Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda, is the best Indiana Jones game ever made, and it isn’t especially close. Built on the studio’s experience shipping the Wolfenstein reboots, this first-person adventure casts Indy between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, sending him from a foggy Marshall College campus to Vatican catacombs, the Giza plateau, the jungles of Sumatra, and beyond, chasing a mysterious ancient network of sites called the Great Circle. This review focuses on the Xbox Series X version, the platform the game launched on alongside PC before arriving on other consoles later.

What makes the game work is how thoroughly it commits to being Indiana Jones rather than a generic action game wearing his hat. Troy Baker’s performance channels Harrison Ford’s cadence and dry wit without doing a flat impression, the dialogue is genuinely funny in the way the films are funny, and the game trusts long stretches of exploration, puzzle-solving, and conversation over constant combat. When violence does happen, it’s messy and improvised, exactly as it should be for a middle-aged archaeology professor who’d rather talk, bluff, or run his way out of trouble.

Story and Setting

The plot kicks off with a break-in at Marshall College and escalates into a globe-trotting hunt involving a Fascist-aligned faction searching for a hidden power tied to the Great Circle, an ancient collection of monumental sites theorized to be connected by more than geography. Indy is joined for much of the adventure by Gina Lombardi, a journalist with her own reasons for chasing the same mystery, and their partnership carries the emotional weight that a solo Indy story would struggle to sustain over a game this long. The writing leans into 1930s pulp adventure tone without winking at the audience, and the mystery itself, while familiar in its beats, is paced well enough that each new location feels like a genuine escalation rather than a repeat of the last.

The game’s location design is its clearest strength. The Vatican section alone rivals full campaigns from other adventure games, blending rooftop stealth, catacomb exploration, and a memorable heist sequence. Giza brings open desert exploration and tomb-diving, a Thai jungle temple complex introduces vertical platforming and a genuinely creepy ancient threat, and a later Shanghai section shifts the tone toward noir intrigue. Each region is large enough to reward wandering off the main path, and side objectives, hidden relics, and optional puzzles are woven into the environment rather than marked with obvious collectible icons everywhere. The transitions between regions are handled through brief travel sequences that keep the sense of a real 1930s expedition intact, rather than dumping players straight from one continent to the next with no sense of distance or time passing.

Photography and Field Notes

One of the game’s smartest systems is Indy’s camera and field notebook, used to photograph and catalog artifacts, mysteries, and points of interest scattered through every region. It rewards curiosity without feeling like busywork, since documenting an object often unlocks a bit of history, a joke, or a clue toward an optional puzzle. It’s a small mechanical idea that does a lot to make Indy feel like an archaeologist rather than a treasure-hunting action hero, and it’s one of the clearest signs the writers understood the character beyond the whip and fedora.

Gameplay and Combat

Combat in the Great Circle is deliberately unglamorous. Indy throws a punch that actually looks like a punch, not a superhero haymaker, and fights are built around improvisation: grabbing a nearby object to use as a weapon, using the environment to create distraction, or simply avoiding a fight altogether by sneaking past guards. Stealth is the game’s preferred solution to most conflict, and it’s well designed, with distraction tools, hiding spots, and a whip that can be used to disarm enemies from range or create a quick escape route. Full firearm combat exists but is intentionally clunky and resource-limited, which keeps the tone grounded; Indy is not supposed to be a one-man army, and the game never pretends otherwise.

Puzzles are the other half of the gameplay loop, and they range from simple environmental logic to genuinely tricky multi-step sequences involving translating ancient inscriptions, manipulating light and mirrors, or piecing together historical clues from notes scattered across a level. The game is generous with hints for players who get stuck without simply solving the puzzle for them, striking a balance that respects both patient puzzle-hunters and players who mainly want to keep the story moving. Traversal, meanwhile, borrows liberally from the films: rope swings, cliff climbs, the whip used as a grappling tool, and the occasional vehicle chase that recaptures the kinetic energy of the movies’ best action beats.

Exploration and Side Content

Each major region hides a network of optional content: hidden tombs, historical mysteries tied to real-world archaeology, and collectible relics that flesh out Indy’s academic reputation back at Marshall College. None of it is mandatory, but the density and quality of the side content mean skipping it feels like leaving value on the table rather than avoiding padding. The game strikes a rare balance for an open-region adventure title: it’s substantial without feeling bloated, and almost everything optional is there because it’s genuinely interesting, not because a checklist demanded it. Some of the strongest optional content is easy to miss entirely on a first playthrough, which gives the game unusual replay value for a largely story-driven adventure; a second run focused purely on the side mysteries and hidden tombs feels like a different, more relaxed game than the main campaign.

Presentation and Performance on Xbox Series X

Visually, the Great Circle is a showcase for how far a first-person adventure can push atmosphere and lighting. Torch-lit catacombs, sun-blasted Egyptian ruins, and dense, humid jungle canopies all read distinctly from one another, and MachineGames’ use of the id Tech engine, previously seen in Wolfenstein, gives the game a strong sense of physicality in how objects and environments react to Indy’s movement. Gordy Haab’s score draws on John Williams’ original themes without simply looping them, giving the game its own musical identity while still delivering the emotional payoff of hearing that iconic theme at the right moment.

On Xbox Series X, the game runs smoothly with short load times and a stable frame rate in its performance-oriented mode, which is the recommended setting for the game’s more physical traversal and stealth sequences. A quality mode trading frame rate for resolution and lighting fidelity is also available, and either option holds up well across the game’s varied environments. Cutscene direction, particularly in the Vatican and Shanghai sections, is staged with a cinematic confidence that few games built around first-person cameras manage to pull off, using camera transitions and blocking that make the character animation feel closer to a directed film sequence than a typical in-engine cutscene.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Verdict

The Great Circle succeeds because it understands exactly what makes Indiana Jones work: a curious, resourceful, occasionally reluctant hero who solves more problems with his brain than his fists, dropped into meticulously researched, richly detailed locations. The puzzle design, the photography and field-notes system, and the sheer craft in the Vatican and Giza sections make this an easy recommendation for anyone who’s ever wanted a game that actually feels like being inside one of the films, and on Xbox Series X, it runs as well as it looks.

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Conclusion

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the rare licensed game that treats its source material with genuine craft rather than nostalgia alone. Its puzzle design, location detail, and lead performance make it one of the standout Xbox Series X releases of its era, and it’s easy to recommend to fans of the films and newcomers to the character alike.