In an era in which whether or not it’s right to punch a Nazi has - rather incredibly - become something of a debate, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle makes great strides in offering a product I think anyone with their head screwed on right wants to see in 2024: an incredibly well-made Nazi clobbering simulator starring renowned Nazi clobberer Indiana Jones.
There are a great many merits to Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, the new adventure from MachineGames and Xbox. And I’ll get to them! But during my few hours with the game earlier this month, I was undoubtedly most impressed at the wide variety of ways it allows you to ruin a Nazi’s day.
Sneak behind a member of the Third Reich in an old castle and bludgeon them with a violin you found; pick up a shovel in an ancient dig site and introduce the so-called master race to a face full of cold metal; borrow a rifle and give it back to the bigots one bullet at a time; pull out Indie’s iconic whip and disarm a racist before giving them a well-deserved broken jaw. Truly, this is the Breath Of The Wild of Nazi bashing. For that reason alone, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle left a strong impression on me.
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There’s so much more to what MachineGames have been cooking up, of course. The Great Circle is a beautifully authentic Indiana Jones adventure that, perhaps most impressively of all, manages to offer up a video game about the iconic professor without simply ripping off Uncharted and Tomb Raider.
The exploits of Nathan Drake and Lara Croft were undeniably influenced by Indiana Jones’ big screen adventures, so when Xbox announced it was making a AAA game starring the whip-cracking adventurer, my first concern was we’d end up retreading well-established ground - just with a leather fedora and the music of John Williams.
What a fool I was. Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is its own beast entirely. MachineGames has taken its years of experience on first-person shooters and created an immersive adventure-action game that’s equal parts stealth sandbox, puzzle game, and first-person brawler. It’s a curious concoction, blending markedly different genres to give us something quintessentially Indie.
You may have noticed I said “adventure-action”, when the common parlance is “action-adventure”. Or maybe you have a life and didn’t pick up on that at all. Either way, this is how MachineGames specifically refers to The Great Circle, stressing that it’s a game where puzzle solving, lateral thinking, and exploration come first and foremost. This may come as a surprise to those hoping for a more action-packed experience, but this game is at its best when it forces you to take a beat.
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Yes, you’ll punch out Nazis and engage in exciting set pieces, but Indiana Jones isn’t a superhuman that can sprint into a camp filled with enemies and take them all out without breaking a sweat. Fist fights are laborious one-on-one affairs where Indie can just as easily be overpowered, and breaking stealth to take enemies on is something you have to consider with care.
You have a revolver that can get you out of hairy situations, but it has limited ammo and can often end up alerting more bad guys. I was quickly outnumbered on more than one occasion, causing me to rethink my approach and slow things down.
Once you start thinking like an incredibly attractive professor of archeology, the game opens up in a big way. Use bottles to distract guards, sneak between hiding places, and choose where to make your stand carefully. When you knock out a foe from behind or beat them in a fist fight, Indie almost always has a spot-on one liner ready to go, just like in the movies. I should also note Troy Baker does an excellent job of replicating Harrison Ford’s gravelly sardonic delivery.
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I’m not typically a fan of stealth games (because I suck at them), but The Great Circle’s large open areas offer enough freedom that having your cover blown doesn’t result in an instant game over. You can react accordingly, using your environment to attempt to escape or make a big, climatic bid for survival. At one point I found myself in a corridor fighting off multiple Nazis like I was in a Marvel Netflix show. Another careless bit of planning on my part later on saw me fleeing into some ancient ruins in Cairo and having an intense firefight with my pursuers.
When you’re not feeding knuckle sandwiches to fiends, you’ll explore surprisingly large open areas filled with multiple points of interests, quests, and optional content. To be clear, The Great Circle is not an open-world game, but that philosophy of freedom is very much baked into the experience.
During my preview I went through an early linear mission that had me break into the Vatican, then over to Cairo where I was afforded much more opportunity to run around off the beaten path. The Great Circle is an absolutely gorgeous game based on what I’ve seen so far, and running around the sun-baked ruins of Egypt and delving into its ancient tombs has me super excited to see what else MachineGames has in store for us.
Every tomb or ruin I found myself in felt like a genuine discovery, with puzzles, secret paths, and traps to overcome. Rather than simply fill every one of these hidden areas with more goons to fight, MachineGames has opted to present us with threats that make sense in the context of where we are. Spike traps that must be swung over with Indie’s whip, or scorpions you’ll need to scare away with fire.
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As with a lot of open-world games, there are restricted areas and enemies that roam freely, meaning you’ll need to be careful of pissing them off. Fortunately the game does a good job of letting you know when you’ve stumbled into a ruin or digsite controlled by the enemy, and there are even disguises Indie can find to blend in and enter these locations without violence.
If I have one concern at this point, it’s that the AI felt a bit wonky. One more than one occasion I was in an unrestricted area and still ended up being attacked, and the guards aren’t always the most attentive while in stealth, with one or two walking right past me as I huddled -rather visibly - in a corner. However, we were told MachineGames is hard at work polishing up the game, so I’ve no doubt these wrinkles will be ironed out.
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is, I’m delighted to say, shaping up to be what Marvel’s Spider-Man and the Batman Arkham games are to their respective superheroes. That is to say, this is a faithful, lovingly made adventure that puts you in the dusty boots of Doctor Jones like never before. I can’t wait to play more.