Now more than a year has passed since its original release, I feel confident saying that a lot of people slept on Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. First released for Xbox consoles and PC in December 2024 — meaning it missed out on nominations at The Game Awards — critics heaped praise upon MachineGames’ first-person adventure while a seemingly small, yet very passionate audience of players did the same.
More would jump on the bandwagon with the eventual PS5 port, while earlier this month we saw the spectacular immersive sim arrive on Nintendo Switch 2. It doesn’t look or run quite as well as other platforms, but the fantasy of exploring different locations as the tremendous archaeologist remains. What makes it so great though? Well, to properly discuss that, I have to go back in time and talk about a game called Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, a 2004 cult classic that laid so many of the foundations for the Great Circle.
How Indiana Jones Learns From The Chronicles Of Riddick
Developed by Starbreeze Studios (seven former employees of which would go on to found MachineGames in 2010), Escape from Butcher Bay is an action-adventure stealth game where you play as titular protagonist Riddick as he attempts to escape from one of the most infamous prisons in the galaxy. Acting as a prequel to Pitch Black, you are treated as merely another prisoner within a sprawling system of criminals. From the second you are hurled into your cell to the moment you finally escape the clutches of imprisonment, it feels like a living, breathing place.
The atmosphere as you explore the corridors or cells or loiter in the yard is palpable, made even more effective as you engage in conversations or sneak into places you shouldn’t be purely to progress. Vin Diesel’s gruff performance makes it feel authentic as well, with the cast rounded out by names like Cole Hauser, Dwight Schultz, and Xzibit. Starbreeze made one of the best licensed games ever made while simultaneously laying the groundwork for future immersive sims.
It could have just been a generic shooter, but it chose to give us a game world where you can pick up and interact with objects, talk with multiple characters, and have to be truly inventive in your thinking in order to progress. The influence it takes from classics like Half-Life and Thief: The Dark Project is clear to see, but it also builds on them too.
Little things you can find in the corners of each room or conversations going on without your involvement add so much to the world building, much like how exploration in The Great Circle informs so much of that game’s excellence. This DNA can be tracked from Riddick to the sequel Assault on Dark Athena to work eventually done at MachineGames on Wolfenstein. While it was more of a straight-laced shooter, it still rewarded consistent exploration and a constant willingness to lose yourself in the world rather than blast through everything you see.
When I jumped into Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I was reminded of Riddick instantly. How Indy moves, interacts with the environment, punches his foes, along with solving puzzles feels like a generational leap over the Butcher Bay classic. Everywhere I turn in this game there is a reason to explore or prod within places begging to be combed over. That’s when it hit me that two things both of these games do so well is interactivity.
Few Games Do Interactivity Quite Like The Great Circle
Great Circle’s campaign is split into a number of large locations you are free to explore. It presents a central mystery for you to solve, but beyond that there are individual quests or plentiful trinkets waiting to be discovered. Disguises can be used to access certain areas and avoid being jumped on by Nazis when you least expect it. What begins as just curiously poking your head into new areas transformed into an interconnected journey across vast playgrounds of unpredictable destruction. So many things can be picked up and used as impromptu weapons while stealth is layered enough to always feel satisfying.
Yes, like most modern triple-A games, you can be told what to do and where to go if you’re not in the mood for messing about, but the real joy comes from how much freedom it gives you to make all of its mechanics your own. Stopping to take pictures of discoveries, getting into new places, and finding countless secrets meant I always felt engaged and rewarded. I would hesitate to call it a true immersive sim, but it certainly borrows from the genre as much as the Riddick games did to inform the depth of its game design.
It’s so incredibly well executed that it kinda bummed me out that so few people seem to have talked about it since launch. Maybe the iconic IP doesn’t mesh as well as a selling point with mechanics that are more involved. It demands a little more attention than something like Uncharted or Ghost of Yotei, but learning how it ticks is so worthwhile. I’m only just finishing up my time in the Vatican during my PS5 playthrough and failed to realise I missed so many excellent moments when I played it on Xbox for the first time last year. Entire areas, cutscenes, and sequences awaited me alongside DLC I’m yet to properly dig into.
If you’re looking for a modern blockbuster that plays like nothing else out there and lets you loose in several different playgrounds with compelling mechanics, I can’t recommend it enough. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle might not have set the world on fire when it hit the shelves, but I can already tell it’s going to go down in history as a classic.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 86/100 Critics Rec: 93%
- Released
- December 9, 2024
- ESRB
- Teen / Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Mild Language, Violence, In-Game Purchases
- Developer(s)
- MachineGames
- Publisher(s)
- Bethesda
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Action, Adventure
