Thank god Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is first-person

GamesIndiana Jones and the Great CircleThank god Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is first-personWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

As videogame marketing clichés go, there may be only one line more overused than “See that mountain? You can go there,” and MachineGames just trotted it out to pitch its new Indiana Jones game, The Great Circle. “In this game, you aren’t just playing as Indy. YouareIndiana Jones,” says director Jerk Gustafsson.

The reveal keeps coming back to this point again and again, playing marketing madlibs with the same message. “Our game is all about putting you in Indy’s shoes, letting you see and feel what he sees and feels,” says senior narrative designer Edward Curtis-Sivess. “For us at MachineGames, we do that best through first-person. It’s the ideal perspective to bring you into the rich, exciting interactive world we’ve built. We believe that being up close and personal to the adventure is key, making each action feel like your own.“Bethesda even played up the line in a tweet.

Despite not buying into the whole “beIndiana Jones” hype, I’m thrilled to see MachineGames following up its two Wolfensteins with another first-person game. Curtis-Sivess wasn’t wrong when he said it’s what the studio does best.

Well,specificallywhat MachineGames does best is let you kill Nazis in first-person, a specialty that The Great Circle absolutely seems to be carrying forward. Yeah, you could go into some third-person wrestling animation and sock these guys in the face with Indy’s iron fist, but then you wouldn’t get to see these facial expressions:

You wouldn’t get to do any first-person whipping, either, which has the potential to be The Great Circle’s best gimmick. After watching this trailer I started thinking about first-person adventure games—anything similar to the globe-trotting, puzzle solving, sneaking, and shooting Indy gets up to in his movies—and came up with surprisingly little. Arkane’s Dishonored and Deathloop sort of fit the bill. Resident Evil 8, kinda sorta. Metroid Prime, despite being sci-fi, nails the sense of exploration (and heck, there’s probably a crystal skull in there somewhere). There are other RPGs and immersive sims that put you in first-person without totally focusing on shooting, but none that feel particularly Indiana Jonesy.

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On the flip side, I won’t belabor the obvious point about Uncharted and Tomb Raider. But there are about 20 third-person irresponsible archeologist adventures between them—it really does feel like well-trod ground. Uncharted 4, especially,which I’m happy is playable on PC, replicates Indy’s world weariness and gives Nathan Drake a grappling hook that might as well be a whip. He even uses it to grab onto a truck and gets dragged along in the mud behind it at one point.

I’d trust anyone who wrote that scene to find a good balance of comic and serious in an Indiana Jones game.

In The Great Circle, though, I think it might actually be the first-person action, not the cutscenes, that prove to be the big surprise. How will a studio that’s proven so adept at shooters make it just as fun to whip and punch baddies, and explore ruins in search of ancient secrets? I think there are some clues in the trailer. There’s the old-fashioned way Nazis put up their dukes for a fistfight; Nazis' hats flying off when you sock them in the face; holding up a lighter to examine a stone shelf covered in thick cobwebs. I’ve solved enough put-the-gear-in-the-right-spot puzzles to last a lifetime, yet I do kind of love the up-close first-person animation of Indy slotting it in, rather than the zoomed out perspective I got from the same moment in Tomb Raider 25 years ago.

The whip is the real wild card here. I’m really curious to see how much control The Great Circle gives us of Indy’s default weapon, and whether it quickly feels locked into a few repeated animations or as flexible as a whip truly should. Done right, it has the potential to feel distinct from anything MachineGames has done before and from the grappling hooks in Tomb Raider or Uncharted. That first-person animation and aiming just hits different from the more abstracted experience of a character that takes up a quarter of your screen doing the same animation.

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

I guess what I’m saying is that at least with this specific aspect of being Indiana Jones, I really do want to spend a day in his boots. (And if anyone from Konami happens to be reading: first-person whip-focused Castlevania is still ripe for the making.)

MachineGames hasn’t committed to the first-person perspective as hard as CD Projekt Red did with Cyberpunk 2077—fans disappointed they can’tconstantlybe looking at Indy’s hat and leather jacket will still see plenty of both in cutscenes and contextual moments where the camera zooms out for climbing animations and so on. But it’s a good sign that MachineGames is less obsessed with that iconography than it is making a game that emphasizes environments with multiple paths, stealthing through enemy patrols, and Indy’s on-the-spot resourcefulness.

For everyone who’s sour on the reveal, well, I have it on good authority that Indiana Jones in the Emperor’s Tombis exactly what you want, and it’s a whole$6 on Steam.

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