Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: most cinematic game ever made

The video games industry has frequently turned to Hollywood for inspiration over the decades, with mixed results. While some labour-of-love interactive remakes of movies – The Thing, GoldenEye and The Warriors spring most readily to mind – hit the spot, many didn’t, so publisher Bethesda and developer MachineGames’ decision to tackle one of the most beloved of movie franchises, Spielberg’s Indiana Jones, could have proven disastrous.

That it hasn’t is due in large part to a cleverly nuanced decision taken at the game’s conceptual stage: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t a homage to any particular Indy film, but is instead a whole new (way beyond feature-length) addition to the Indiana Jones canon in which we get to play as the titular hero.

I would argue that some of the most successful games franchises ever are essentially homages to a more generalised notion of the movies: notably the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted, The Last of Us and late-period Tomb Raider.

Thus, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle presents a whole new chapter in the Indiana Jones saga, wisely positioned in a period of prime Indy: specifically 1937, between the events of the first and second movies. It is, basically, a whole new Indiana Jones movie – except if it were presented as a movie, it would go way beyond two hours, so it’s more like a whole new Indiana Jones streaming series.

Initially, in a false intro, it teases the specific-film-homage approach, with what is essentially a tutorial showing Indy raiding a very familiar tomb in South America. But it swiftly cuts to Indy’s place of employment, Marshall College in Connecticut, and interaction with his boss Marcus Brody, recognisable as a digital recreation of the late Denholm Eliott. A break-in occurs, perpetrated by a mysterious near-10-foot-tall giant, and the pair realise a cat mummy has been stolen; seeking to recover it, Indy follows clues to the Vatican.

Adventure-packed hubs worth exploring

The Vatican is the first of the game’s three hub-areas (the others being Egypt’s Gizeh and Sukhotai in what was then Siam). There, Indy hooks up with jazz-loving priest Antonio and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s gameplay, structure and general tone begins to reveal itself.

The Vatican is awash with Mussolini’s fascists, but once Indy acquires a priest disguise, he is able to move among them fairly freely, although Fascist Captains will see through said disguise, so he must avoid them. He acquires a camera, which is invaluable, since it can be used to generate hints for solving puzzles (which are satisfyingly plentiful), and any photos Indy takes of interesting scenes earn him Adventure Points which can be spent on ability-enhancing Books.

A triumph of melee, stealth & whip-traversal

Although Indy has a revolver, I was reluctant to use it against unarmed enemies – and when I did so, it swiftly encouraged them to start shooting back at me. Only when the game reaches Sukhotai does gunplay come into play on a regular basis. The shooting engine is decent – as you would expect from a MachineGames game – but ammo is always in short supply, and the core gameplay is about stealth and brawling. As it should be: Indy, as we all know, is great with his fists, but less enamoured with guns.

All the levels are littered with melee objects which Indy can use to knock out enemies when he creeps up on them, but which swiftly break, and he has a sophisticated two-handed fist-fighting system which encompasses blocking, dodging and powered-up punches which break defensive guarding. His whip, naturally, features heavily: it can be used to disarm enemies or pull them to Indy, and even to perform takedowns if you find the right Book to get that upgrade. The upgrades on offer are very varied, and in order to find them, it pays to take on as many side-missions as possible.

Naturally, Tomb Raider and Uncharted-style traversal plays a big part: Indy can use his whip to swing to inaccessible areas or climb vertical surfaces. Later in the game, a clever element of puzzling enters the traversal: Indy can throw spears at giant mushrooms to create pivots for his whip.

idTech delivers a striking experience

Perhaps unsurprisingly, since it uses id Software’s idTech Motor (essentially idTech 7) engine – which is owned by Bethesda – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes a first-person view, which I found pleasingly immersive.

The game is a great advert for idTech Motor: it’s fantastically cinematic, with brilliant use of Hollywood-style techniques, depth of field and depth of focus, and the level-design is breathtaking. When crawling through cracks or along ledges, Indy drops seamlessly into third-person view, so he’s often present in his full glory. And the way in which action blends into and out of cut-scenes is exemplary. The cut-scenes weren’t entirely free of Uncanny Valley moments, but they were very few and far between.

As I stealthed around the Vatican, I uncovered a vast array of side-missions and activities, which fall into two tiers: Fieldwork, which are large and intricate missions that generate chains of sub-plots, and Mysteries that are more self-contained and localised, but no less compelling for that. Many of the latter involve exploring vast swathes of each hub-level, and I swiftly became obsessed with completing many of them, gaining an intimate geographical knowledge of the levels in the process. Luckily, you can return to any of the hubs after triggering main story advancements which take you to a new area.

Living up to the movies and more

The puzzle-solving aspect of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle obviously draws comparison with both Tomb Raider and Uncharted, but the sheer volume, variety and consistent quality of the puzzles simply blows both those franchises out of the water – which goes a long way towards generating the feeling that Great Circle is a game which really does justice to the Indiana Jones franchise.

Impressively, the same applies to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s overarching plot, its cinematic cut-scenes and its writing. Indy acquires a companion, Italian investigative journalist Gina Lombardi, and the pair’s relationship develops in a plausible and interesting manner. Indy can often be found delivering dry quips. Snakes and scorpions abound, and the baddies – notably Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss, and his Wehrmacht sidekick / frenemy Gantz – are often less one-dimensional than many of Indy’s enemies from the films.

Beyond the hubs, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle zooms between a number of locations, including the Himalayas and Shanghai, providing the chance for a change of pace via spectacular action sequences that sometimes involve on-rails shooting. Such sequences are very reminiscent of Uncharted, and satisfyingly cinematic. And there are even some boss-battles which generally call for specific tactical approaches. They aren’t great, but neither are they bad.

Towards the end of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Indy is given more access to automatic weapons, but the game sticks to its stealth-first principles: when I went weapons-hot, I soon found myself surrounded by impenetrable hordes of Nazis, guns blazing, but could always find a way to bypass them with stealth.

In that respect, as in all others, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle lives up to the beloved movies more impressively than any previous movie-homage game. In terms of production values, it easily meets, and sometimes outshines, the most recent Indiana Jones movies. Its plot is every bit as outlandish and at times, deliciously unlikely, as those of the movies.

But for me, its most impressive aspect is the way in which it really made me feel like I was Indy, starring in my own movie which felt utterly plausible as long as I bore in mind the context that it was part of the Indy-verse. It may just be the most truly cinematic game ever made.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: verdict

This is no lazy homage. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle delivers one the finest cinematic gaming experiences you'll ever play. A proper new Indiana Jones film that is actually a video game in which you control Indy, with all his signature moves and quirks: the stuff of fans’ dreams, in other words.