Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Indy’s New Game Whips

By Garrett Martin | December 5, 2024 | 7:00pm

Video Games Reviews Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Indy’s New Game Whips

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When I was a kid old guys didn’t play videogames because they were old guys and old guys were men and men didn’t “play” anything but the ponies and sports with the fellas. Today I am an old guy and I make my living playing games and writing about them for people who I assume are usually not old guys and probably don’t get my old guy jokes and references. The game I’ve been playing most lately, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, is an ultimate old guy game, though, one made with our aging hopes, desires, and expectations constantly in mind. This one’s for us, old guys of the world, and the arrested development and obsession with childhood entertainment that keeps us talking about 40-year-old toys and kids’ movies instead of doing sports with our goodtime buddies like the emotionally inert old guys of yore.

Indiana Jones isn’t even just an old guy at this point. Like me and my friends and the American election system, the good professor is an absolute relic. A swashbuckling archeologist scrounging up ancient stones and idols around the globe, but in a way that’s somehow “ethical” and “respectful” of other cultures, usually during the build-up to (or aftermath of) the defining military event of our modern world? I don’t know what could seem more out-of-touch to the non-old guys of today, and more perfectly in sync with what I find unquestionably entertaining.

Still, an Indiana Jones game by the modern Wolfenstein studio MachineGames seems like a lay-up (that’s a sports term, non-old guys). The worldwide leader in movie-inspired Nazi-killing games getting their mitts on the preeminent cinematic Nazi puncher of the post-war era? Another playable movie designed by Jens Andersson, who helped turn the fifth-rate comic book The Darkness into a surprisingly smart and poignant game, and whose game based on The Chronicles of Riddick did a lot to rehab the bad name of Vin Diesel’s bomb of a movie? This should be an ideal match, like social media and depression, or old guys and emotional distance.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle lives up to those expectations—sometimes. And when it doesn’t, it’s easy to see why. At its best The Great Circle offers up esoteric mysteries and hard-to-crack puzzles in ancient, exotic milieus, punctuated by rousing setpieces right out of a Spielberg/Lucas movie; at its worst it’s a sluggish, patience-trying stealth game by a studio best known for fast-paced first-person shooters. The highs are tremendous, and not in short supply; when your autosave sticks you in the middle of a Nazi compound that has to be slowly, methodically crawled through, though, with almost every engagement with the enemy leading to a quick death, The Great Circle becomes the kind of slog people accuse the last two Indiana Jones movies of being.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Yes, set aside your memories of Wolfenstein and fantasies of guns a-blazin’. That ain’t Indiana and so it isn’t The Great Circle. Most of Indy’s time in this game is spent lurking on the edges of Nazi and Fascist (with a capital F, so you know it’s Mussolini’s real-deal Italian fascism) excavation sites, trying to find the conveniently highlighted doo-dad that will trigger the next story-delivering cutscene. Knock a guy out from behind, if you have to, even confront them in a straight-on boxing match, but if they’re packing or have any friends nearby or even hint at blowing a whistle you’ll need to be careful. Each major open-world location is full of side quests, of course, where you’ll help a nun find the centuries-old diary of a mad priest, or a well-heeled British-Egyptian “patron of history” liberate Egyptian artifacts from the Nazis. Although fists are Indy’s weapons of choice whenever he’s forced into a fight, he obviously has his whip on hand, which is as useful at disarming enemies as it is for swinging and climbing over obstacles; he also keeps a small pistol at all times, and can make use of the rifles and machine guns dropped by the bad guys, but it’s almost always a bad idea to fire a gun in this game. They’re loud, they’re messy, and no matter what kind of firepower you’re working with, your enemies will always have a lot more.

All this slinking around fits Indy—he’s never been a fight-first kind of guy—but it also points at one of the fundamental issues with translating this particular character to this kind of big budget game with broad, mainstream commercial aspirations. Watching Harrison Ford figure things out on screen every 20 minutes or so between exhilarating action scenes is way more fun than spending hours in a lethal version of hide’n’seek just to pad out the runtime and keep the story wheel turning. When a mission works out smoothly—when you find the right hidden entrance that lets you get into that Thai temple and grab the Germans’ gold without being noticed, after a few too-long trial-and-error attempts to get through the Nazi camp that surrounds it—The Great Circle pays out more than it asks from you. When one doesn’t, though, and you keep stumbling into Bavarian bruisers who send you back to the last checkpoint and erase minutes of play at a time, it’s all just a little frustrating.

The Great Circle lands on the best combo of videogame and Indiana Jones movie when it changes things up. A daring escape via a stolen Chinese plane, with you having to shoot down the fighters on your tail, feels like something that would happen in one of these movies and keeps a fast, steady, exciting pace. (It’s also over within a few minutes, just like a movie scene would be.) A chapter-ending encounter where you have to combine Indy’s expertise of the ancient and esoteric with beating a big guy against the head with large metal rods turns the basic concept of stealth into something active and violent. Moments like these don’t happen enough, but always work when they do.

