Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: would’ve been better as a movie

I am Indiana Jones. I am trying to investigate the Great Pyramid of Giza but it’s currently swarmed by Nazis looking for the same artifacts I am. Some of the lower ranking soldiers don’t pay me any mind as I’m dressed like one of the local workers. However, the higher ups see right through my disguise which causes problems: I’m forced to either run away before they sound the alarm, or fight them and risk bringing a horde of Nazis down on my head. 

But! Through intrepid exploration and stealth I’ve managed to find a newer, better outfit, one that disguises me as a Wehrmacht soldier. Surely those pesky commandants will recognize me as one of their own and I’ll be able to stride through Giza, plundering pharaohs’ tombs unmolested. But within five minutes of donning out my new outfit, I got shot by one of those pesky commandants.

My time with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was filled with similar disappointments. Taken together, those moments coalesced into one prevailing sentiment — this game would be better as a movie. 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes place within the Indiana Jones canon between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. In it, Dr. Jones (who I always forget has the given name of Henry not Indiana) is investigating the theft of one of the artifacts he “liberated” from an Egyptian tomb. His search leads him on a merry, globe-trotting chase thwarting the ambitions of Nazis and the designs of an ancient cult of “giants.”

The Great Circle is filled with all kinds of references and flourishes that scream, “This is an Indiana Jones movie!” There’s the fun, John Williams-esque orchestral sting that plays when Indy discovers a secret. The dialogue is chock full of witty repartee and one-liners that sound exactly like something Harrison Ford would say to his co-stars. Even the punching sound effect is ripped straight from the movies. Those elements are fun, comforting even, since Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny failed to capture audiences the way the original trilogy did. But the developers at Machinegames, the studio best-known for Wolfenstein, took their mandate too seriously, making what is essentially a spiritual successor to Raiders and Temple of Doom, instead of a video game that is fun to play.

The game is played in the first-person perspective. Don’t expect to flip and dip a la Lara Croft or Nathan Drake, though, as platforming is a bunch of ladder climbing and wall-shimmying broken up by occasional bouts of whip swinging. I do appreciate that the developers took the yellow paint discourse seriously, choosing white as the color to denote a climbable surface. It’s still there as a visual marker in case you get stuck, but because the faded white paint blends in a bit more naturally, you don’t feel condescended to when you notice it.

Like the platforming, puzzles leave a lot to be desired. The puzzles I’ve encountered after roughly 25 hours with the game are wildly inconsistent. Some come pre-solved, requiring you to just press buttons to input the solution, or are the kinds of puzzles you’ve seen in just about every adventure game (use beams of light to unlock doors, for example). Conversely, others are so esoterically constructed that they are simply unsolvable. 

I got so excited when I ran into a locked safe right next to a cryptogram consisting of a poem with certain letters circled, and a key with letters and numbers arranged on a grid. I figured the way it worked was to treat the circled letters as coordinates that would point to the right number on the grid. I tried every permutation of letters and numbers to get to the right combination. Nothing worked. I even Googled the type of puzzle it was, found a website that solved them, and input the letters and the key and still couldn’t get the right answer. With no in-game hints or a way to look up a solution, I was forced to abandon the only puzzle that I felt good about trying to solve.

With banal platforming and puzzle solving a bit too simplistic, the last gameplay element left is combat and, well, that wasn’t all that enjoyable either. The Great Circle put a lot of emphasis on giving me options. When I encountered an enemy, I could choose to engage them directly, covertly, or not at all. I often chose not at all, sneaking around locations and hiding behind objects until my enemies walked by none the wiser. When forced to confront an enemy, guns were useless if not outright hostile to me as the user. 

I get that for stealthy games like The Great Circle, guns are meant to be used sparingly as a weapon of last resort. I did that. I spent every encounter killing enemies with the various blunt objects littered throughout the game. I only started using firearms in one of the game’s later levels where gunplay was all but mandatory because there weren’t very many melee weapons for me to find on my own. I would shoot a Nazi point blank in the face no fewer than three times before they went down, or, as was usually the case, before they shot me once, killing me almost instantly. It felt like I had played the game the way it asked me to, but I was still punished for it.

That said, The Great Circle isn’t totally joyless. The levels incorporate multiple ways to reach an objective and it is legitimately fun to wheedle around to find the solution off the beaten path. I first found that Wehrmacht uniform behind a locked door requiring a key, and I walked away dismayed because I didn’t have the patience to go rooting around for the Nazi who had it. But I just happened to look up and see this locked room was connected to a tower with an open door; all I had to do was shimmy up there, beat up the lone guard, and the uniform was mine. That was fun. When I noticed the two enemies I had beaten up were standing in a pool of water investigating a broken electrical device, I reloaded the checkpoint just to see if I could electrocute them instead. I could. Well done.

But those little thrills were so few and far between because it felt like Machinegames went topsy turvy with its game design. Its most interesting moments, like a knockdown, drag out fight with the main villain that happens midgame, were rendered as cutscenes. Meanwhile the less interesting bits are actions you have to perform. This certainly matches beat-for-beat the kind of stuff Indy gets up to in the movies. But those already exist, and I can watch them any time. The Great Circle is missing something more important: a reason this adventure needed to be a game.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches December 9th on Xbox and PC, with a PS5 version due out in 2025.