Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

2026-07-04

Nothing beats a good crack. The crack of biting into a fresh apple, the crack of a whip, cracking your knuckles before a fight. MachineGames understands the crack, and they saved their best for The Great Circle: the crack of the final blow that knocks a fascist unconscious. Bang, biff, pow, crack--he's down. Indy, stalwart Nazi slayer, slinking perpetually crouched through delicately rendered centuries-old Italian architecture, stopping only to club a Mussolini meanie so hard his chair shatters and he emigrates to New Jersey. You can feel the Riddick of it. Fifteen hours in, that crack never got old. The problem is the hiccups between the cracks.

The Great Circle aspires to be and succeeds at manifesting an Indiana Jones movie. Sure the much-lauded Troy Baker performance is an eerie channeling of handsome Harrison, but honestly it's Gordy Haab's impersonation of a John Williams score, with its army of horns, that convinced my brain I was seated for a proper Spielberg/Lucas joint instead of the brainchild of Todd the Godd Howard. Everything you want from an Indy movie is here and more thanks to the change of medium's expanded runtime. Ever want to check out Indiana's office? Pore over some ancient artifacts? Teabag a Wehrmacht wanker while wearing a leather fedora?

The hiccups then are everything they crammed in to fill that runtime. You're riding high when you're listening to Indy crack jokes or in a Siam boat chase scene that could be a Disneyland ride or even--especially--when you're solving yet another not too cognitively challenging, yet visually intricate artifact puzzle. But eventually you hit the part of the game where you need to go places.

Don't get me wrong, I love the actual movement in the game. Especially because we love a swing jump and Not Harrison Ford be swangin' his whip all over the place.

No the problem is the level design, Rome especially. It presents what at first glance looks like a pretty open level design and then tosses in so fucking many dead ends. Sure, Indy can whip and clamber up to random corners but half the time only to be met with a "The door is locked from the other side." In a FromSoft game that is an exciting discovery. Here I found after much experimentation this just means you didn't progress far enough in the story to unlock the level. Which would be fine if the game didn't also inundate these Not Open World levels with a billion fucking collectibles that are revealed immediately and then locked behind said story-progress locked doors. Eventually the level design wore me down enough that I just started constantly pulling out Indy's notebook so I got the big fat dumb nav arrow pointing me where I should go. And when a game defaults to no nav arrow and you end up turning it back on? That's the game telling on its own clunky level design.

And why do we need collectibles? Why does Indy need to accrue currency by robbing Nazis to buy skills that are inconsequential stat increases or unlock abilities I don't want to use? Why do I need to gather medicine from around the map to turn in to some lady so Jones' health bar gets bigger? Because they made a game that's too large. And lord knows you can't make a game without RPG systems these days.

And while I'm ranting, why the fuck are there guns in this game, man? MachineGames already did us a favor and littered the map with various mundane instruments of melee coma-making. You'll heft pans and oars and hammers and absolutely wallop the sense out of nationalist Luger-lovers with a couple hits. And yet in Indiana's hands a gun has all of the effect of tossing an aperol spritz in their face. I understand the devs likely don't want to make it so you can just shoot everyone on every level and have to engage with stealth and melee. But, my word, I used an SMG and it took 5 headshots on a helmet-less Blackshirt to send him to Italian Jesus.

And I haven't even gotten to Voss (skip this paragraph if you don't want spoilers), who spends the first half of the game as a campy, one-dimensional, low-tier Indy villain: weird face, doing his MASTER MANIPULATOR bit at every campfire. And then somewhere along the Great Circle he becomes a person. He's still an absolute bastard but there's a moment where you can tell he actually just wants to talk to Indiana Jones about his discoveries--to talk to the one person on earth who can understand what he's accomplished. And he looks genuinely hurt when Indy tells him he's the problem. Then you duel each other, he's screaming about KA RA TE, and you're both dangling over the ocean punching each other in the face in the only one-handed duel I've ever seen in any form of media. And to cap it all off, in a classic bit of Indiana Jones fiction he gets God-lasered into oblivion. Oh and a giant rides a Nazi Ark to heaven. I can only assume Todd Howard was on potent hallucinogens when he wrote the plot and I'm thankful he had that experience.

If you stick to your fists, avoid the dead ends, and ignore the collectathon you'll find the best Indiana Jones movie since the Last Crusade (get fucked, Crystal Skull). So grab your whip and get ready to batter some racist cunts till you hear that delightful CRACK. Just watch out for the Italian German Shepherds (the most fascist possible dog).