Smart, fun and so very Indiana Jones, The Great Circle is a stealth action tour de force that marks a bold new era for MachineGames.
The legacy of Indiana Jones has been on rather shaky ground lately. His last two films didn’t quite hit the mark, and it’s been even longer since a game has managed to do him justice either. It’s a feeling that developer MachineGames seems acutely aware of, too, in the opening stretch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. If there was ever a need to prove the studio fully understands what makes Indy great and what he’s about, then letting us play a word for word, and almost shot for shot recreation of the iconic prologue from Raiders of the Lost Ark certainly isn’t the worst way to go about it.
Cynically, one might suggest it’s the kind of painstaking homage that actually ends up casting an initial shadow of doubt over the whole endeavour – that the subsequent romp around equatorial sites that make up the titular circle is all going to be a bit by the numbers, and a plain and obvious yank on the old nostalgia goggles. But those cynics would also be dead wrong, as once those Raider training wheels come off, it’s immediately clear this is no mere rehash of an old museum piece. The Great Circle is wholly its own kind of Indiana Jones adventure – a rip-roaring, globetrotting tour de force that marries The Last Crusade’s eye for fun, wit and slapstick humour with smart, player-driven investigations that really put you, as Indy, in the driving seat of this worldwide mystery. Better yet, it’s so much more than just another reheated attempt at a new kind of Tomb Raider or Uncharted yarn. At every red dot on Indy’s journey, The Great Circle is never quite what you think it’s going to be, and it’s all the more thrilling for it.
Hands up time. I was as sceptical as anyone when The Great Circle was first announced. I mean, The Great Circle? Is that eyeroll of a subtitle really the best we can do here? It doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping, does it? Look past the words on the box, however, and this is right up there with the best that Indiana Jones has ever been on either the small or silver screen. Set between Raiders and The Last Crusade, the Nazis are once again up to no good in their pursuit of occult tactics to get the jump on World War 2, but the purpose and power of the treasures they’re after is kept tantalisingly at bay as Indy picks up their trail. It’s a journey that’s perfectly paced to keep you on tenterhooks throughout, its story missions and sizable ‘Field Work’ sidequests dovetailing brilliantly to fill in the gaps as you travel from the Vatican all the way across Asia and back again.
The finer points of the story are best discovered for yourself, but the important takeaway here is that MachineGames well and truly sticks the landing with this one, offering up a gripping and memorable global conspiracy plot that’s buoyed by an excellent cast of supporting characters. This is a studio that’s always known how to do eminently punchable villains, and Marios Gavrilis’ performance as Nazi investigator in chief Emmerich Voss is no exception. He’s a real bruiser of man, his thick-set neck, permanently gritted teeth and wicked scowl making him a palpable intellectual threat from the off. He alone does a splendid job of carrying you through the main story, but it’s Indy’s companions where MachineGames has really stepped things up a notch.
Alessandra Mastronardi’s turn as Indy’s wily reporter companion Gina, for example, is an instant favourite, and an infinitely better hang than the wave of bland nobodies BJ Blazkowicz was forced to hang out with across multiple Wolfenstein games. But even tiny bit parts bring an unforgettable flavour to Indy’s various base camps, with Enrico Colantoni’s vinyl-loving Vatican priest, Necar Zadegan’s wealthy benefactress, and the late Tony Todd’s imposing gentle giant being particular standouts. I also love just how many native languages we get to hear in this game, too, both from Indy himself as an unsurprising polyglot, and the wider cast. It’s a truly remarkable feat of localisation all round, and it brings a welcome texture and cultural nuance to each and every setting.
The locations themselves are marvellous spaces to explore, too. The tall, imposing towers of the Vatican, sizzling dunes of Gizeh and the tropical waterways of Sukhothai act as the main trinity of tentpole investigation areas, but they’re also supplemented by a handful of smaller, more linear setpiece environments that are just as dazzling and bonkers in their conception and execution as their larger counterparts. It’s the big three where you’ll be spending most of your time, though, as these discrete but dense environments have a surprising amount of depth to them. These aren’t just templated, copy-paste pockets of familiar stage furniture either, as while there’s a little bit of connective tissue between them all, they remain a far cry from the more common Ubisoft standard used to populate such wide, open sandboxes.
