This was one of the few games I was looking forward to this year. I tend not to play many new games due to how expensive gaming and life is. Thankfully, Game Pass allows me to play some of these new releases. Combine that with the awesome IP of Indiana Jones and ol' Thrakington was prescribed with 12 mg of hype!
Indiana Jones Games | Past and Present
I grew up on the Indiana Jones trilogy. I used to rent them from my local library and would watch them over and over. Temple of Doom made the most impact on me as a kid because of how ridiculous that movie is. Human sacrifice, monkey brains and racial stereotypes can haunt a 10 year old's psyche. Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite of the Indy movies, but only by a hair to Last Crusade. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny are...well, this isn't the place to talk about those. Suffice it to say, the movie series is one of the most celebrated in cinema, showcasing the talents of lead actor Harrison Ford, Director Steven Spielberg, Co-creator George Lucas and composer John Williams.
Due to this success, there have been various game adaptations over the years, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600. Released in 1982, this was a very ambitious title for its era, being a single-player action-adventure that has an ending which was rare for games of this era. Unfortunately, the game requires you to use two 2600 controllers in order to control Indy and his ever-changing inventory of items, which makes the game clumsy to play and something I would not recommend outside of a curious look.
After this, we got various games based on Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, all of which vary in quality. One highlight was Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure made by LucasArts. This released right in the beginning of their golden-era of point 'n' click adventure games and proved to be successful enough to get an original sequel, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which would go on to be the consensus pick for best Indiana Jones game ever made.
Indiana would get further acclaimed titles in the 90s with Greatest Adventures on the SNES and Infernal Machine on the N64 and PC, but by the 2000s Indy games were becoming more sporadic. Emperor's Tomb was an early gen Xbox and PS2 title that still holds a cult following but was succeeded by the Staff of Kings, which was supposed to be a 360/PS3 next-gen classic, but ended up being another victim to the Waggle Wii motion controls. Despite some Lego games, Indy fell mostly silent until 2021 when Bethesda announced they were working on an Indiana Jones game, which MachineGames at the helm of development.
My history with MachineGames is lacking. They are known for the reboot Wolfenstein games which I have heard many great things about, and with them being on Game Pass after the Xbox purchase, I should download them and give them a playthrough. Needless to say, this was an interesting choice to make for an Indiana Jones game. Known for their high octane action and putting numerous bullet holes in Nazis, it makes sense for them to make a game starring everyone's favorite Nazi hater. Releasing on December 9th 2024, this game currently has an 87 on Metacritic and OpenCritic with 92% of reviewers recommending the game. Seems like Xbox has another late year hit on their hands after Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 shattered all kinds of records for that series. However, does the game live up to this hype?
WARNING - SOME STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
With this connection to more immersive sim-style games, we get an Indy game like no other.
Plotline
The story of the game takes place one year after Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we get a fantastic intro/tutorial section which is the famous opening scene of Raiders, recreated shot for shot. Right off the bat, this game looks gorgeous! I played through the game on my Xbox Series X and it truly was a stunner the whole way. Character models look great, environments are detailed and the lighting is incredibly crisp. There is an additional download on Xbox to get higher quality textures (could be for Series X users only) and that quality shows. After you run away from the famous boulder, Indy wakes up in Marshal College, suffering from a bad nightmare and discovers a break-in is happening. You go explore it and find this monster of a man stealing some artifacts. After a short fight, he escapes with them and Indy decides to go on a globe-trotting adventure to learn the meaning of the the stones that were taken by the man and how it is related to The Great Circle. The Great Circle refers to how all the areas where the stones are buried form a perfect circle around the Earth.
Eventually you discover why this is so important to the Nazis, who are trying to collect all the stones, and this massive man you met who has different motives for collecting them. You travel to the Vatican, Gizeh, the Himalayas and more. I found myself engrossed in the story of this game and how it flowed like a classic Indiana Jones movie. The cinematography, performances, and dialogue all feel straight out of Last Crusade and all the credit in the world goes to the development team for crafting an experience that truly makes you feel like Indiana Jones, right down to the first-person perspective.
