In a lot of ways, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is almost the pinnacle of video game perfection. I was sceptical going in. Most things under Mickey Mouse’s thumb that aren’t Marvel have had a tepid response including the most recent Indiana Jones movie — Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. However Indiana Jones and the Great Circle bucks the trend.
Set between the events of the movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has you as the titular archaeologist and explorer as you scour the globe in an attempt to solve the mystery of the Great Circle — a collection of holy sites across the world which form a perfect circle when plotted on a map — before his nemesis (and Nazi) Emmerich Voss does.
The moment Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had me hooked was when I made it to the game’s first area, a Fascist-fortified version of the Vatican. After a somewhat lengthy exposition consisting of light gameplay and a lot of cut-scenes, the Vatican section highlights the open-ended nature of how you can approach each mission.
There’s a welcome level of flexibility in how you handle each objective thrown at you. Sure, you can simply use Jones’ revolver from the get go but you won’t get very far by just trying to gun down every enemy you see. Instead, the game throws a host of tools at you to find your way around its many challenges.
I snuck past guards, knocked out soldiers, wore disguises while avoiding observant enemies, regaled in underground fight clubs to boost my skills, and discovered my fair share of tombs hiding beneath the Vatican’s hallowed halls and beyond, such as Gizeh, Sukothai, and Iraq.
The action takes place in first-person, shifting to third-person as you climb a ladder or swing across pits of death with your whip. After years of games like Tomb Raider and Uncharted codifying the adventure genre to be third-person, I’ll admit I wasn’t so sure how developer MachineGames’ focus on a predominantly first-person perspective would work.
Those fears quickly melted away when I saw how each location accommodated for this. From interactions with non-playable characters to combat and even stealth, each and every part of the game works in tandem with the first-person view. Be it crawling through vents in army bases or solving puzzles in chambers of sand or just avoiding death from a swarm of flesh-eating leeches, it simply works well in first-person and does a whole lot to heighten the immersion of the proceedings.
Speaking of immersion, the moment-to-moment gameplay is surprisingly nuanced. Jones’ whip can disarm foes and grapple across canyons while guns can be used as intended — with the side-effect of every enemy in the vicinity rushing to your location the moment they hear shots fired or to quietly bludgeon your opponent. Every action has a welcome sense of weight and impact to it, even throwing punches in a fist fight feels good.
This is combined with a host of upgrades that can be found over the course of the adventure such as getting a second chance in a fight by finding Jones’ fedora or learning a skill that can let you silently take down bigger enemies. Throw in exotic locales that encourage exploration and you have a game that has more in common with immersive sims and their freeform approach to play than a typical linear game that has you simply resorting to violence every step of the way. Which is ironic considering MachineGames is known for its ultra-violent take on the seminal Wolfenstein series of games.
Nonetheless, there are issues that prevent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from perfection. Bugs for one. There’s a single save slot and on more than one occasion access to areas necessary for progression was blocked. This forced me to roll back to an older save losing over an hour of progress in my 25 hours of playing the game to its end credits. Even right now, this is a known problem without much in the way of a fix.
Also, availability and price are concerning. While you can buy Indiana Jones and the Great Circle digitally via Steam for PC and on the Xbox Store for Xbox Series X|S and PC (as well as being on Xbox Game Pass), the price of ₹4,999 on Steam and ₹6,499 on Xbox Store is far from palpable. More so when physical copies of the game didn’t make it to India officially which would have been priced lower (Xbox games at retail don't usually cost more than ₹5,500 before frequent discounts). And if you’re playing it on PC like I am, the extreme system requirements and download size are bound to be an annoyance as well.
That said, if you can look past these concerns or grab it via Xbox Game Pass you’ll be treated to one of the better single-player experiences in recent memory. It’s just that good.