Is Indiana Jones and The Great Circle a Good Video Game?

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a great example of how some movie concepts are hard to truly replicate with balanced elements to a video game. Before everyone gets up in arms about what I’m about to say, let me clarify that I did enjoy the game for the first half and think it’s a solid Indiana Jones game.

HOWEVER.

Perhaps Indiana Jones wasn’t the best character to center an action-adventure game around. I know that sounds weird but the thing is, The Great Circle didn’t seem to do a great job on the action part of the genre. The adventuring and discovery though? Amazing.

The environments in The Great Circle looked incredible and had the most gorgeous set dressings and world that I’d seen. I had my settings maxed out on my PC and I couldn’t get over how pretty everything looked. Each new environment level I visited was stunning and I loved being able to walk around and explore so much of the areas. 

I was really happy and impressed with the amount of space each map had. You could stumble across little puzzles by falling into a tomb or explore some ruins that you found on your way to your main objective. Also, if you heard conversations nearby with people talking about a situation or place, you could use that intel to go find what they were talking about and uncover secrets.

The adventuring part of The Great Circle was honestly the best part of the game. I really loved that you could take photos of places and people with the little camera you get early on. I felt like I was playing Pokemon Snap but as a tourist in the various cities we visited. Also, we could take pictures of cats and MachineGames got cat noises and mannerisms down which I thoroughly appreciated.

When I first started the game and was progressing through till I reached the Vatican City, the interactions with Nazis, or fascists as they’re calling them here, were really not too common. Yes, the city had guarded areas with the fascists but you were able to find alternate paths by climbing or swinging across higher platforms. Or straight up just sneaking up to guards and clocking them out with a flyswatter.

But once you get past Vatican City, you end up coming across way more groups of fascists in Gizeh and each point of interest is swarming with them which significantly increases the difficulty of stealthing. Let me fully disclose that I am a horrible stealth gamer. I always choose to go loud even if I start out with stealth. I just really like action and feeling like the main character. 

Once you get to this point of The Great Circle, you start feeling the stealth exhaustion when coming to new camps or locations. What’s unfortunate is that there’s no manual quicksave function which would honestly make the stealth slog way better. The Great Circle has set autosave points for each location you come across.

The autosave function is pretty awful. When you start an encounter at an enemy camp, you end up getting an autosave when you enter, and you get another autosave after you finish the encounter. But these enemy camps have gotten much bigger and have way more people in them, so you could fight half the camp but die and get reset all the way to the start of the interaction.

That was pretty frustrating and I wish I could say that combat made Indiana Jones feel fun to control in these instances when stealth would fail. Stealth takedowns felt great, I mean anything was a one smack kill basically if you were able to get proper sneak attacks. Even a flyswatter that should definitely not do any damage at all.

Unfortunately, when you get discovered and need to fight your way out of a situation, you end up feeling way less powerful. And look, I totally get it, Indiana Jones is just a guy. He’s a professor all the women (and men let’s be honest) want to get with. But the way he handles in The Great Circle makes me want to physically fight him and slap some sense into him.

If you have any item in your hand, a broom, baton, shovel, whatever you can find, you’ll do some decent damage before the item breaks and you need to just use your naked fists to take the bad guys out. You can use your whip to stun enemies and get them to drop their weapons but all of these actions use up good chunks of Indy’s stamina.

While you can get upgrades to boost Indy’s stamina meter and usage, it doesn’t ever seem to be enough when you’re duking it out with an angry guard in your face. Parrying punches felt great but following up with a punch would drain stamina quickly which would force me to back off and try to regen stamina in the middle of a 1v3 fight.

Now you can pick up weapons the enemies drop and in Gizeh you do get access to guns and your own pistol. Unfortunately there’s no headshot modifier so you don’t get an instant down for shooting them in the head. If there is a headshot kill mechanic, I may have only gotten it a few times since it seems super inconsistent if that’s an actual thing.

