abboration and film grain, but weirdly doesn't have a field of view setting, which the PC version does. Something I appreciated as an OLED owner is the ability to specifically turn down the brightness of UI elements which, especially with HDR enabled, helps to mitigate image retention.
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While I mainly played on Series X, I did also play a large chunk of the game on my PC, which has an RTX 4070 (no Ti or Super), a Ryzen 5800X3D, and 32 gigs of RAM. There are two crucial things to consider if you want to play The Great Circle on your PC. Firstly, a card that supports ray tracing isn't recommended, it's mandatory. An Nvidia card without RTX in its name will not be able to run this game, period. Likewise, anything older or lower spec than AMD's Radeon RX 6600 also likely won't work. This is a point of contention for a lot of people who have an otherwise still decent older GPU without ray tracing support. Personally, I believe ray tracing is an inevitability, just one that's arriving maybe a little slower than anticipated. Doom: The Dark Ages will also require hardware ray tracing, showing that The Great Circle just the first step for Bethesda towards that future. You can kick it up a notch with full path tracing, but as expected, it'll tank your framerate pretty hard and it's not something I found to be as transformative as in other games, such as Cyberpunk 2077, so I personally left it off (all of the images on this page were either taken with it off or on Xbox).
The second thing you need to consider is your VRAM. Great Circle, despite its ray tracing requirement, is, for the most part, a fairly well optimized game, but if it uses more VRAM than your graphics card can handle, it'll stutter like crazy. I can get it to run decently on my system, but for some reason running the game at 4K, regardless of which other settings I was using, including DLSS, would drop the game down to about 4 FPS, and would only sometimes correct itself if I alt-tabbed and clicked back in. My understanding from another Digital Foundry video is that as long as you keep your VRAM usage in check, you'll be fine.
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In my opinion, the audio is the game's weakest presentational aspect. My problem isn't in the ambient effects, like water dripping in a damp cavern, or the iconic "crack" of Indy's bull whip - that's all present and accounted for and adds to the game's immersion factor. My issue is the soundtrack, which I find lacks the magic that John Williams manages to get out of every project he's involved in. Perhaps that's because it's meant for a game rather than a movie, and needs to be more dynamic and all-encompasing. It's not bad by any stretch, but it does sound a bit generic, especially outside of cutscenes and the occasional scripted action sequence. Maybe I'm not the most qualified to talk about music, and maybe I just can't put my finger on it, but I thought that while the music sounds like Indiana Jones, it doesn't feel like Indiana Jones. Hopefully that makes sense.
This leads me to the big question: The Great Circle looks like Indiana Jones and sounds like Indiana Jones, but how does it do in regards to being Indiana Jones? The plot of the Great Circle is typical Indiana Jones fare - as Indy, you travel the world with the typical vague love interest companion, following the typical Nazi bad guy to see what typical bad guy scheme he's up to, and typically solve typical puzzles in the typical ruins of typical ancient civilizations as you typically move closer to uncovering one of the world's great typical mysteries. On the one hand, it checks every box you would expect an Indiana Jones game to check. On the other hand, it doesn't do much to separate itself from its inspiration. I've seen people say it's better than Crystal Skull or Dial of Destiny, but I thought The Great Circle's plot was too formulaic to agree with that assessment. Okay, maybe Crystal Skull.
I like the blueprint of The Great Circle a lot - its parcticular balance of action and adventure gameplay elements suits Indiana Jones quite well, to the point where I believe it's what Uncharted should have always been. There are a few large maps in which you have free reign to roam around and discover things on your own, or just follow the next point to advance the story, a level of freedom I very much appreciate. I mostly stuck with the story, not doing very many side quests, and the ones I did do didn't add to the game meaningfully in such a way that compelled me to go out of my way to persue the rest of them. Interestingly, The Great Circle primarily focuses on stealth, allowing you to take out unsuspecting bad guys from behind with one strike of the many improvised weapons scattered around. Once you've knocked someone out, you can pick up their bodies and move them around so someone else doesn't find them and alert his buddies, just like other stealth-centric titles such as Thief or Dishonored. If that's not your style, get used to it, because damn near everywhere you want to go in The Great Circle has a cadre of guards you'll need to get past.
