Every Moment You’re Playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Feels Like Torture

Indiana Jones should be the perfect video game hero. He solves puzzles, he shoots Nazis, he leaps and swings through an international cavalcade of locations primed for platforming. His very existence has inspired some of the greats of the medium, from Tomb Raider to Uncharted, all in homage to the whip-slinging blueprint Indy provided. And while he’s definitely starred in plenty of attempts over the years, he still feels like he’s waiting for his moment to shine in the world of games of his own accord, rather than simply via the impact of his legacy.

With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he’s very much still waiting.

Out next week from Bethesda and MachineGames, Great Circle marks Indy’s first return to video games in 15 years, since the double hit of the mediocre Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings and the slightly-less mediocre Lego Indiana Jones sequel, The Adventure Continues, in 2009. Set in 1937 between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, it begins with a break-in at Marshall College by a mysterious, giant man named Locus (the late, great Tony Todd). That sets Indiana Jones (Troy Baker) on an international adventure in search of a series of artifacts from ancient temples that form the titular Great Circle—a powerful relic also being sought by the Nazi regime’s latest occult expert, rival archaeologist Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis).

Over the course of the around 15 hours or so it’ll take you to whip, punch, and mostly watch cutscenes through Great Circle, you’ll travel everywhere from Vatican City to Thailand, from the pyramids of Giza to Shanghai during the height of the Japanese invasion of China, as Indy teams up with investigative journalist Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi) to stop Voss, and solve the mystery of the Great Circle’s vast power. It’s in telling that story that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle really shines. It’s a slow burn due to the length of a video game compared to your average movie, but watching Great Circle it’s clear MachineGames not only has great reverence for the films, but understands what makes Indiana Jones work in the first place.

Great Circle is packed with great characters giving impeccable performances. Baker makes for a stellar turn as a Harrison Ford-alike that rarely breaks into his usual gaming voiceover sound, aided by a brilliant render model of a young Harrison Ford that MachineGames’ cinematics revels in giving a great deal of subtlety and nuance to, letting your brain make the leap that you might as well be watching Ford in his prime all over again, from high drama to slapstick humor. He’s backed by a great cast of supporting characters you meet across the world, anchored by Gina, who provides a compelling emotional arc to hang the game on beyond her relationship with Indy. In Voss, Great Circle has a compellingly asshole-ish rival, one that leans less into the direct menace of the likes of Belloq or Donovan, and more into the almost threateningly comical exaggeration of the Nazis seen in MachineGames’ Wolfenstein reboot.

All this plays out in greatly presented cinematic cutscenes, shot and framed to feel just like you’re not only watching an Indiana Jones movie, but arguably one of the best of them, standing alongside the likes of Raiders and Last Crusade at the very heights of the Indiana Jones franchise. It has everything you want out of one of these stories—sweeping scale, humor, heart, and romance, tons of action and yes, Nazis getting what they deserve.

But that’s where the good news stops. Because while Great Circle is a fantastic thing to watch, it is also a video game that you have to play—and playing it is an exercise in excruciating, frustrating tedium.

Almost every mechanical aspect of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is miserable to experience. Its controls are horrendously clunky, with almost every interaction with the world around you feeling like it takes one button press too many to get anything done. Although there are linear segments of the game—its mechanical highlights being the various temples Indy has to puzzle his way through—a good chunk of the game is split into a series of semi-open world locations to explore for sidequests and flourishing details, but they’re simultaneously too large to feel great traversing through and also frustrated by the presence of guards peppered throughout to force you into interacting with the game’s simplistic stealth system.

It doesn’t help that every action you take—running, jumping, climbing, punching, whipping—is governed by a stamina bar that feels too short even after unlocking extensions, that only really serves to pointlessly blur your screen for a moment before you start recovering it. What feels like it’s designed for a level of friction meant to immerse you in Indy’s perspective (literally, in that Great Circle is a predominantly first-person game, save for all the times it jarringly yanks you into third-person to pull door chains or climb a wall, or swing from your whip) and remind you that he’s not a superhero, but a particularly well-traveled college professor, instead just feels like frustration to the player. That frustration is also frequently amplified by awkwardly specific triggers to interact with the world that make everything just feel even more sluggish than traversal already does—it’s no good that there’s this world ripe for exploration by the player when exploring it feels like such a chore.

