Well, we’re back at it once again. If raiding all those tombs wasn’t enough, there was a new push for Indiana Jones this past few years by our overlords at Disney. There was Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, released in theaters in 2023, and the focus of this article, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, released late 2024.
I’ll go ahead and assume that you, dear reader, have at least some knowledge of Indy’s exploits on film. He had a slew of video games as well, though most of them weren’t terribly well received. The biggest exception which comes to mind is Fate of Atlantis, a point-and-click adventure game from LucasArts’ golden age. Otherwise, they were typically either side-scrollers or knockoffs of Lara’s games.
A conscious effort was made by the developers, MachineGames, to avoid obvious comparisons to Indy’s virtual contemporaries. Lara Croft and Nathan Drake have dominated the video game adventurer space for decades. They’re both third-person platforms and shooters at their core. MachineGames, who previously worked on the excellent Wolfenstein reboots, have FPS games in their DNA. They decided to keep with their tradition and Great Circle plays from Indy’s perspective for most of the game.
It struck me as an odd choice at first. Licensed games usually emphasize the character you’re playing as. In some ways it makes sense, but it can also feel like the game is talking down to me—like I won’t know I’m playing a Spider-man game unless I can always see Spider-man on screen.
But that’s where probably the biggest thing the game has going for it comes into play. Indy’s performance. Harrison Ford was apparently never considered for the role, but he did give the game his blessing and praised the lack of generative AI in the game—something for which I am also grateful.
Instead, Troy Baker fills in for Indy’s voice, though the game still uses Ford’s likeness. Hearing is believing. Baker sounds virtually indistinguishable from Ford throughout the game. Coupled with some fantastic facial capture performances, and the result is uncanny.
I’d also like to acknowledge the great work done by David Shaughnessy, who voices Marcus Brody. Though he’s not in the game much, he also nails Brody’s lilting, almost C-3P0-like voice.
The rest of the cast does great as well. Big bad Emmerich Voss has a wonderfully sinister comedy to him, and the late Tony Todd lends a deep timbre to the hulking Locus. Simply put—it’s at least on par with the movies if not a little better than a few of them.
Homage
The opening to Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most famous scenes in all of cinema (nothing but hot takes here, I know). It’s how the game starts off, with a combination of cutscenes and you enacting key moments. It’s some of the best reenactments of a movie in a game that I’ve ever seen. If nothing else, I’d recommend you watch a comparison of the two online.
Indy gets crushed by the boulder and wakes up in his office at Barnhart college some years after the events of Raiders. He hears something go bump in the night and goes to investigate, finding Locus stealing an artifact. Indy tries to stop Locus but gets his hat handed to him. From there he’s off to Italy, his first stop on his Globe-Trotting Adventure.
Despite that first-person perspective I mentioned, there actually isn’t a whole lot of gunplay in the game. I didn’t even fire a shot until I was around six hours into the game. Most of the time I’m sneaking around and using fascist heads as bottle openers. It’s impressive that they showed so much restraint when designing the combat of this game. I’m constantly being forced to think on my feet and improvise with whatever weapons I can scrounge up. When all else fails, Indy’s signature right (rivaled only by the atomic blast in Oppenheimer) gets the job done.
This wonderful balance does eventually falter. Towards the end of the game, during a spectacular set piece which I won’t spoil here, the number of enemies make stealth unviable, and I found myself cheesing my way through the final few bits of the game. It seems to change from this fun, improvisational combat to a specific, prescribed gameplay style, any deviation from which means death.
Puzzles hold up well. There are traps straight out of the movies here, and they require quick thinking and are satisfying to solve. Some of the optional ones are particularly devious, and I had to whip out the notepad for a few of them.
Great Circle follows the same Lakes and Rivers style I described in some of the later Tomb Raider games. While most of the time I had fun exploring the open world hubs in Vatican City, Giza, and Sukhothai, it did grow old after a while. Most of the side quests are fairly stock. While I did try to do as many as I could, I did eventually grow tired of them and just sped through the main story.
It’s not something to be missed, though. The ending is again straight out of the “good” fourth movie we never got. Again, I can’t stress enough how faithful of an adaptation this is. There are moments, so many moments, where I can squint my eyes slightly and imagine I’m in a screening room with Spielberg watching an advance copy of the next Indy flick.
I can say with confidence that licensed games are back, and Indiana Jones is just another in a line of outstanding examples. Are there a few kinks along the way? Absolutely. Does it detract from the overall experience? Absolutely not.
I’ve loved MachineGames’ output thus far, and given their work here, I have no reason to doubt whatever they put out next. They haven’t announced a sequel to Great Circle, but whatever they do decide to release, I’ll be there.