The last Indiana Jones game that I played new was WAY back in 2003 with developer The Collective’s Indiana Jones and The Emperor’s Tomb on Xbox which married aspects of the Tomb Raider games with the brawling mechanics from their earlier Buffy the Vampire Slayer game (also on Xbox). Unfortunately for it, similar franchises were able to take the concepts further and it was often forgotten, even though it did a number of things (especially the navigation and combat) that are often recognised in both the modern Tomb Raider as well as Uncharted games.

Then more recently it was announced that Bethesda picked up the license and would be developing a new game featuring Indiana Jones and what’s more would be leveraging developer MachineGames to do the heavy lifting. With a team who is renowned for their Nazi killing games in the Wolfenstein series it seemed that we were probably going to have something that steered more in that direction and the confirmation of the game being in first person seemed to prove that might be the case. Now that the final game is in player’s hands, it’s kind of awesome to admit that everyone was very, very wrong about this and what we have in its place is something pretty special.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is set after the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark where we find Indiana Jones is no longer riding the highs from his last adventure but stuck at his college having a late night drink with his old friend Marcus Brody. An intruder interrupts the night, stealing an artifact which sends Indy on his way again as he tried to figure out why and stumbles into a situation he’s all too familiar with, full of global spanning adventure, ancient treasures and punching Nazis is the best possible way.

At its heart the game is a first person adventure with a strong emphasis on exploration, puzzle solving and collecting. The main quest path is fairly linear involving a “find this to unlock this to get to here” but it is interspersed with a number of side quests (identified as “fieldwork”) that can offer you unique challenges and rewards to help you on your way. Some of the side quests are impressive in their creativity and while you can potentially skip them to focus on the main path, they add so much colour to the overall story that it’s highly recommended to complete them all. Experience is earned by completing objectives, including missions, taking photos and solving puzzles. This can then be spent on unlocking books you find in your travels that offer boosts to Indy’s abilities. It’s a fair compromise as to add or remove abilities from the character would be wrong as movie fans know exactly what Indiana Jones can do. Adding boosts though helps from a gameplay perspective making later challenges easier to overcome.

When all else fails and it comes down to a fight, there’s no shortage of ways to take on the Nazis but make you may reconsider your approach if you go in all guns (or fists) blazing. Indy is only human and taking on multiple enemies at once is not going to work in your favour often which forces you take a stealthier approach. You can lure out them out by throwing bottles or get a quick takedown if you approach from behind which gives me a Splinter Cell vibe, so I am right at home tackling the game this way. The AI of enemies isn’t complicated and compares to the aforementioned game where enemies are triggered and go through a combative phase that eventually stops and they return to a passive state. Certainly not realistic, but very forgiving.

The game’s presentation really nails the experience, and the sound design is going to get the praise first up. Troy Baker does the Harrison Ford voice brilliantly and the first scene which relives the Raiders opening is the ultimate test and he nails it. That goes a long way to making the rest of the game fit both the timeline and the mountains of new dialogue he has to deliver. I’m also rapt they kept the sound effects to the same levels of the movies – being in the middle of a fist fight with a Nazi and every hit sounding like that classic meaty thunderclap does not get old to my ears. Visually the game does a great job of creating fitting environments with just enough detail to them that you can quickly understand the limits of what you can do. The mix of open and linear areas helps move the story between locations and it’s wild to think about the amount of work that would have gone into some of these transition areas. The production budget on this game must have been comparable to some of the biggest in the industry and it shows.

Fans of the film franchise will love this as you get a game that feels like an extension of those stories while giving you far more time to explore the world around Indy. If you were to compare it to the movies, it’s almost as if one has been given a Lord of the Rings style extended edition treatment with a huge amount of additional content to fill out the overall package. For players familiar with other antiquity chasing adventurers, this is a game that gives you an experience where the focus is more on the journey and less on the bloodshed and it might just work for you as much as it has for me. Now that I’ve finished it, all I want are more adventures done this way… it’s that good.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is out now for PC and Xbox. PlayStation version coming soon. Played on an Xbox Series X via Game Pass.