While you are exploring, you’ll also be sneaking through enemy encampments. Whether it’s Mussolini’s blackshirts setting up shop in the heart of the Vatican or Voss’ goose-stepping legions of Nazi goons, enemies are everywhere, and while Indy can certainly fight (more on that shortly), Great Circle is primarily a stealth experience. It’s simple enough as one, with largely brainless AI making it relatively easy to sneak your way around (and that’s even before some areas give you disguises that make you basically invisible to all but senior officers among your foes), and the stealth attack system makes fun uses of items in the environment to let you cinematically bonk broomsticks, hammers, pickaxes, bottles, candlesticks, and even the butts of rifles over the heads of Nazis with almost reckless abandon. But that’s about all there is to it, and its simplicity driving the bulk of Great Circle‘s gameplay is just another layer of tedium.

It’s not great then that if you do break stealth and the alarms sound out, Great Circle‘s combat is especially atrocious. Melee is the name of the game in Great Circle, which plays to Indy’s strengths as a slugger, but it feels absolutely awful to engage in. Again, there’s some brief fun flourishes—Indy’s whip isn’t so much a weapon as it is a disarmament tool, forcing armed foes into fisticuffs either by making them drop weapons or by literally dragging them into close quarters—but it never amounts to more than basic flailing, a fist assigned to either trigger of a gamepad. Again, this is all governed by a pointless, but needlessly restrictive stamina system, so short fights become dragged out, and the handful of slugfest “boss” fights in the game become slogfests. And while there are guns available in an extremely limited capacity, don’t expect a Call of Duty feeling here, or hell, even something akin to MachineGames’ own Wolfenstein games—they’re awful to aim, awful to shoot, and the only saving grace is that the game limits ammo so much that you’ll have a better time flipping most guns around to use as an impromptu bludgeoning device.

All this is compounded by a weird checkpointing system, too. There’s no manual saves to be found, so more often than not, if you mess up a combat situation—which is easy to do when breaking stealth can bring a swarm of enemies flailing at you to overwhelm by sheer numbers, and even easier as the game progresses and more and more opponents can just simply take you out in a few brief bursts of gunfire—you’re sent right back to the start of it all to try again, making Great Circle feel simultaneously both a simplistic chore and unnecessarily punishing for the kind of game it is. Well, the kind of game it thinks it is: there are so many awkwardly paced moments where you’ll be watching a cutscene, be brought back into gameplay for a single mechanical action, like handing over an item to someone or climbing a ledge, and then go right back into a cutscene, it’s almost like Great Circle both needs to remind you that it’s a video game and is almost embarrassed by that fact, knowing how poorly it all plays.

The only saving grace in its gameplay are the puzzles, whether it’s simple moments of figuring your way around a locked room or the grander riddles and secrets that drive the game’s linear temple sections. There’s some great ones throughout, and more often than not Great Circle does a good job of making you feel clever in solving them, letting you choose just how much or how little you want to be handheld through them, via both the in-game photo system letting you take increasingly explicit hint pictures, or by variable difficult settings that let you tweak how challenging action and puzzle gameplay are separately. But even as fun as they can be, they’re still hampered by the same issues facing every other aspect of the game—frustratingly clunky controls, sluggish traversal, or, perhaps most sinfully, a few buggy moments where certain triggers simply wouldn’t activate correctly even if you had the right solution, prompting you to jump back to a prior checkpoint.

Great Circle should be a match made in heaven. Like we said, Indy is tailor made for action adventure games, and in pairing him with MachineGames—which has plenty of experience in games where you have a great time destroying the absolute hell out of some Nazis thanks to Wolfenstein—Lucasfilm was seemingly onto a winner, as it has been in collaborations with its other famous cinematic franchise for games, like Respawn’s Star Wars: Jedi series. A great series in need of a modern game, paired with the perfect studio to nail the feeling of playing out your very own Indiana Jones movie… there is a reason that Great Circle has been one of the most anticipated games of the season.

Alas, the game only gets partway there, because it’s seemingly confused as to what it really wants to be. The very act of playing of the game, regardless of it being stealth sections, gunplay, or traversal and puzzle solving, is all distinctly hampered by clunky-feeling controls and a sense of friction that’s less immersive and more just deeply frustrating to deal with. But it’s made worse by Great Circle‘s uncertainty as to when it exactly wants you to embody Jones as an action hero, wrenching and shoving you as a player in and out of control for cutscenes that arguably get way more of the better set piece moments than you do.

While that makes Great Circle much more fun as a new Indiana Jones story, it makes it much, much more miserable as a video game. And that’s a big problem when you are, in fact, meant to be the former.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is available on PC and Xbox Series X and S starting December 9, or starting December 6 with purchases of its premium and collector’s editions. A copy was provided for review.

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