Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

I'm not a big fan of the Indy movies. I just saw the store page screenshots and thought: "hey that looks kinda pretty", and I bought a cheap key off Steam And that's exactly what I got: gorgeous path-traced visuals, incredibly beautiful environments, and a ton of effort put into highlighting various cultures & civilizations. On the absolute highest settings it is a feast for your eyes and I understand now why people often use this game as a benchmark for new GPUs. It took me forever to get anything done because I was constantly walking around taking screenshots. Everything looks so magnificent. And not just on a technical level, but aesthetically too. Everything looks organic and real, nothing felt out of place or videogamey. Every tree looks unique, every home appears lived in, every object has a purpose. Love to see this kind of attention to detail True to the Indiana Jones movies, you'll travel a lot. And there's a staggering amount of variety here. Each new location more breathtaking than the last, and they're all packed with people, landmarks, props and vegetation. They spared no expense crafting some of the most incredible and lifelike environments in all of gaming, especially in the second part of the game. All of that serves to create an excellent sense of exploration as you're constantly discovering something new. There's frequent references to cultures, myth and legend throughout the entire game's duration. I think people who love history and folklore will fall in love with this game. I don't care at all about those things, but even I was fascinated by it And that's in no small part thanks to Troy Baker's performance as Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones. That's right, he didn't just play a character. He played an actor who played a character, and he really nailed his impression of Ford https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3800042332 In terms of gameplay, I'd say the game is made up of 3 distinct features: exploration, combat and puzzles Exploration is fun because of how gorgeous the game looks, so you naturally always want to see more of it. Exploring ancient tombs, climbing up temples, spelunking and looting enemy camps - it's all entertaining. And using your whip to swing around can feel pretty nice. But it was at times a bit frustrating due to all the backtracking for the missed collectibles Combat was another highlight because both armed and unarmed played really well. There's a lot of improvised melee weapons at your disposal, though they all play exactly the same. It's just satisfying to bonk people over the head with a heavy brass candlestick. Unarmed combat felt impactful, even more so when combined with your iconic bullwhip Exploration and combat can be further enhanced via perks and abilities. While they're nothing special, they do make things easier and help make you feel like a badass. Also it's no big deal if you try something crazy and die. The Great Circle is very generous with its checkpoints, and respawning is pretty much instant. In terms of extra content, there are only a handful of side quests in each hub, but they're all nice and worth completing. They have custom locations, animations, cutscenes and voice acting. They feel just as good as the main quest and they all help further build and flesh out Indiana as a character Puzzles on the other hand, were definitely my least favorite part of the game. Not just because they challenged me on an intellectual level, but also because sometimes it felt like the game couldn't properly communicate what it wanted the player to do. It was fun the first couple of times, but it got boring fast. I completed about half of the puzzles myself, but after 15 hours or so I just lost interest and googled all the solutions to save time. Maybe I'm just too dumb and people solve them instantly? Maybe there's just too many of them if you 100% the game? Not sure, but none of them brought me any joy. Especially when the reward is just some random diary page that I won't bother to read and 2 revolver bullets. I guess that's just not why I wanted to play the game https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3800042351 Now that I've subtly shifted the conversation from praising the game to complaining about it, let's expand on that I have to say that the enemy AI is pretty braindead. And while that's fun to abuse because they're essentially at the mercy of your whim and creativity - it often ruined my immersion. Knocking someone out while he's talking to his friend, only for the same friend to just casually walk away mid sentence. Or enemies always letting you get at least 1 charged attack in before they become alerted. Or them not noticing their dead allies on the floor next to them. Little things like that happened all the time The character models in this game also look pretty bad. It's like the engine itself wasn't really designed around rendering humans and especially their eyes and faces Another huge disappointment for me was the UI. If you press J to bring up your Journal, you can flip through pages with Q and E. That's all well and good, except there's a problem. If you're standing in front of any object that you can interact with, then bring up your journal and press E to flip to the next page - Indiana will instead close his journal and interact with that thing in front of him. So you wanna turn the page and he closes his journal and picks up a lemon instead. What a baffling design choice, pretty much forcing the player to always turn or run away from any highlighted objects. Everything regarding the journal is slow and delayed because of the animation of Indiana actually fiddling with the journal. The whip can sometimes feel the same, sluggish and unresponsive. And hotkeys can also be pretty unreliable. You press 3 and select the bandage icon, then click to heal - and Indy will just eat a croissant instead There are also a million dumb collectibles that never show up all together on the map, so you'll have to constantly flip through different quests to see them I was also surprised that there's so little environmental interactivity. For example swinging your weapon at a glass windows or some bottles won't shatter them. Shooting a car's tires won't deflate them, throwing a full bottle of wine at a wall or the ground won't cause a splash or a little puddle, etc The story was ok, but none of it felt exactly right. It's as if things were building up to something special and then nothing happened. There was no big Hollywood finale, no satisfying character arcs, no emotional breakthroughs or resolutions. Perhaps due to the IP not allowing any significant changes to Indy's character? Ultimately I think it was just secondary to the game's main attraction - the fantastic locations and visual fidelity It lacked that classic Indiana Jones fantasy scenario. Where the iconic theme plays as you haphazardly leap from trap to trap and use your trusty whip to traverse great chasms as everything around you comes crashing down. Something like that where you have to use everything you have learned thus far and do things instinctively because you have grown to be a real pro, not because you were told to do so by the tutorial pop-ups. They never let us have that glorious moment, tho it came close to it two or three times https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3800042314 With all that said, I recommend Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Is it worth $100? Absolutely not. Buy the Premium Edition off-Steam for like $30 if you can, I think that's an appropriate price. It's not a perfect game, but it might just be the best movie license game of all time. I think the weaker parts like the forgettable narrative, old-gen character models and sluggish menus are easily beaten by the mind blowing environments, engaging gameplay and a profound feeling of immersion

The story was great, and the graphics looked really good. It genuinely felt like an Indiana Jones adventure, and I had a lot of fun playing through the main game. I wasn't as keen on the DLC though. There were way too many puzzles one after another, and after a while it started to feel like a bit of a chore. It also felt like it was missing some of the story that made the main game so good. Still, I don't think that takes away from how good the base game is. Overall, I really enjoyed it and had a great time with it. Achievement note: The “Collect All Notes” achievement didn’t pop for me even though I’d collected everything. I had to go back to the Vatican and take a picture of the Jesus puzzle again before the achievement finally unlocked. 8.5/10