Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Not long after his discovery around the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones is back to teaching his university class on archeology. While sleeping in his office, Indiana awakens to the sound of a break-in. After discovering the perpetrator, a mysterious man who speaks Latin and stands several heads taller than Indiana, a rare cat mummy is found to be missing from the university archives. As Indiana Jones seeks to recover the missing artifact, he's unexpectedly caught up in a far greater mystery which will have him circling the very globe itself. Indiana Jones is an action adventure/immersive sim, which follows Indiana Jones as he travels the globe seeking to recover missing artifacts. While there is a linear narrative, the game is largely split into three major "open worlds," The Vatican, Giza, and Sukohthai. Each location features a large variety of cinematic cutscenes, delivering a surprisingly convincing Indiana Jones by Troy Baker. However, the supporting performances are not equally impressive. Ginetta "Gina" Lombardi quickly establishes herself as one of my least favorite heroines in the Indiana Jones franchise, marred by equal parts a strained voice acting performance, and a personality that wears out its welcome almost immediately. The plot, used generously here, is effectively a MacGuffin festival, as it devolves into chasing literal stones from one destination to the next, often crumbling under a weight of its own design during exposition. The culprit here is a desire to authentically reproduce Indiana Jones in video game format. The writing evokes that same mainstream cartoonish writing as the original movies from the 80's, with familiar blend of slapstick and sarcastic quips. A format which worked well enough for a short 90 minute feature picture, does little to make for a particularly deep story across a 15~20 hour experience. Despite my criticism, I must admit that while the outcome did not always please me, the writing really does capture the style of the early Indiana Jones movies. Thus, for fans seeking a game as authentically true to source as possible, there's a lot here to appreciate. The writing even tries to add some character depth to Indiana from the later films, discussing his trouble with relationships, and strained relationship with his father. Though, this also felt a bit half-baked, never really impacting the story in a meaningful way. The gameplay of Indiana Jones will feel all too familiar for fans of modern AAA video games. Players are quickly greeted on their journeys by talkative NPCs who love to ask you "what about that lever up there?", walls with paint highlighting where to climb, and a burdensome list of collectables from each location to pad out those gameplay hours. To its credit, the arts and graphics are incredible in some segments of the game. Many areas of the Vatican, and indoor areas in general have some of the best graphics I've seen in a game. Not all areas benefit equally, with several of the later levels experiencing a decline in graphics quality. The game is also plagued by an abundance of visual bugs, made very apparent due to the questionable directorial decision to feature many rapid changes to camera angles during cutscenes, often creating instances where the rendering struggles to prevent texture pop-ins. While Indiana Jones explores each location, he's typically met by a wide array of puzzles and guards. Puzzles are generally pretty simple, and generally evoke the same vibes as puzzles from the movies. Combat on the other hand is more akin to MachineGames' Wolfenstein franchise, which emphasizes stealth over shootouts in many instances. For reasons which escape me, combat is shockingly easy, due to the AI for the Nazis being unexpectedly good sportsmen. Unless you draw a gun on them first, nearly every enemy in the game will basically ignore their guns, and engage Indiana Jones in a fistfight. One benefit is that brawling is cathartically brutal, with Indiana serving up knuckle sandwiches like they're all you can eat. Admittedly though, with very little depth to the combat or stealth systems, these begin to feel repetitive pretty quickly. Indiana Jones is a tentative recommend for me. It's a game which rarely steps outside the safe zone either in terms of writing or gameplay, resulting in a bit of a bland overall experience. However, the graphics are very impressive in some sections, and I'm always a sucker for a good immersive sim. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle succeeds at following in the footsteps of a giant; however, even after assembling all the pieces, it's ultimately stuck chasing the past.