Gameplay
This is what I get asked about this game the most: "How is the first-person? Does it hurt the game?". I can empathically say it does not. MachineGames previous work was all first-person even back to when these guys worked at Starbreeze studios before splitting off, so this perspective is what they know. There are moments where the game shifts to third-person, like when you use the whip to swing across a chasm or you are climbing up some vines. It can shift quite a lot in certain instances, but you end up getting used to it. Due to this change of perspective, the game goes from being an Uncharted or Tomb Raider style game (which people expected this to be) and instead becomes something closer to Dishonored or Chronicles of Riddick.
With this connection to more immersive sim style games, we get an Indy game like no other. Focusing on stealth, exploration, puzzle-solving, and the occasional combat segment. This may turn off some gamers wanting a more action-heavy experience (which I totally understand) but I like what MachineGames has done, crafting something more unique for this franchise. Stealing a Nazi uniform and sneaking around these various areas to find hidden mysteries and side quests was the bulk of the fun for me. I couldn't get enough of trying to uncover all of the little things spruced throughout the areas, so my playtime ended up being much longer than I had anticipated.
Highlights for me were stumbling into rooms that would have a puzzle box or a mystery that needed to be decoded, and they do not hold your hand through them. There are hint systems and clues to help you out, but it is a refreshing change of pace to see a AAA game not think you are a moron who can't solve anything on your own. The puzzles are not especially difficult or anything (not for a Professor Layton veteran like myself) but they were a great time.
Bummers
Despite my praise for the game, there are some downsides.
The combat itself is not that fun. Stealth attacking a Nazi with a flyswatter is fun as fuck and never gets old. But when you have to engage in fisticuffs, that's when the combat falls apart. They got the sound effects of the punches right, but the way the camera flails as you punch, combined with a not great usage of a stamina system, leaves you with some real herky-jerky hand-to-hand combat that emphasizes going instead with stealth because it works so much better.
There are plenty of melee weapons that you can use in combat, from the aforementioned flyswatter to things like guitars, sledgehammers, brooms, shovels, nightsticks, and much more. It all has an improvised feel to it which lines up well with the movies and makes combat flow better, but the weapon degradation system in this game is somehow worse than Breath of the Wild. I understand it here more than Zelda, but I still do not care for it.
You maybe asking "What about the whip? Can you fuck up Nazis with that?", and sadly no. The whip has the ability to disarm enemies, and at close range you can swing it like a melee weapon, but the damage it does is rather minimal. Whipping is saved for the platforming puzzles and more acrobatic moments in the game, which are cool, but it turns the whip into something more contextual than practical.
Then there's the gunplay. You have the revolver from the moment you hit the Vatican, though the game never tells you, and you end up finding out when you randomly collect bullets for it. You are able to pick up other guns throughout the game, like a shotgun or a rifle, but you can only have one at a time, and they all have limited ammo that gets used very quickly in any situation they are used. For a studio that is known for great gunplay, the guns suck here. This is not a game that you can shoot your way through, so it would make sense for the game to not have great gunplay, but I wish it felt better. Also, because of this lack of solid combat, the boss fights that the game dishes out to you are not the most amazing either. Many of them rely on hand to hand fighting and it further emphasizes how not great that feels.
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Overall Thoughts
Despite some small issues, I ended up having a great time with this game. I was surprised at how much this game hooked me, and I could not stop playing it until the credits rolled. MachineGames was able to branch out their Nazi fighting simulators with quite possibly the best Indiana Jones game ever made, and that is saying something. For most of the year, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was my Game of the Year, despite some major issues I had with that game. I was not sure what to expect with Great Circle, but it ended up eclipsing Infinite Wealth to become my GOTY for 2024. It came in late and it came in hot and I loved it! I hope MachineGames is able to follow-up on this and create more Indy games with some stronger combat mechanics, more fun puzzles to do, and tombs to raid. If you have Game Pass, I cannot recommend enough that you play this game.
What game(s) would you like me to look at next? Let me know in the comments as I would like to make writing reviews more frequent next year and beyond.
Until next time, buh-byee!
