If any blockbuster franchise should be easy to adapt into a good video game, it's Indiana Jones, but spinning the source material into a truly great game is a less enviable task. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ends a long hiatus for the archaeologist's interactive adventures, re-appearing in a world where the Uncharted series has already redefined the genre. With the newest outing, developer MachineGames attempts to avoid retracing Nathan Drake's steps while wrangling a game into something that genuinely resembles the movies, an ambitious venture with an appropriate touch of daredevilry.

The game opens with a bit of fan service that more or less stakes out this claim, diligently recreating the set piece from the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark before pivoting into its own story. Situated between Raiders and The Last Crusade, The Great Circle is interested in the same subjects as the franchise's most memorable films. The plot starts at Marshall College, but it doesn't take long for Indy to get wrapped up in a race to recover powerful artifacts before the Nazis can make use of them.

It's a proper globe-trotting adventure, and it features the same kind of erratic pacing that tends to define stories driven by set pieces. Several big playgrounds offer Indy ample room to explore, starting with a tour of the Vatican that features a milder version of the Hitman franchise's undercover flavor. Smaller, more linear levels are also interspersed, and true to the spirit of archaeology, there's a generous dose of wandering through underground tunnels in search of artifacts that hide behind puzzles inscribed in ancient languages or walls that are weak to sledgehammers.

Scrappy Melee Action Is The Star Of The Gameplay

Guns Can Be Nice Decorations

Most of the action sticks to a first-person perspective, a choice that makes a lot of sense whenever Indy's bashing Nazis with bottles, wrenches, and guitars. It's not exactly an immersive sim, but for a game with a focused story and predefined character, it sometimes comes surprisingly close. The first-person approach isn't without its concessions, however. Swinging across chasms on his whip or climbing certain obstacles switches to third-person, as do the cutscenes, which are frequent to a degree that occasionally verges on comical.

Like the Wolfenstein titles from MachineGames, combat that never truly reinvents itself relies on a succession of set pieces and new opportunities to keep things interesting. Scavenging melee weapons is the easiest way to take out enemies, and although smacking a guard with a rolling pin or a mallet mostly comes down to the same thing, there's fun to be had in seeing tools that should be perfectly durable explode against the thickness of fascist skulls. There are guns, of course, but between a realistically slow revolver reload and the general risk of blowing cover, a scrappier approach comes naturally.

Imperfect companion AI can occasionally be a bit distracting, as Indy's companion Gina isn't always on the ball about going where she should or saying her voice lines at exclusively the right times.

Exploration, puzzles, and platforming break up the combat to varying degrees of success. The virtual tourism is often fantastic, with detailed renditions of memorable locales that actually provide enough voice lines for random NPCs to dodge repetition. Main story puzzles aren't often real brainteasers, but they do feel bespoke enough to earn their keep, while side challenges run the gamut. Cracking open one safe might confront Indy with little more than finding the right sheet of paper, but getting inside another could require him to make the most efficient moves in a problem based on the Siamese board game Mak-Yek.

Compared to the heights that combat and puzzling can reach, platforming is a relative weak point, but it does pick up in the last of the game's major areas. First-person ledge-grabbing is typically finicky, and nothing is ever exceptionally fluid. A commitment to incorporating the whip is the most commendable part of the affair, and a few gratifying moments that outdo the standard chasm-swing pop up here and there. One traversal concept with thrown weapons is used throughout an area and then converted back into a combat feature with the subsequent boss fight, a simple gambit that elicits real excitement.

The Journal Threads The Adventure Together

Smart UI & Structure

The various gameplay prerogatives are tied together through the Journal, a feature that goes much further than it does in Uncharted. Quests, snapshots, collectibles, and more are all organized in a physical item that Indy flips through, part of an overall initiative to make the game stick to diegetic elements as much as possible. A shuffling approach to tasks avoids the worst aspects of repetitive side content checklists, and occasionally running into too many doors that are locked from the other side is a small price to pay.

