Back in 2009 MachineGames was formed by people who decided to leave Starbreeze Studios after completing work on The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena – a good expanded version of the already fantastic Escape from Butcher Bay they’ve worked on 5 years prior. The title, that remains one of the best examples of a movie license game, was an incredible mix of different genres and somewhat of an “immersive sim-lite” and managed to perfectly replicate the mood and the style of Riddick movies in an interactive form. However, as MachineGames they’ve worked on titles that were a bit more conventional. While Wolfenstein: The New Order (and The Old Blood to a degree) had its share of curious and unorthodox decisions for an FPS game, it was still a more or less straightforward FPS. While Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Wolfenstein: Youngblood were showing them going an even more conventional and boring route, including a lot of very generic live service and looter shooter elements into the game.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was meant to be different. An unofficial return to the ideas of Riddick and The Darkness, of sorts. And while it doesn’t stick the landing, it mostly gets there.
Just like the aforementioned titles of Starbreeze, The Great Circle is a curious mix of genres that come together in a mixture that feels like it is going for the immersive sim design methodology, but simplifies it a lot for player convenience. As Indy you will stealth, use disguises, punch and shoot fascists, have lots of traversal abilities, which, of course, include using the whip and have an unconventional health and stamina system.
Pure stealth here is usually quite simple and enemy AI isn’t particularly smart (at least on default difficulty), so the odds are usually in player favor. But more often than pure stealthing, it’s mixing in using disguises with stealth. In most locations, and there are three major huge open levels with things you can do in almost any order, you get two types of disguises on top of your normal Indy suit – a civilian disguise, that allows you to not look immediately suspicious to most enemies, and a soldier disguise, that lets you explore more areas freely. Well, almost freely, as there are always certain types of enemies who will get suspicious and see through your disguise and you must avoid them or knock them out. With most of the stealth exploration focusing on smartly blending in and not doing anything suspicious as you’re being watched, distracting enemies or disabling them, when needed.
Speaking of the last, most of the time you will be knocking enemies out with some sort of makeshift weapon. Levels are full of interactable items that range from actual weapons (including guns that you can hold as a melee weapon) to things like guitars or flyswatters. All of which have durability and a certain damage they can deal. Usually hitting enemies from behind will knock them out outright either way, but hitting bigger dudes with smaller items might not be enough even as a stealth attack and you will then transition to combat. Combat in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is both really cool and also almost too full of abilities for its own good. You can disarm enemies with a whip, grab them, push them, punch them, block and counter attack, dodge, use melee weapons all while managing a stamina system that can further be temporarily increased by eating fruits… Most of the time – you genuinely don’t need a lot of what this game allows to knock enemies out. And it’s just cool how impressively complex the system is – Riddick and Condemned (and Zeno Clash) used to be the benchmark of this type of combat, but The Great Circle sets a new bar of quality here.
However, you can also use the ranged weapons “as intended” and as an FPS this game… well, it only somewhat works. The idea seems to be that if things go south, you can grab a gun, shoot a few nazis and escape and use it more as a defensive option, but most of the time it’s not very useful even for that. Plus, many locations respawn their enemies even if you kill them, so a timely escape is usually a worse option than reloading a checkpoint. Either way, the game uses a very Mirror’s Edge approach (or Condemned, I suppose), where you can’t keep weapons that aren’t part of your disguise/default Indy suit, so as soon as the weapon runs out of ammo or breaks, you just drop it. You also drop them for most of your traversal moves, so you have your hands free. And in some very specific situations it can click really well and lead to memorable moments where your stealth approach fails suddenly and you take a risk to punch and shoot the rest of the guards, using all of your moves to do it and barely survive. But more often than not, using guns is just unfun and not useful, which is very different from how it was handled in Riddick.
What is also very different is the pacing. Now – Indiana Jones is about exploration and adventuring at its core. You expect solving puzzles, exploring ancient ruins and all of that kind of stuff that requires more space and slower pace. So a more claustrophobic and linear approach that Escape from Butcher Bay had doesn’t fit as is. However, The Great Circle goes way too far in simulating the worst “open world” elements of the modern games and ends up feeling poorly paced and too full of unnecessary crap, if you are to engage in it. Following just the main plot is a more condensed and well paced experience, sure. Though even there the third big open level location feels too big, tedious and unnecessary. But this is Indy, you want to explore and solve puzzles, right? Which becomes more and more boring as the game drags on. Especially since some of its “collectible” types are literally invisible photography spots that you will not see unless you use the markers and special books that show you where things are.
Oh and the books – there is an upgrade system for a lot of your basic abilities and you will get new moves too. Which is tied to both collectibles and a money system. And it’s all quite simple, but is there to provide some additional depth to the game, just like it did in Riddick. Though, as with the rest of the things, it feels less focused and some of its elements can be completely ignored for most of the game, whereas in Butcher Bay you had complete cohesion between all aspects of the game that made it so memorable.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feels too ambitious for what it could be, but also not ambitious enough with some of its aspects. It plays some things too safe, does not provide anything even remotely as shocking and unexpected as what Uncharted games have been doing since the second entry. But at the same time, it tries to be too big for what fun gameplay it can provide. The first two thirds of the game keep it together and make things click, but the last third of the game starts literally falling apart. Numerous bugs, visual and progression-based. Horrid ideas that make parts of core mechanics pointless. Pushing more time with a companion, who is really fun from a narrative perspective, but is one of the absolute worst partner characters in terms of mechanics I’ve seen since the mid-00s. And while the very end of the game gets exciting once again, it’s too little and too late and by that time you’d be wishing game was over hours earlier. Where Escape from Butcher Bay ends with some of the most exciting high intensity final acts of a videogame you can imagine, this feels like a real drag to finish.
Nonetheless, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a great game. It’s exciting to see this approach to game design return and it might be among the better huge budget games of the last decade. But at the same time, it’s not as memorable as Escape from Butcher Bay and because it drags on for so long, seemingly just to please the obnoxious people who think that “game long=game good”, I have no real desire to ever replay it. Whereas I’ve replayed Escape from Butcher Bay quite a few times since it was released. In a world where this would be the first game of its kind, with no Riddick or The Darkness, I would’ve been praising The Great Circle a lot more, despite having most of the same criticisms. But I know this can be done much better in terms of overall structure and removal of “fat”, so the game is a bit more disappointing than it could’ve been. But hey – probably best Indy game since The Fate of Atlantis and among the best examples of big budget games of the past decade, so that’s good.