Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launched December 9, 2024 on Xbox Series X/S and PC, later landing on PS5 and Switch 2. Bethesda Softworks published it. MachineGames finally hands the franchise the Indy story fans have been owed since 1989, then locks that story inside gameplay too stiff and constrained to match the ambition.
The year is 1937. Indy wakes at Marshall College, freshly split from Marion Ravenwood, and watches a seven-foot giant steal a cat mummy from the university museum. That theft kicks off a chase from Vatican City to the pyramids of Giza, through the Himalayas, and into the jungles of Sukhothai, all hunting ancient stones tied to a mysterious alignment of sacred sites called the Great Circle. Indy partners with Gina Lombardi, an Italian journalist looking for her missing sister, and squares off against Emmerich Voss, a Nazi occultist who is genuinely good at getting inside people’s heads. The game runs mostly in first person: stealth, melee, puzzles, and exploration across semi-open hubs stitched together with linear set pieces.
Dial of Destiny was garbage. The tragedy of The Great Circle is realizing this controller-written adventure is the Indy story the movies should have put on a screen. The globe-trotting structure hits the iconic beats. The world feels inhabited in a way most licensed games never manage. Vatican City alone can eat three hours. Every corner smells like an attic full of things people forgot they were hiding. The comparison I keep reaching for is the 2009 Ghostbusters game on Xbox 360: when the films stalled, a game picked up the torch and gave fans the story they were waiting for. The Great Circle does that for Indiana Jones. Love and craft. It sits next to Raiders and Last Crusade as a real entry in the saga. Getting there through a pad instead of a theater is bittersweet. The story itself satisfies.
Troy Baker plays Indy, and he is performing Harrison Ford performing Indiana Jones. That layered job flattens most actors into a cheap impression. Baker is fantastic. There are stretches where your brain genuinely confuses the two voices, and that confusion feels great. He has Ford’s cadence locked in.
Combat is stiff. Indy can grab a shovel or a frying pan and crack it over a Nazi’s head, and the improvisational slapstick is impressive on paper, straight out of the films. Execution is the problem. Every swing carries a mechanical clunk that fights the fluidity the animations try to sell. The control scheme and systems are clunky overall. This is a clunk-riddled game. Gunplay is worse: floaty. The whip shines in traversal, then in a fight it only stuns or disarms. Get hit with a bullwhip in real life and you are not politely stunned. MachineGames clearly poured design energy into melee, which makes the stiffness sting harder.
Bethesda publishing usually implies a certain freedom, not full Skyrim sandbox, but multiple angles into the experience. The Great Circle delivers about twenty-five percent of a Bethesda-esque game. Stealth is where the clunk hits worst. I have never felt less stealthy in a game that asks me to sneak. It cuts both ways. Throw a bottle and enemies track it with their eyes, then decide nothing happened. Or they hear you thinking from the next building and swarm. The one place the game trusts you is the puzzles, and those work. Vatican trial-and-key sequences reward looking. The puzzle chain captures the feel of Indy deciphering a room.
Seventy dollars retail. Story and world earn a place beside the franchise’s best. Combat stiffness and on-rails design hold the game at arm’s length from its own potential. Made for the Backlog. Seventy is too high, and a production this expensive will not go on deep sale soon. It reads like a Game Pass lead magnet, which fits, because it is on Game Pass.