Not everything that makes it into the journal is necessarily thrilling, and although the process of finding a collectible can often be fun, the result of simply adding another tally to the total isn't as rewarding as coming across a book with combat upgrades or even a memorable note. Major side content, however, can feel just as bespoke as the main story, and I had to check once or twice to which I was doing. Seeing the journal fill up throughout the adventure is satisfying, and I took particular pleasure in browsing pages arranged with shots of my own framing.

I mostly stuck to settings that minimize hints and display indicators, something that some games punish by failing to communicate key interactions in intrinsic ways. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does a generally good job of avoiding that kind of reliance on UI, and ideas like delivering hints through taking extra photos of key objectives put the ball in the player's court.

Cinematic Presentation That Actually Means Something

The Spielberg DNA Is Very Present

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's focus on immersion works in service of its story experience, and the way it handles that narrative leaves surprisingly little to be desired. To address the elephant in the room, it's not a game for those who don't like cutscenes, and it can occasionally verge on a Frankenstein marriage of movie and game in a way that doesn't always work out perfectly. It is, however, a game for those who only dislike bad cutscenes, because bad cutscenes are essentially nowhere to be found.

Imitating Spielberg is a risky business, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn't operate with the same level of sheer invention. Still, it puts forth a serious effort, and that pays off with results that are well ahead of the cinematic direction in most games. The characters are charming, the tone appropriately mixes goofiness and sincerity, and the story situates itself in a realm that's comfortably familiar but not overly so (even if the Siwa segment occasionally does resemble Raiders). Troy Baker acquits himself surprisingly well as Indy, capturing the endearing gruffness consistently enough to dodge anything particularly uncanny.

A lot of games have good stories, but far fewer have good storytelling, and the style is what ultimately sells Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Cutscenes actually make use of both foreground and background action, and characters occupy themselves in more ways than just opening and closing their lips. The lighting puts ray tracing to a far more deliberate task than usual, delivering a dizzying array of Spielberg-style god rays and making the shadows matter in a way that got sidelined when global illumination took off. It may be the only game that's ever looked better with the film grain filter on.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle requires a card with ray-tracing on PC, which isn't a typical demand. For compatible cards, however, the performance seems better than the requirements might indicate.

There is, unfortunately, one downside to this success. Although it consistently looks great, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle occasionally overshadows its own gameplay with its cutscenes, rigging up climactic moments as clever scenes that play out ively while the player simply watches. Seeing Indy dodge traps or knock out enemies in especially inventive ways makes me want to participate directly in them, a desire that doesn't always get indulged.

This problem is at least a little front-loaded, and when the game arrives at the sound and fury of the climax, it does hand the key action over to the player. An occasional loss of agency can be partly dismissed as something that's not entirely new to Indiana Jones, as the hero essentially spends the climax of Raiders without partaking in that action at all. Going any further than the game does is easier said than done — I wouldn't be any more satisfied by shoehorning QTEs into the mix — but I still do wish it had managed to close the gap more.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

Screen Rant Gives Indiana Jones And The Great Circle A 9 Out Of 10

Like Dr. Jones himself, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a little bit out of time. It's a strange amalgamation of modern cinematic game sensibilities with the adventurous spirit and minimal hand-holding that more frequently characterized older movie tie-ins. For me, that mostly works wonderfully, and there's real magic to seeing what's effectively the best Indiana Jones movie since the '80s play out in the middle of a game with incredible production value and a sense of player agency and discovery.

More than anything else, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gave me a kind of joy that I hadn't yet found in a blockbuster game this year. ittedly, I'm an easy mark. As someone who can still have a grand time with 1999's Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine and perks up whenever anything even vaguely approaches being an immersive sim, the cocktail presented here has my name written all over it.

A truly great blend, though, can appeal to more than just its target audience. If I can sit here after finishing the game and keep smiling when I think about Voss's eccentricities or the dumbstruck look on the faces of fascists taken by surprise, I'm pretty certain that most people can smile while playing it. The Indiana Jones franchise is blockbuster action tuned to its most gleefully magnificent possibilities, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle chases that goal like there's a rolling boulder behind it. With that energy, any minor faults are easy to forgive.

Screen Rant was provided with a PC code for the purpose of this review.

Source: Bethesda Softworks/YouTube