Bought this when it first went on sale along with a bunch of other stuff, but it took a bit before i tried it since i needed to upgrade my graphics card then. Followed by trying it installing a framerate patch for the cutscenes and promptly abandoning it for over a year. I'm a big Indiana Jones fan but I've never played any of the games outside of Lego Indiana Jones. But I'm doing a bit of a Indiana Jones month along with rewatching the films and playing the Lego Games with my mom. Along with completing this of course i do plan to do Staff of Kings & Fate of Atlantis, the latter of which seems quite beloved.
Anyways Great Circle is developed MachineGames (Wolfenstein Reboot fellas) and is really well put together game overall. There's a certain irony to how IJ is more of a serial action flick, but the ratio of action to traversal & puzzles in a game like this is going to be longer and slower (at least compared to a film anyway) but i think being a history lover, there's something about how you play a character in a historical period, that's pursuing antiquity from much older historical periods that hits just right.
Its set in 1937 and so its after Temple of Doom & Raiders, although i found it didn't make nearly as many references as i assumed it would. Like his dad Henry is mentioned once from his own lips as far as i can tell. And as is tradition you have a Sidekick for some of the story, and whether or not you enjoy the flow of the story is going to depend on that sidekick, i think she works well. Although in the post game she has like 2 lines that kept getting said as i was finishing exploring the jungle area. I have some preferences for how a sequel would go. But talking about it would spoiler the story.
Probably the most notable and off-putting part of this for many is the game is actually 1st person, since this game looks like an Action-Adventure adjacent to say Uncharted or Tomb Raider (i haven't played either for what its worth) that seems odd considering how iconic of a character Indiana is. It also ironic i think since Uncharted & Tomb Raider are inspired by IJ. However it does work for world exploration a i think since it makes the interaction of stuff a bit more intimate which really helps with puzzles and just generally embodying the character. However your also not a silent protagonist so maybe it would have been just a good to be 3rd Person.
Gameplay mechanics work well as a package, but if you break them down peacemeal there a little bit flawed i think. The brawling mechanics are very straightforward, but also very satisfying with stuff like sound effects or the ways in which you can improvise, there's like a 100+ different types of objects you can pick up and knock someone out with. The two funniest ones to me was a Violin Bowstring and a Flyswatter. The whips usage is also great, it sound really loud and punchy like a gunshot almost, which to my understanding is quite accurate. However since i was playing on KB&M i found myself not alternating punches too much, and considering i just got off playing Punch Out (which is referenced by name only through the skill book system) you can punch with one hand really, REALLY fast. Which i don't like much as Indy is more of about haymakers and playing dirty than fast jabs, also grappling was pretty useless outside of pushing someone off a ledge which is a guaranteed kill even if its only like 10 feet high.
The Puzzle system, or i guess just the puzzles are fairly intuitive i find, ignoring the Safecode ones i only had to lookup a guide once and it was for a Tomb in the Order of Giants DLC. But its definitely a bit of a Valve Effect were its not intuitive to you then the lack of any direction grinds the game to a screeching halt and out comes the guides. My one main issues is actually not the puzzles themselves but the journal. I don't like how the menuing in it works. It could stem from a controller first principle. But if you found yourself needing to recheck a note clue for a safecode or something then it becomes abundantly obvious how bad it is. Considering you have to fully put away the note to interact with something, and if you need to check the note again, you need to open the journal, go to the quest tab, find the correct discovery/mystery chain and select the top note.
And while this is not exclusive to this game i had a bit of a frustrating time dialing my Graphics in for this one. This probably justs from wanting good fidelity 4k120fps on not a 5090, but even with a 5090 your never truly going to get a no compromised experience with these high budget games and kinda just need to accept that. HDR has been an absolute nightmare to dial in for years now, and im not sure if its my TV not being good enough, Windows, Game Implementation (like for Great Circle it might need full Raytracing for the HDR contrast to work properly but i turned it off due to really inconsistent framerates) or it might be my personal preference just wanting thing to be well lit and contrasted whether its a dark or bright scene and HDR grading simply doesn't do it how id like. Maybe one day buy a Switch 2 and try HDR on this TV using that to see if maybe its PC HDR being a mess.
Oh one last thing, the acting is fantastic, especially from Troy Baker who play Indiana. However i think its get glazed a bit too hard as being just like Young Harrison Ford or sounding exactly like him. And to be quite frank he doesn't in either respect, he's not the first to do an impersonation of him for Indiana or Han Solo in the video game space and he won't be the last. I can easily tell its not Harrison, however its also not to tell its Troy Baker either. And the silver lining is he does a great job playing the Character, just not impersonating the actor. A good comparison to make there is probably Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, and i think Great Circle does a better job than that since its Mo-Cap & Troy Baker doesn't need to look like Harrison Ford or anything.
Overall i had a good time, i wouldn't say it blew me away, but id like to see sequel set during WW2 since the franchise avoids it like the plague for some reason.
