Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

a

Great adventure without the constant violence. Great puzzles and strategy creeping around. I like finding treasure. Beautiful graphics

very gas

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I give a tepid recommendation to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, probably the best proper Indiana Jones product of the 21st century--which isn't saying much, I suppose. Troy Baker does a wonderful Harrison Ford impression, and the game is really superb in mimicking the mannerisms of Indy, whether it be his schoolboyish joy when he's discovering something, or his reciting of scripture when he finds a Biblical reference. The game also just nails the Spielbergian humor of the movies. Fans of the movies will get a kick out of stuff like this. A lot of game mechanics work quite nicely, with incentivization towards exploration and stealth. I particularly like how effective and ubiquitous improvised weapons are, and the need for disguises in certain parts of the game. I like the bare fact that Indy gets XP by way of reading notes, solving mysteries, and doing fieldwork, and not by merely gunning down Nazis or fascists. The whip has a nice functionality to it, and although I feel like it's a bit of a cop-out to have silently taken down as many enemies as I did with it, I liked the whip mechanics overall. But--and this is a big But--some mechanics are useless, or the very modernity of the game's mechanics rear their ugly head. Repair kits are virtually worthless because improvised melee weapons are everywhere. I hazard most people will max out on repair kits in Rome without really knowing how to use them. Guns have been nerfed a bit too much. But the biggest problem of all is the guides which show where all the treasures, notes, relics, mysteries, etc are in the game. One of the only ways to spend your money is to buy these guides, and some of them you stumble on anyway--and they utterly sap organic exploration out of the game once they are acquired. The game becomes a drudgery of walking around each level with your map out sweeping zones of items not merely for the completionist, but for anyone who wants to optimize Indy, because these items are the things that bestow XP in the first place. I would hazard for most people the strongest part of the game is the first couple hours in the Vatican. The narrative conceit of going undercover as a priest works very strongly amidst the trappings of Mussolini's Rome, and it's a fresh setting which makes a lot of sense for an Indy adventure. That said, this does not endure for the entirety of the game. While Sukhothai is adequately handwaved in terms of its milieu (a corrupt general let the fascists in), and is a nice unique setting as well with its riverboat explorations, the Nazi archaeological digs at Gizeh and Ur are low points. The game doesn't even bother to explain how these digs have popped up here. Raiders of the Lost Ark has the Nazis at Tanis, but this game lays it on too thick by having the Nazis operating multiple armed digs in British territory, with several adjacent to the Sphinx and Great Pyramids. Maybe the British can miss one dig at Tanis, but on this scale? It's a very tawdry excuse to give us some "Raiders" vibes, but I was just put off by it. The characters, too, are somewhat uneven. Again, Troy Baker does a great job with Indy, and the villains Voss and Gantz are great as well, chewing up the scenery wondrously. With Gina, though, they treat her too much like an inevitably-forgotten potential love interest in the shadow of Marion Ravenwood. She switches back and forth--sometimes she's highly motivated to help Indy get to the bottom of the mystery, and other times she's dismissive of it, saying "what really matters is the upcoming WW2." Ultimately it feels like Indy is more into her than she is into him, and that's not very narratively satisfying--nor is the tepid end to their relationship at the finale. While Antonio is a good NPC in Rome, and there are good ones to be found in Sukhothai as well, Dame Nawal Shafiq-Barclay (although voice-acted well) is a disaster of a "modern character," a female, openly gay, half-Egyptian archaeologist who owns her own museum in 1940's British Egypt. She's a laughable anachronism, a perfect representation of how modern games conveniently whitewash history by, ironically, ahistorically diversifying it. And then there's the overarching plot--which is pretty weak. I play these types of games to explore vast, remote ancient ruins that are based off of real civilizations. Unfortunately, a lot of the ruins are neither remote nor vast. Due to the semi-open world nature of the game, it's more closely resembles a bunch of tinier ruins with prominent puzzle chambers which exist just off the beaten path, mere dozens of meters from the human-infested surface. Bereft of a sense of remoteness or scale, I feel a modicum of disappointment with the ruin exploration. The Rome ruins aren't bad, but are typical of clumsy video game dealings with Greek and Roman antiquity, liberally mixing in medieval and Roman aesthetics to create what is sometimes an overly ornate mess, and because it's set in the Vatican, some of the puzzles are right out in the open (like the fountain). The Gizeh ruins are surprisingly disappointing and muted, and we don't even go into the Pyramids (they're just there for the horizon). Sukhothai has some interesting stuff but perhaps the most potentially interesting is the pyramid in the jungle. Unfortunately it quickly turns out to not resemble Khmer ruins, but is rather a bunch of unadorned ugly-looking slabs typical of the Nephilim/Adamic stuff in this game. And let's talk about that stuff. The Nephilim/Adamic stuff in this game (including the above Sukhothai pyramid) just doesn't land. Aesthetically, It all feels too modern and grid-like to feel like an authentic ancient language (the physical ruins also have that problem), and a secret race of giants is kinda lame (their size makes them instantly harder to hide). The Adamic ruins are bereft of interesting reliefs or art. The game is remarkably blase about keeping the player up to speed with what exactly they're looking for. Indeed, even after playing it, I can't really tell you what the Great Circle has to do with Noah's Ark (which is introduced far too late) or why all those stones were necessary in the first place and why they all had different powers, and why it's been giants who have been protecting them for so long. It feels like they had too many ideas and didn't render them down into something digestible. Contrast it with the simplicity of Atlantis in Fate of Atlantis, or even the servants of Marduk and the Tower of Babel in Infernal Machine. The ending is a bit of a downer as well--not only is there the "meh" conclusion to Indy and Gina, but the ending fight with Voss features some pretty bad gameplay design, and it mimics Raiders far too strongly overall. There's a lot to like in this game, and I'm glad that lots of people like it. It resembles an Indy movie more than any other game in the series, and it's better than a couple of them that have been released this century. But I literally prefer the clunky, uncinematic Indiana Jones game that was just a Tomb Raider clone (the aforementioned Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine) over it, to say nothing of the superb Fate of Atlantis.

Amazing Game

This game feels like a true Indiana Jones movie. So if you like those you will love this game. Amazing game!!