Hands-On: MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is shaping up incredibly well

Indiana Jones has a spotty history in the world of video games. Some well-loved PC adventures and some less-than-stellar console games are a paltry lot for Lucasfilm’s second-favorite child. MachineGames is looking to change that, and from the three hours we’ve had the chance to play, we think the Swedish developer is well on its way to delivering the game the franchise deserves.

There are many directions you could take an Indiana Jones game, but it would also be so easy to make something that doesn’t feel Indy at all. Focus too much on puzzles, and you lose the car-chasing, Nazi-punching side of Indy. On the other hand, if it’s all action, you miss the exploration and puzzle-solving side of Professor Jones. From what we’ve played, MachineGames has taken the approach of giving the player a bit of everything.

The game, which is set in 1937, following Raiders of the Lost Ark, but before The Last Crusade. Indiana, now professor, Jones is working at Marshall College when an ancient artifact is stolen. Indiana, being Indiana, can’t let a good mystery go, so it’s quickly to hell with his students, and off he goes.

Our demo showed off three distinct slices of gameplay. The first was the game’s intro in Mashall College. Here, we completed a small puzzle that saw us match displaced artifacts to their appropriate displays. The first thing we noticed was the extremely high quality of the game’s models. The artifacts, display cases, and even Indy’s hands are extremely detailed, which is a huge plus for a game that will likely have you spending so much time looking longingly at bits of old pottery.

After this, we travelled by map to the Vatican to play through one of the game’s more linear levels. Here, stealth was a focus as guards patrolled the outer walls of the world’s smallest country. We typically don’t love first-person stealth sequences owing to the limited amount of information it’s possible to convey from that perspective, but The Great Circle handles it well. It’s quick to let you know when you’re in the process of being spotted, but it’s also lenient in allowing you to get back into hiding. If all else fails, you can employ the game’s very best mechanic: lobbing everything that’s not nailed down.

When Indiana has been spotted, or you just fancy a bit of fun, virtually every piece of hand-sized set dressing can be thrown at enemies. Every bottle, brick, and ancient bust can be lifted and smashed against the side of unsuspecting enemy’s heads. Not only is this outrageously good fun, and a bit of slapstick hilarity, but it’s the closest we can think a game has ever come to recreating those action movie moments where the hero is snatching at whatever they can to take out a baddie in a tricky situation.

It’s also the method through which you can escape a situation with stealth. Launch a bottle at a wall, and the enemies all turn in unison to allow you to nip off. The Vatican level also had a decent amount of exploration for what seems to be one of the game’s more linear set pieces. By being slightly braver and sneaking past more guards than we needed to, we got ourselves a key, which allowed us to skip a large part of the level.

When we were caught, the game’s hand-to-hand combat came into play. Indy does have a gun for when the going gets tough, but that’ll alert every guard in the area, leading to a virtually unwinnable fight. The hand-to-hand combat is fine, but we’d look to avoid it. Ripping items out of the enemy’s hands with the whip and then smashing them across the nose with them never ceased being a great laugh.

Following this bit of jiggery-popery, we were off to Egypt for a sequence that took place slightly later in the game. This is one of the game’s far more open zones. We’re given the task to recover a series of plates, and it’s up to us to go and explore. This is where the game’s disguise system comes into play. In a Hitman-esque move, Indy can dress up in various outfits that will permit him to pass freely in otherwise restricted areas.

In this case, our costume has that of one of the slaves in the dig sites, allowing us to move around the areas containing the plates without alerting the Nazi officers. You can still stealth your way around the map as just Indy, but this makes things far easier.

Our only reservation with this larger map is that there was a fair amount of dead space between the various activities, but traversing them wasn’t the most arduous challenge. There were even a few unmarked side activities here, like a man who had managed to lock himself in a hut, with little clue as to how to unlock him. It feels like players could spend a lot of time in these sections, or move on fairly quickly if they were looking for a more linear experience.

“Our only reservation with this larger map is that there was a fair amount of dead space between the various activities, but traversing them wasn’t the most arduous challenge.”

While the gameplay seems to deliver what we’d want out of an Indiana Jones adventure, the other half of the coin is the presentation and the writing. As far as writing goes, while we didn’t get a great grasp of the overall story, the dialogue between the characters worked well.

We were reminded of Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens in the sense that the game doesn’t feel like it’s trying to do a reboot of the series, but more create a modern experience built in the mold of the 80s films, rather than the recent ones.

All of Indy’s dialogue sounds authentically 80s. This is thanks in large part to an excellent Troy Baker performance, who threads the needle so well that you very quickly forget that you’re not listening to unearthed Harrison Ford performances. Ford’s visual likeness has also been captured incredibly well.

So far, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just the Indiana Jones adventure that fans have waited 40 years for; it’s the video game that the franchise has truly deserved. MachineGames seems to be a match made in heaven for the franchise, and we left our demo extremely keen to play more.

The balance of linear and open, combat and puzzles seems pitch-perfect, and it feels like an adventure that, were it to be released as a film in 1987, no one would bat an eye. Whether it belongs in a museum or not will largely be determined by whether the team can pull off a memorable story or not, but so far, all the ingredients are there for a pulpy Christmas break treat when the game launches in December.