Using the guns enemies drop is fine but there are often only 6 shots in the weapon before you run out of ammo. For the automatic SMGs you can grab, they hold about 16-18 shots but you have to use almost all of them to kill an enemy. Just as a frame of reference, I was playing on the normal difficulty.

So while it’s entirely possible to just kill every enemy you come across by using their own guns against them, it never felt like there was enough ammo or guns dropped to actually slaughter the entire base. Not to mention that once you’ve fired a weapon or thrown a shovel at someone, the entire base gets alerted to your location.

I tried to wait it out and see if the alert goes away but it never feels like enemies actually stop being alerted after you trigger it unless you die and have the second chance hat perk. Only when you get downed and get back up does it seem to truly reset which is incredibly frustrating.

I know the main point of The Great Circle is not combat. But this is still an action-adventure game. The combat just felt really rough and the boss fights being reduced to fist fights was pretty silly. I really wished we could’ve used other tactics like say whipping something above the boss’s heads to pull down traps on them or being able to swing across to other platforms in a bigger boss area and throwing things at them.

The boss fights just felt so… boring? But I get it, Indy isn’t known to be a big fighter and is literally just trying to survive as a professor. He’s a brawler but he’ll always use his ability to outwit someone instead of fighting them outright so it felt like a shame we couldn’t do that in The Great Circle.

Don’t even get me started on the final boss fight. That was the most anticlimactic fight I’ve ever experienced in a video game. You finally get to fight that Nazi leader you’ve been tailing all game and it’s a fist fight beatdown since you don’t have your whip or pistol and it’s just really boring. You slide off and then kick each other like children until you get into another cutscene. The combat was just not the best part of The Great Circle and genuinely made me feel like ignoring side quests and other areas because it was just such a pain in the ass to sneak around a giant camp of enemies for an hour.

Granted, if you’re into stealth games you might like this more than I did and I totally understand that there’s that disconnect with me and stealth games. But I do enjoy games that have stealth as an option but you’re not beholden to it. So while you CAN stealth or go loud in The Great Circle, you’re really rewarded for NOT going loud since after Gizeh, alerting enemies just seems like a fail state with the amount of dudes who’re shooting automatic rifles at you.

Aside from the combat, gameplay is generally fine. I loved doing the puzzles and figuring out what needed to be done to get that just out of reach relic. I liked stumbling across side quests and hidden caves because of environmental clues. I loved just looking around locations and finding all the good photo spots. 

I always found the Indiana Jones plotlines in the movies to be generally just okay. They’re not particularly deep and they’re all about pushing Indiana to find clues and the motivations of the enemies who want a historical artifact for their own evil purposes. The Great Circle follows the movies and has a pretty weak storyline that didn’t really entice me to finish the game.

I finished the game because I started it and was determined to see the end of it. Unfortunately, the villain's great big plan reveal and the power of The Great Circle was wholly underwhelming. The motivation was incredibly weak (I mean you wanted to get the circle so you could transport your Nazi soldiers to a major city in the United States) compared to other Indy storylines. In the Temple of Doom, the threat is that a cult wants to take over the whole world.

The narrative wasn’t very interesting and I ended up tuning out of the storyline. Even the connections we made in the game with the various different characters just didn’t feel natural. I never felt a connection to Gina or felt that I should care about her story and her motivations.

Her whole arc with her finding her sister was pretty predictable, which honestly isn’t a problem. The problem was her reaction to it and how she never seemed to grow from it as a character. Also, the fact that towards the end of the game, she deliberately ignores Indy’s plea for her to stay away and protect the stones from the big bad was incredibly infuriating.

I get we need conflict to get storylines moving but there could’ve been a much more graceful way to do that without making her character incredibly frustrating. I also never got the sense that Indy and Gina were flirting. Their conversations were fairly short and aside from a few lingering stares from Indy, I didn’t really understand what their whole development was going to be until that hotel scene in Sukhothai.

That scene felt fairly jarring since I genuinely did not feel any chemistry between the two. Regardless, Gina was a decent video game companion though I definitely wouldn’t have minded if she tossed me an apple or croissant every now and then like Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth does with health potions and coins.