The Vatican remains perhaps the most impressive of the lot, as the puzzle-box-like nature of its warren of hallways, scaffolded courtyards and secret over and underground passages makes it innately more enticing to peel back and nose around in than the emptier stretches of sand and swamp filling in the gaps elsewhere. To MachineGames’ credit, there’s still plenty to discover in those seemingly vacant patches of land, whether that’s a little combination lock puzzle gleaned from just a handful of notes and documents in an abandoned tent, for example, taking a picture of a snoozing cat with Indy’s camera, or simply doing a good deed for a stranger you happened to find locked in a barn. Crucially, though, it sidesteps that dreaded Bethesda-style bloat by sensibly prioritising what’s actually important.
The Great Circle’s biggest and most substantial sidequests are designated as ‘Field Work’ tasks, for example. These are essentially miniature story missions that take you to farther flung corners of the map, but feel just as bespoke as the main story missions. Collectible-focused objectives, meanwhile, such as seeking out rare medicine bottles for the local doctors to trade for collectible skill books (many more of which can also be found in camps and other points of interest out in the world), are classed as ‘Discoveries’. Smaller, one-off puzzles, on the other hand, are known as ‘Mysteries’.
Everything else, though, doesn’t even get a mention. Unlike Skyrim and Starfield where the simple act of walking down a street will invariably load you up with 10 more sidequests to go and toil away under, throwaway tasks like helping that bloke in the barn is never something that’s made your explicit responsibility to sort out in The Great Circle. They’re not catalogued anywhere, nor are they especially important. Your reward for everything in this game is simply a growing bank of Adventure Points, which in turn are only useful for unlocking new abilities gleaned from the comic books you yourself have go out and find. You’re rarely short of points to spend, and the result is absolutely blissful. The world can feel alive and rich with people’s problems, but you as the player don’t have to stake any claim in putting them to rights. Instead, these take-it-or-leave-it moments are given permission to be nothing more than instances of playful discovery, and I cannot tell you how refreshing that is to see in a big, lavish blockbuster like this.
The Great Circle’s approach to puzzle-solving is equally exhilarating, both in terms of their pure, pulpy spectacle and how you navigate them. Its hands-off approach puts real trust in the player to figure things out intuitively based on the evidence in front of them, and lessons have clearly been learned from the overly chatty companions of God of War and Uncharted. It’s empowering to be presented with little more than a room full of objects and discerning, through sight and sound alone, how they’re meant to be arranged and configured to crack open their secrets. Occasionally you’ll get the odd line of a dead language etched into ancient stone to give you a teeny bit of a steer, but other times you’ll glimpse a note inside a seemingly inaccessible chamber and just be left to your own devices to work out how to get in there. The solutions are never particularly complicated, but the game’s refusal to give into the same kind of heavy-handed prompts that have become so commonplace in the AAA space these days (at least on its ‘Moderate’ puzzle difficulty) makes you feel like a proper genius when the penny finally drops. And critically, it’s the kind of genius we all know Indiana Jones possesses in abundance.
That emphasis on successfully reading your environment extends to Indy’s more general traversal techniques as well. The Great Circle’s platforming is surprisingly robust, with stomach-lurching jumps complemented by breezily executed grapple swings of Indy’s whip – and sometimes both at once. Indy’s whip can also be used abseil up steeper cliff faces and ease him down into ominous chasms, though only at designated points. It’s not quite Stray levels of subtlety, but I’ll take its sparing use of lightly sun-bleached walls over honking strips of yellow paint any day.
It’s important those routes aren’t too obvious after all, as part of the joy of The Great Circle is discovering the many possible ways into a single location. Again, it’s no Deus Ex, but it’s still absolutely the kind of design that will make immersive sim heads punch the air with a joyous, mournful smile. And when you do find a new way through, there’s a similarly pleasing tactility to the way handles, locks and chests must also be pushed, turned and rotated with intentional nudges of your analogue stick. You know Indy’s the kind of guy who’d appreciate a well-crafted mechanism, and it’s great to see this reflected in how you’re able to luxuriate in little details like this.
It’s certainly quite the step change in sensibility for MachineGames, a studio who, let’s not forget, has up until now made its name on the altogether more aggressive exploits of its Quake and Wolfenstein shooters. But it’s equally clear this studio has so much more to offer – and to see it take to an altogether different kind of combat so skilfully feels transformative. Indeed, reaching for any kind of gun in The Great Circle always feels like it should be an absolute last resort. Not because the guns don’t feel good to fire – they absolutely do. And it’s not because they’re so damn noisy that they’ll instantly alert entire camps of fascists and Nazi soldiers to your location – though that is certainly a factor. It’s more a question of why would you want to shoot your way through these dense and sprawling locations when there are so many other, better options available almost everywhere you look?