If you’re wondering about Indiana himself, and how the game pulls off its virtual Harrison Ford, I gotta hand it to ‘em: MachineGames does a solid job turning this infamously grumpy old guy into a younger videogame version of himself. The character model looks like the real guy did circa 1982, and since it’s a first-person game his face isn’t on screen enough to notice any glaring uncanny valley moments or glassy dead-eye stares. Even more impressive is how this Indy sounds; Troy Baker, one of three guys who seems to get every major gaming voiceover role, somehow captures Ford’s immediately recognizable voice in a way that isn’t off-putting, disruptive, or purely impressionistic. His readings don’t always sound like Ford, but they sound enough like him most of the time, and the tone, inflection, and emphasis always feel right for the character. Humanity has failed to do a proper Kermit the Frog since Henson died and yet here’s Troy Baker doing a real, living guy and making it seem easy.

One thing Indiana Jones likes to call a Nazi after punching his lights out is “little guy,” and I like this, because it’s about time somebody took the little guys down a peg or two.

Baker’s joined by a handful of recognizable faces in prominent roles. I had no idea Enrico Colantoni (who makes everything better) was in here, but that’s him as a jazz-loving Vatican priest and longtime Indy buddy. The recently departed Tony Todd isn’t given much to do as an actual giant who exists to protect the literal language of God, but it’s always good to see him. And Alessandra Mastronardi, probably best known in America for Master of None or The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, does what she can as Indy’s lady friend du jour, an Italian investigative journalist whose sister is somehow wrapped up in the Nazis’ latest supernatural scheme. (Something videogames can’t do yet: tap into the innate charisma of two superlative-looking human beings to make us believe they could fall deeply in love within mere minutes of first defying death together.)

Speaking of the Nazis, it’s been hard to remain interested in the formerly entertaining tales of Nazi occultism over the last several years, with fascism and Neo-Nazism on the rise throughout the world. I’m all for anything that makes Nazis look not just like evil subhuman losers who deserve to get the shit kicked out of them, but really dumb ones, too, but focusing on apocryphal Morning of the Magicians stories about goofy supernatural bullshit seems like a good way to underplay the real threat posed by the resurgence of the real beliefs that drove the Nazis’ real actions. The Indiana Jones movies everybody loves are about Nazis hunting down Biblical artifacts for their magical abilities, though, so The Great Circle goes that route. And although it does occasionally make me think of real-life, current-world stresses that I typically turn to games to get a break from, that hasn’t happened nearly enough to make me hate playing it. Also, Nazis have rarely looked as much like really dumb, evil subhuman losers as in this game, so it might even be a little cathartic today.

How much will any of this resonate with younger audiences? Does it even need to, or will today’s legions of old guys who never got over their childhood interests be enough to justify this game’s existence? As an old guy with negative interest in business analysis, I can’t say. But part of what makes Indiana Jones the character feel so disconnected from today is how the contemporary world views the kind of culture-pilfering “archaeology” he engages in. The Great Circle pointedly, somewhat clunkily, addresses that when Indiana tries to win the help of Thai rebels who are sick of seeing their heirlooms stolen off to Europe, but that’s late in the game and extremely too little. Indiana is inextricable from archeology, and the history of that field, especially before the late 20th century, is inherently condescending and colonial. It makes perfect sense for anybody sensitive to those matters to avoid this game.

As one of those old guys I can’t shut up about, though, awareness and acknowledgement of the character’s problematic aspects doesn’t diminish the excitement of uncovering mysteries in the belly of the Great Pyramid or in secret tunnels beneath the Vatican. With The Great Circle MachineGames taps into the fundamental “gee whiz” thrill of the Indiana Jones movies and their movie serial inspirations. There’s a palpable, adventurous appeal to uncovering humanity’s past and exploring its oldest ruins, and The Great Circle realizes that while using puzzles that are usually a little more creative than videogames’ “put this thing here and voila” standard.

I’m as tired as anybody of the “movies becoming games becoming movies” ouroboros that has dominated the last two decades or more of game development, but The Great Circle pulls it off in a way that whip-cracks several of my buttons. Whatever cynicism or skepticism I brought into this one wilted somewhere early on, perhaps the first time Vatican librarian Enrico Colantoni cut a rug to the latest swing 78 fresh from New York. Part of what makes Indiana Jones special is how it makes old guys feel young and everybody else feel like old guys, at least for a couple of hours. The Great Circle doesn’t always keep that up, but it does just enough to keep me entertained.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda. Our review is based on the Xbox Series X|S version. It’s also available for PC.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.