Review: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (Sony PlayStation 5)

I do think that Indiana Jones shouldn’t have persisted as the property that it has. The two films that have come since The Last Crusade have been so drenched in a desperate kind of nostalgia, all but begging people to love them because they brought back a beloved ’80s classic. They are, frankly, terrible films. When Indiana Jones and the Great Circle opened with a boulder chasing Indy, I was genuinely tempted to put down the controller and walk away, assuming that the developers were falling into all the same traps and trading in nostalgia over having original ideas. I am glad I persevered.

Firstly, The Great Circle comes to us from developer MachineGames – a team that previously has been best known for the Nazi-slaughtering Wolfenstein. Indy also happens to enjoy giving fascists what they deserve, and in the Great Circle you do get to punch a lot of Nazis in the face. You can also shoot them, but there’s something much more visceral about a good melee takedown, and as the game features stealth prominently, it’s also often the best way to go about it. Right from the start, I did enjoy this about the game.

Narratively, it takes place somewhere between Raiders and The Last Crusade, and it’s a story about racing with the Nazis to collect priceless and magical artefacts, so it is leaning heavily into Indy nostalgia, but I couldn’t help but let myself get swept up in it. In the end, it is a AAA-blockbuster game, so you’re not going to come away with profound thoughts or insights into the human condition, but as far as popcorn entertainment goes, MachineGames nailed everything, with excellent pacing, and did a far better job in trading in nostalgia than the recent films managed.

Also, as a quick aside, I actually thought they’d somehow convinced Harrison Ford to voice this game. As it turns out, the voice actor is Troy Baker and it is one of the greatest impersonations I’ve ever come across. Brilliant work, Troy.

As you’d expect for an Indy game, The Great Circle involves travelling around the world and visiting exotic, ancient locations like Egypt, the Vatican, and so on, playing “where in the world is Carmen Sandiago” only looking for those artefacts rather than a woman. These travels bring Indy into all kinds of dangerous situations (especially with Nazis), at which point he generally has a couple of different ways to get through, with some openness in how you make your way through the areas, but with stealth being heavily weighted as the safest solution.

There’s little that’s particularly unique about The Great Circle’s stealth system. You’ll need to use conveniently placed bottles to throw in a direction to distract the guards once shattered. You’ll need to hide bodies else guards on patrol will spot them and raise the alarm. And, if the enemy spots you, you have a couple of seconds to quickly retreat into hiding. Do that, and because the AI is stupid, they’ll forget about you quickly enough. Developers have never quite sorted out how to work around that artificiality so that the AI doesn’t take three seconds to lose interest in chasing down someone who murdered their friends. It does break the suspension of disbelief, though.

Because it’s a stealth game, guns are present, but ammo is deliberately kept so scarce you’ll try to rely on weaponry as infrequently as possible. I was disappointed with the whip being of such limited utility. For the most part, it’s basically used to help indie climb places, but only the places where the level design allows you to climb, so it’s no different to white-marked walls in other action-adventure titles (and there are plenty of those too).

It all works, and ticks all the boxes of a stealth genre play. But here’s the big problem with this: It’s sometimes hard to identify Indy in it. Putting aside the Indiana Jones voice acting, soundtrack, and locations, and The Great Circle does feel like an Indy game to play. It feels like it could be a new Thief title – significantly better than the last time Square Enix dusted off that property, yes, but aiming for the same kind of experience. Like I mentioned, the whip is just a utility that allows you to do the same thing that we’ve seen a thousand other games. You can play disguises at points, but you’re severely limited in what you can do when you do that so, rather than being a creative way to really play up the character and role of indie, it’s just another tool for getting you from point A to B and, again, we’ve had plenty of other games use disguises as a mechanic.

There is a camera, and you’ll need to find landmarks to take photos of, but that’s just there to provide you with points for upgrades. And so on and so forth – every time there’s something that should be an iconic Indy tool, it’s twisted and shoved into a role that is ultimately generic to the genre.

Finally, there are the puzzles. Any good Indy experience needs puzzles that tie into the fact that he’s an academic and an archaeologist. Let’s just say that MachineGames isn’t great with designing puzzles that don’t feel condescending to the intelligence. I appreciate that puzzles are something of a minefield for AAA-blockbusters, as they have the potential to confuse a player that can’t solve them quickly enough and may even result in them giving up on the game (and then writing a negative player review), but if you make them too simple and straightforward, as has happened here, they become one of the dullest and least fulfilling parts of the game.

To be clear, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is good fun. The presentation is spot on, and it’s an example of how nostalgia can be traded on in a way that is fun, rather than desperate. But as a video game, it’s yet another example of how the AAA blockbuster end of the market is totally incapable of breaking away from the overly safe and familiar, and the inflexibility of these “video game design best practices” means that no property is allowed an identity of its own anymore. Every gameplay feature, character, environment, item and puzzle needs to be the exact clone of the successful examples we’ve seen before and in the end, even punching Nazis starts to feel too rote for the joy that it should provide.