What’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle about?

You play as archaeologist Henry “Indiana” Jones as he jets about the world looking for rare and specialist artifacts belonging to tribes like Inca, Mayan, Egyptians and even retrieving artifacts stolen during World War II while visiting beautiful places around the world like deep Jungle, Temples and Pyramids to around caves beneath the Vatican. Using his trusty whip, Indiana must traverse around the many locations solving puzzles and using stealth and cunning to complete his missions. While Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does contain some scenes from the infamous movie plots, it doesn’t centre directly around them but having a loose tie in instead. Some familiar characters return as you go through the story and get introduced to some new characters also.

While the character is based on the Harrison Ford character from the movies, he does not voice the character himself in the game, instead he is voiced by Troy Baker who does a great job. All voice acting and cut scenes are great in the game and really do immerse you into the world of Indiana Jones flawlessly.

How does the game look Visually?

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks amazing visually albeit i played it on only medium on my PC rig using a RTX 3080 on Windows 11. There is a lot of cave scenes and under ground passage that is very dark so gamma levels were a needed adjustment and the actual pc requirements are beefier than normal so while the game detects your specs, it does warn if you’re setting the graphics too high.

While my rig has 16GB ram, i played it from a HDD not SSD so loading was not terrific but that was likely the cause. Ray tracing is present but not used a lot in the game that i could see but didn’t take anything away from the games great visuals. You could definitely beef up the visuals more if you had higher specs and I’m sure the title would look even better! Watch a few hours of gameplay below on our channel.

The sound design along with the graphics really share the experience of been on a quest with Indiana and the lighting of the various light sources in caves and underground caverns really bring with it the atmosphere of the movies. The fighting animations are pretty cool the way they sound crazy but the animation follows it great and gives you the sense of really been in the fight.

How’s the Gameplay?

The gameplay in Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is pretty neat and uses the whip in many cool ways like attaching to swinging areas to using it to climb up the side of buildings and scaffolding. You can also use the whip for attacking enemies and interacting with some puzzles also.

You do also have use of Indiana’s pistol but i didn’t find myself using it very often, at least not to where i have gotten to int the game so far. You can tell the title is from Machine Games, who are the team responsible for the Wolfenstein games, another FPS title but Indiana Jones and The Golden Circle is very different and similar in many ways. There is many puzzles that you run into on missions and some are pretty cool and not so easy to crack as i found out, as some had me scratching my head but had enough clues about to get the brain ticking from either notes or NPCs. The voice acting of these NPCs are just fantastic and really get you immersed in the story, and really related to the 80s movies with the humour and direction.

Combat, Controls and Mechanics

When i first started playing the game i thought the controls were a wee bit messed as it kept switching between control and keyboard all the time but i later found out that it was a steam/windows issue that was rectified. The controls are pretty good and the only issue i found was how icons for actions would only show is you had a certain item equipped or no item equipped which got in the way of some fight scenes or puzzle mechanics. The fighting mechanics are good but can seem like you’re not really in much control as you’d think and the animations are very similar, and perhaps could have more variations. But however as a FPS, a lot of these mechanics can be hard to take to that perspective and have to give Machine Games props for what they have pulled off in this title.

Conclusion

I have really been enjoying my time playing Indiana Jones and The Golden Circle and been a kid of the 80s, the nostalgia while playing the game is fantastic and really is a gift to fans of the series. The puzzles are great and the characters are great also. While the AI is not the brightest. I’m sure that would improve with maybe increasing the difficulty which i have yet to do at this stage. If you’re a fan of Indiana Jones and would like to play a game dedicated to fan service then i definitely recommend Indiana Jones and The Golden Circle.