As you probably already know from the movies, Indy is something of a pugilist, so when stealth isn't enough, you will have to throw hands in what can best be described as a clunky version of Punch-Out. Parry with the LB button, then use the shoulder trigger corresponding to your free hand to land a hit; A button dodges out of the way. You can also block, I guess. This is one of those cases where you need to play it yourself to understand, but I thought it felt just a little bit off and never found it to be all that fun. In heavier situations, you can resort to using your pistol, or using the Nazis' own firearms against them. Every weapon besides Indy's own handgun is one-time use, so if you thought that kind of thing is annoying in games like Breath of the Wild, you'll probably hate it here - repair kits only work on Indy's pistol, or whatever he has bound to left on the D-pad while wearing disguises.
More Indy-centric actions involve his whip. Use it to climb and swing for reaching new areas, scaring away dogs, or stunning and disarming opponents. It's satisfying at first, thanks to the sound it makes every time you use it, but the charm wears off after a while. And that's how I would describe the game as a whole - charming, but by the time you're half-way through the campaign, it starts to feel repetitive, failing to regularly introduce new concepts that challenge the player. The Great Circle's difficulty curve is not very steep - the situations presented to the player late in the game are hardly any different from those you'll find early in the game. You climb around, sneak up on Nazis, climb or pull on things with your whip, wash, rinse, repeat, .
Adding to the been-there-done-that nature of the game is MachineGames' usage of what I like to call the Contemporary Game Design Starter Pack. First aid bandages heal you, food gives you temporary health, and fruits give you temporary stamina. Books can be used to upgrade Indy's capabilities, many of which you'll find lying around, and some you'll get as a reward for turning in stolen German medicine to specific individuals. In order to use the books, you have to spend Adventure Points, which you earn by completing quests, finding relics, and taking pictures of damn near everything, among other things. Most of these upgrades improve simple numeral attributes, such max health, regenerative ability, weapon durability, and so on. My favorite upgrade is Lucky Hat, which gives you a second chance when you're knocked out by picking up your hat while you're on the ground - not because it's useful, but because Indy does this stupid, cheesy grin every time regardless of context.
Enemy AI is unimpressive - I get they have to be a little dumb for the sake of gameplay flow, but these guys are really dumb. You can often take out an enemy Nazi without his nearby comrades even noticing, and despite being able to pick up bodies so you can hide them, I rarely found myself in a situation where I couldn't just leave a body out in the open without consequence. The easiest way to take someone out is whacking them with a melee weapon from behind, as Nazis seem to be better at taking bullets to the skull than a fly-swatter. The Great Circle has four difficulty settings for "Action Experience"; my first playthrough was on the second (moderate) and I played through the first half or so again, for the sake of getting screenshots, on the third setting (hard), and maybe it's because I was more familiar with the game the second time, but I could not tell a difference. You might as well play it on hard, and it's worth noting you can change the difficulty whenever you want.
While I find The Great Circle as a game to be ho-hum, it doesn't have many real issues - it's a technically competent game, but I do have one gripe: Fast travel. If you want to get from place to place quickly, you need to use sign posts, which are surprisingly easy to miss, despite the fact that they gleam in the distance. Sometimes they're not spaced out in meaningful ways, only saving about 15-30 seconds of time, while some areas you have to go to don't have a signpost anywhere near it. In addition, I found myself in a frustrating situation where I went back into a Nazi compound for a side quest, decided I didn't want to do it yet, and found it tough to leave, not just because of the sheer number of Nazis that needed to be either avoided or knocked out, but I also had trouble finding the exit. I thought I could cheese it by returning to a previous chapter of the game, then coming back, but it brought me back still in the compound. Adding to the frustration were invisible walls where Indy should easily be able to escape. If I could just fast travel out of there, I wouldn't have wasted a half hour stumbling around. You can call it user error, but I'm confident I won't be the only user having such an error. There's no good reason why you can't fast travel to any sign post when not in conflict.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a decent enough game, faithfully replicating the overall feel of the film series, with suitable gameplay that is competent, but repetitive. If all you want is an Indiana Jones video game with serviceable gameplay wrapped up with a new story that checks all the boxes and could hold up on its own as a "sixth" entry of the films, then by all means, check it out. It's not unenjoyable, but in the 18 or so hours it took me to get through the main storyline, it just didn't do enough to keep me interested past the halfway mark. For me, it's a 3 out of 5.