I’m thinking of the abandoned guitars, violins and metal bells you occasionally see lying around its security outposts, which twang, clang and wail with pleasing dissonance as you clobber foes over the head with them. Or the rakes, spades and lead pipes which Indy can thread through unsuspecting legs from behind and alternately whack them in the ghoulies or trip them up, before delivering another lights-out slug to the forehead in one, joyously violent takedown. Personally, my eyes would always light up whenever I clocked a spatula, dustpan or egg-encrusted grill pan. Sure, they break a lot more easily than the larger, sturdier pickaxes and hammers lying about, but the comedy value of using such daft instruments of destruction to dispatch ever-greater numbers of tightly scrutinised patrol guards is hard to beat.
There is, dare I say it, a slight
When viewed in this light, everything has such tantalising potential, and the sheer abundance of these objects doesn’t diminish the game’s overall challenge, either. This is a stealth game first and foremost, but not the kind where you can send out Assassin’s Creed-style pulses to easily tag and mark up unseen enemies to fill in the gaps of your awareness. Indy doesn’t have the tech for that kind of nonsense. Rather, it’s clear The Great Circle has been a much more diligent student of the Hitman: World of Assassination school of sneakiness, putting the ball firmly in the player’s court to make sure they’re not spotted when scampering around restricted areas, or to leave any telltale bodies lying about in full view of their mates (and also which don’t automatically sink into the ground as soon as they touch a tall patch of grass either, while we’re at it). It’s a wonderfully nerve-wracking riff on IO Interactive‘s seminal social stealth work, and it makes the player a much more active participant in the drama and danger of being somewhere they shouldn’t.
If all that wasn’t enough, there’s even a bit of creative costume work to indulge in, with Indy able to don disguises to move through certain areas more easily. Brilliantly, though, Indy can’t just strip the clothes of any old person’s back in a surreptitious alley. Instead, there’s a fixed number of costumes that are either found or given to you in set locations, and some of them are very well hidden, accessible only by completing sidequests that yield special keys as part of your reward. Seeking them out is well worth the effort, though – if only because they’re a godsend when it comes to mopping up sidequests, puzzles and other copious collectibles later on. Despite this being a mostly linear adventure, you can thankfully revisit earlier areas whenever you please to mop up anything you’ve missed. But even with the right disguise, that won’t stop wary captains and other authority figures raising the alarm regardless, as just like Hitman, there are always certain foes who will see through your tricks if you don’t give them a wide enough berth.
Unlike Agent 47, though, Indy has a few more options to get out of sticky situations if caught. On the rare occasion there isn’t some everyday object to seize upon, Indy’s fists make for a muscular alternative. There’s a frenzied and slightly madcap energy to The Great Circle’s hand-to-hand combat, with shoves, dodges and the odd whip crack all essential in helping you to manage a crowd. But as its various brutes jostle to take you on, you can feel all those years of MachineGames’ powerful gun-craft come through with every punch, the sound, speed and wallop of it all feeling like the blast of a shotgun. Instead of discovery feeling like a failure, its meaty melee lets each encounter rally to a more positive end point, infusing them with a muck-in and give-it-a-go-anyway kind of attitude – though not to the extent that it turns Indy into a superhuman boxing champ. Enemy fists will also tear through you like a shotgun, too, if you draw too much heat at once, and it’s often better to simply leg it and wait for things to die down again rather than sticking it out to the bitter end.
Taken altogether, Indiana Jones really feels like he comes full circle (sorry) in this latest adventure. At long last, there’s an Indy game that nails both the puzzles and the kind of action we know so well from the films, and it does so with wit, charm and a real eye for spectacle. There are moments here that feel so inherently Indy that you almost can’t believe they haven’t been lifted straight from the cinema screen itself, and everywhere you look is a constant surprise and delight. I’d be hard-pressed to name a more entertaining game I’ve played this year, or one that so willingly hands the reins to the player and says, ‘Off you pop. Go and have some fun for the next 25 hours’. For those left disappointed by The Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny, this is Indy as you remember him. And for those yet to discover why everyone keeps banging on about this beige man with a hat and a whip, well, what a smashing introduction this will be. The next Tomb Raider and Uncharted games certainly have their work cut out for them after this, as will whatever MachineGames ends up tackling next. But one thing is certain. Indy’s legacy feels well and truly restored with The Great Circle, and that’s the kind of mileage we can all enjoy for years to come.
A copy of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was provided for review by publisher Bethesda Softworks.
