Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: A Grand Globetrotting Adventure

MachineGames, the developer behind the recent Wolfenstein series, is back again in familiar territory. While MachineGames is known for its faced-paced Nazi-killing adventures, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes a much more methodical approach.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fantastic action-adventure game filled with beautiful environments including vast deserts, snowy mountains, and drenched rainforests. Its grounded gameplay may not be as explosive as Wolfenstein’s, but it’s much more strategic and leaves plenty of room for our hero to improvise. It’s definitely one of the best (timed) console exclusives for Xbox Series X|S.

Setting up for adventure

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes place in 1937 after the first film, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and follows our eponymous hero as he travels across the world to track down an artifact thief. What starts as a simple pursuit eventually snowballs into a giant conspiracy and catastrophe beyond Indiana’s wildest dreams.

MachineGames uses the time period to great effect. Indiana finds out that various historical and spiritual sites coincidentally form a perfect circle around the globe, thus justifying his reasons for going to all of them. This allows MachineGames to constantly change up the scenery and utilize different kinds of environments to keep the game from feeling stale.

The game has a charming supporting cast with the heroine Gina Lombardi and the villain Emmerich Voss. Gina is on a quest to find her missing sister, who somehow seems involved with Emmerich’s plan to harness whatever secrets the Great Circle holds for the Third Reich back in Germany.

Gina is not a sitting duck either, as she actively helps Indiana solve puzzles and mysteries as she tags along, making her an excellent companion. Emmerich shares a lot of similarities with Indiana, mainly in that they’re both archeologists and thirst for knowledge.

However, what makes them different is that Indiana is curious about other cultures while Emmerich is a selfish and power hungry individual. Their ideals clash and make them enticing foils of one another.

While Troy Baker puts on an incredibly believable and excellent voice performance as Indiana Jones, all of the characters’ facial animations look a bit uncanny. The game goes for hyper-realistic graphics, but the eyes and mouths move awkwardly, which honestly reminds me of the 2004 film Polar Express, during a time where computer-enhanced technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now.

Around the world

What the story does well is that it’s paced almost exactly like a cinematic movie. After major story beats, the game switches between linear levels and semi-open-world ones. The linear levels act as huge set pieces and story exposition that play out like an actual Indiana Jones film.

In particular, the events in the Himalayas end in an explosive Uncharted-like set piece while Indiana plays a mini-game where he shoots down Japanese airplanes in China. These levels are quite short and don’t overstay their welcome, and drastically cuts down on open-world fatigue.

There are three distinct semi-open world segments in the game, which include the Vatican in Rome, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Sukhothai temples in Thailand. I love that all of these are visually and mechanically distinct from one another. Vatican City features a bunch of tall buildings, resulting in Indiana having to climb quite a bit to get to various areas of the city. On the other hand, Egypt is very flat with a few dig sites scattered around.

Sukhothai is my favorite, though. The area is a lush rainforest and Indiana and Gina can ride around in a boat, similar to how Kratos and Atreus do so in God of War. MachineGames did a fantastic job making sure that each of the open-world areas felt unique and different. There are some issues with texture popping that’s very noticeable on the Xbox version of the game. When I walk forward, sometimes foliage will pop out of nowhere. The problem even occurs during cutscenes, which can hamper immersion.

Unlike the vast amounts of emptiness that open-world games had back in the day, like Dragon Age Inquisition, The Great Circle’s open-world areas are just big enough that they fit a substantial amount of side content. It makes the gameplay pacing feel manageable and fun. The side quests are well worth doing as they add a lot of world building and provide useful rewards, such as books to learn new skills or money.

One of my favorite side quests involved rescuing an apprentice from the Blackshirts, members of Italy’s Fascist party. Here, I got to see more of Indiana’s heroic side, helping regular folk along with his usual excavation adventures.

Itching for a brawl

Most of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is presented in first-person, which heightens the immersive sim aspect of the game. There are some instances where the camera pans out to third-person such as climbing or swinging. Surprisingly, that actually immensely helps to gauge how far distances are if I’m swinging on Indiana’s rope trying to cross a gap.

Instead of going in guns blazing like in Wolfenstein, Indiana is a regular human so he has to take a much more strategic approach when it comes to dealing against a bunch of enemies with guns. He doesn’t have any special powers like characters in Dishonored, and he doesn’t even have a “radar” mechanic to detect enemies behind walls like so many other characters in similar games have.

So Indiana has to really improvise by using a variety of different weapons lying around like shovels, batons, wine bottles, and even discarded rifles. This keeps the gameplay feeling fresh, yet grounded. As for character progression, the game takes another clever route. Instead of earning EXP points through combat, Indiana earns adventure points by completing quests and taking pictures of interesting landmarks across his global adventure.

These adventure points are then spent on collectible books he finds, granting him new skills such as receiving a second wind when he gets knocked out or being able to put more ammo at once into his revolver. This approach also has a secondary effect. Sometimes it’s better to sneak out of an enemy encounter instead of trying to fight your way through, just like real life. You don’t get any reward for taking them out anyway! I love how MachineGames leaned in on making the game as realistic as possible.

An approachable hero

The game also features a comprehensive suite of accessibility options that puts it on par with PlayStation’s first-party games. Many of the typical options like changing font size and adding subtitles are available, but one in particular I like is the high contrast mode. This makes it much easier to spot collectibles and items out in the wild.

The difference in this game, though, is that there’s an option to only apply high contrast mode as an outline as opposed to the usual method of making everything a solid color. I really appreciated this one as making the background one entire solid color like how The Last of Us’ high contrast mode did, would have made me miss out on the gorgeous environments.

There are also different difficulty settings for both the combat and the puzzles. It’s a smart way to customize your experience. There’s a plethora of enemy modifiers such as changing how much damage enemies inflict, as well as simplifying puzzles so that they’re not as difficult.

Speaking of the puzzles, I found that they were perfectly balanced in being challenging, yet not so overly hard. If you’re stuck, taking a picture of the puzzle with Indiana’s camera can provide you tips on how to solve it.

The bottom line

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a stunning game filled with diverse locations and immersive gameplay. It has an exciting and adventurous story and fun cast of characters, along with some gorgeous environmental visuals. It has some problems with texture pop ins and character facial animations, but don’t let that distract you from this fantastic globetrotting adventure.

If you’re looking for an action-adventure game that’s similar to Uncharted or the Tomb Raider series, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is definitely for you. Its release date is December 9, 2024, and players who purchase the Premium Edition get a full 72 hours of early access, which means they can start playing on December 6, if the pre-order is placed before the start time.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle costs $69.99 for the standard edition and $99.99 for the premium edition. The game will be available for Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, as well as on Xbox Game Pass at launch. It will launch on PlayStation 5 in Spring 2025.

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