It’s easy to understand why video games using licensed IPs with recognisable characters default to third-person action games, but MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is easily my favourite take on Disney’s whip-cracking hero, and just behind The Chronicles of Riddick games if had to create a list of my favourites. You get all the mechanical satisfaction of first-person exploration, stealth, and fisticuffs, but there’s no shortage of stylish cutscenes, excellent voice work, and frequent third-person animations to ensure the illusion of playing through an epic, globe-trotting Indy film is never lost.



Befitting the source material, it’s certainly “cinematic”, though not in the usual video game sense that means oppressive directorial control and railroaded gameplay. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle features plenty of cutscenes and set-pieces to drive the story forward or highlight Indy’s personality, but the three lengthy mid-game acts provide dense, semi-open environments that give you plenty of freedom to explore, tackle optional objectives or collectible hunts, and engage enemies through a mix of stealth, brawling, or firefights – though the latter is only really viable on the easiest difficulty.



Set in 1936, neatly between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle manages to tell a complementary but standalone story that still sticks to familiar themes: discovering the “truth” behind ancient religious or traditional myths, a world on edge with fascism on the rise, and Indy’s willingness to always rush off on another adventure abroad to avoid dealing with personal issues. After a visually impressive but mechanically bland tutorial recreates the Peruvian opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, events jump to the (in-game) present as Indy awakens in Marshall College to confront a literal giant of a burglar who knocks him flat and steals an ancient cat mummy from a Gizeh expedition.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle features plenty of cutscenes and set-pieces to drive the story forward or highlight Indy’s personality...

After discovering a dropped medallion belonging to an ancient Vatican order, Indy sets off on an epic adventure that’ll see him explore catacombs beneath the Vatican Holy See; excavation sites around the Sphinx and Great Pyramid complex in Gizeh; the flooded jungles and elaborate water-driven tombs of Sukhothai in Siam, and finally a massive burial complex in Iraq – with a few unexpected and memorable diversions along the way. As you might expect, no matter where he travels, he comes up against Italian Blackshirts and German Nazis, with the primary antagonist Emmerich Voss stealing show as an increasingly unhinged and self-aggrandising archaeologist serving a Nazi division interested in using occult objects to empower the Third Reich.



As in the movies, Indy rarely fights alone. Each location introduces memorable new allies: a Catholic priest Indy met during the First World War; and an Italian investigative journalist looking for her sister who was working with Voss; an Arab-English aristocrat funding Gizeh expeditions to smuggle artefacts away from the Nazis; and members of a Sukhothai village resisting Italian forces propping up an oppressive military regime in Siam.

The journalist Gina serves as Indy’s potential love interest and foil, while the rest of the supporting cast serve as traditional quest givers for each semi-open chapter, and feature in optional “Field Work” quests that flesh out their character. The writing, voice work, and cutscene direction feel authentic to the period and closely matches the style of the movies. Troy Baker’s take on Indy is excellent and every scene benefits from the iconic soundtrack.



I’d argue the quality of the storytelling and overall production values have an oversized influence on the experience as Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is mechanically fun but unexpectedly simple – especially in contrast to many of its modern AAA peers that cram in mechanics that add little to the experience beyond a layer of busywork. The gameplay can be broken down into a handful of loops: exploration and investigation sequences to discover new leads or key items; platforming and puzzle-focused “dungeons”, with no shortage of switches, light beams, water currents, traps and the like; and a handful of more linear set-pieces that ramp up the pacing and culminate in significant story beats and boss fights. Complicating matters are the presence of Italian or German soldiers, which you can handle through classic stealth, using disguises, meaty brawling, or messy firefights.

I’d argue the quality of the storytelling and overall production values have an oversized influence on the experience as Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is mechanically fun but unexpectedly simple.

During the semi-open chapters, there’s initially an immersive sim vibe as you can, in theory, go anywhere without fail states (short of dying) and you’ll sometimes find alternate routes to bypass guards completely. However, I’d strongly recommend following the primary quests as they trigger scripted encounters and guide you towards keys or disguises that make freeform exploration more satisfying. If you don’t, that immersive sim comparison can break down, as systematic explorers could spend hours poking around the wonderfully detailed game world, only to end up coming back to locations for structured quests and discovering enemies have respawned; an ever-present issue typically found in open-world games. To Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, it’s only while replaying it that I could appreciate how smartly designed it is, with the main story taking you on a route through each region that allows you to tackle most of the additional content as you go.



Once you get a feel for the gameplay structure – and realise you can’t lock yourself out of quests or collectibles – Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a lot of fun and distinctly “gamey” by design, prioritising fun and forward momentum over realism. Stealth is based on distance and line-of-sight, using noisy distractions, enemies with short-term memory problems, and entertaining takedowns using a diverse assortment of props, from batons and sledgehammers to plungers and fly swatters.

Disguises are almost infallible so long as you avoid dogs and officers, allowing you to stroll through previously restricted areas and get the drop on isolated soldiers. Brawls require managing swiftly regenerating stamina while you chain weapon strikes, punches, and kicks, with blocks and parries essential for larger foes that can power through your offensive moves. Movement is wonderfully fast and fluid like the modern Wolfenstein games but, much like The Chronicles of Riddick games (many MachineGames devs came from Starbreeze Studios), the camera pulls back to the third-person perspective while climbing about to show off Indy.



His iconic whip also proves useful no matter what you’re doing, be that swinging across a chasm, activating switches, creating a distraction, or whipping a weapon out of an enemy’s hands and forcing them to brawl. As Indy rarely uses firearms or explosives in the movies, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle limits their usefulness. They’re powerful but draw every enemy from a massive radius to your position and those with firearms will immediately use them, making survival incredibly difficult without kiting and cheesing the AI.

As Indy rarely uses firearms or explosives in the movies, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle limits their usefulness.

In contrast, you can stealthily dispatch and carry away unconscious soldiers without other patrols noticing or engage in a scrappy brawl in one room without alerting enemies in the next. So long as you go into combat with fists up rather than a firearm drawn, armed soldiers are surprisingly sporting and will respond in kind. It makes little sense but means that you’re not forced into maintaining stealth.



Where Indiana Jones and The Great Circle can falter is in it’s dated approach to collectibles and how they tie into light progression mechanics. Essential gear – think a camera, lighter, or rebreather – require local currency you accumulate as you explore. Optional but incredibly useful books can also be found or bought, providing passive perks like stronger melee strikes, more health and stamina, or a second chance if you fall in combat by crawling towards Indy’s iconic hat. The perks are unlocked using experience gained from quests and solving puzzles, but if you want them all you’ll need to hunt for even more collectibles like documents, photo opportunities, medicine bottles, stolen treasures, and ancient artefacts (tied to an optional puzzle in the final chapter). You can buy guides to reveal the location of these collectible but trying to collect-them-all can kill the narrative pacing and break immersion.

Some minor gripes aside, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a fantastic first-person action-adventure that captures the look and feel of the original Indiana Jones trilogy – though I imagine the first-person perspective and predominantly stealth- and melee-oriented encounters make it a little ore niche than most licensed IP blockbusters. PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro owners have had to wait a few months but they’re getting an uncompromised port with the addition of satisfying DualSense haptic feedback, while Pro owners get a bump to the dynamic resolution scaling bracket that can push it up to a native 4K/60. If you like the original Indiana Jones films and can handle some basic stealth and brawling in your action-adventures, don’t pass this up.

*PS5 Review code provided by Xbox Game Studios