This isn’t to say that the voice actors’ performances were bad. Everyone who provided a voice in The Great Circle was actually incredible. All their portrayals of their characters were done really well and Troy Baker really nailed his Harrison Ford impression. His inflections and low calm tone were perfect and I honestly could not tell the difference between his Indy and Harrison’s Indy.

The Nazi leader, Voss, was voiced by Marios Gavrilis who did an incredible job with the German accent (maybe because he’s Greek-German) and seemed to have so much fun with his performance as a whacky, slightly maniacal, villain. The voice acting really carried the cutscenes for me, even if I wasn’t sold on the story.

Speaking of cutscenes, I felt like there was just a few too many moments where I’d have just a small inch of gameplay before getting thrown into another cutscene. It wasn’t nearly as aggressive as some games but there would be some moments where I'd get out of a medium length cutscene, sneak across one area, then get tossed into another long cutscene.

Again, I think if The Great Circle just really leaned more into the adventure part of the action-adventure genre, I would’ve been a bit happier. There’s nothing wrong with having a game that’s more narrative based like Until Dawn that’s just set in the Indiana-verse. I think I would’ve greatly preferred that, honestly. 

It’s not that The Great Circle is a bad game. It’s just that Indiana Jones seems to translate poorly into this particular genre of video games. An interactive drama game would do much better for Indiana Jones since we got so many cutscenes anyways and more could be done to make Indiana Jones feel more dynamic than how he felt in The Great Circle. 

With an interactive game, you’d be able to do much more with Indiana’s wit and outsmarting enemies and you’d still be able to do stealth takedowns but with a better story and gameplay structure. Indiana Jones is such a funny, lucky, and cinematic character and I felt we really didn’t get to see the whole of Indiana in The Great Circle.

The cutscenes really showed us Indiana’s personality and his classic misadventures but they split up our actual play time and it just felt a bit messy. Indy’s personality aside, I think it’s fair to compare The Great Circle to Tomb Raider and Uncharted since they’re also action-adventure games.

Lara Croft as a character makes a ton of sense for an action-adventure game since she is a highly athletic and trained person. Her gameplay has always been about survival and doing what it takes to continue living in her stories. She can be brutal in both stealth and loud gameplay and gives the players a series of weapons you can use to suit your playstyle since Lara canonically is great with all these options.

Nathan Drake is equally physically viable since he’s working as a treasure hunter and a deep sea salvage expert. He’s also had a history of being thrown in prison for his treasure hunting escapades and has been taking jobs that land him in trouble since he was a kid. So Nathan being a scraper and unafraid to use weapons liberally makes him a great character for an action-adventure game.

Indiana Jones, however, feels less suitable for this genre since he’s an archaeologist professor. Yes, he served in the US Army, but he’s not a character who’s known for immediate violence and weapon usage. He has his trusty whip and his wits. And luck. He doesn’t strap two guns or bows to his back and go into an expedition. He’s a professional archaeologist who often finds himself between an artifact and an evil plot.

Perhaps Indiana Jones just doesn’t translate well for this genre and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. The gameplay loop was just poorly balanced between its action and adventuring and this issue becomes really apparent towards the middle to late game chapters once you reach Sukhothai. I found myself just wanting to get through sections as fast as possible to progress the story and finish it.

Overall, the game took me 15 hours to finish and How Long to Beat says it takes about 14 hours to mainline the story and 32 hours if you want to go the completionist route. 15 hours wasn’t that much, but I definitely felt the Indiana fatigue the more I played. 

Again, I wouldn’t say this was a bad game but I personally did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. The first half was really solid and it just sort of fell apart for me after that. If you like stealth games and sinking a lot of time into sneaking around massive bunkers, I’d say this is your game. If you’re a fan of Indiana Jones, this will probably be fun for you.

I just felt more frustrated with my time in the game than anything else. On a grading scale, I’d give this a B- or C+. Maybe leaning more towards the B- because the game looked absolutely gorgeous and I did enjoy the first half of it. However, I just can’t recommend this to anyone who likes their action-adventure games more actiony.