You ever really regret finally getting something you thought you absolutely wanted?
Four years ago—and woof, there’s a phrase that puts the lie to “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” huh?—I wrote an installment of this column about the ways Indiana Jones had been depicted in video games. I was inspired, at the time, by the announcement that Machine Games, a studio I had a lot of affection for then, and still do now, was tackling a new Indy game, which would eventually become Indiana Jones And The Great Circle. My thesis, essentially, was that the Wolfenstein studio needed to let go of some of its taste for hard-nosed badassery and present a version of Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., who got his ass kicked more often than not.
You may now possibly see where I’m going with the regrets.
I’m finally playing Great Circle, courtesy of its lovely and technically accomplished PlayStation 5 version, which hit stores five months after the game’s initial December 2024 release. The new version plays perfectly well, and I’m loving all of those things that people have been loving about the game for nearly half a year at this point: Troy Baker’s shockingly good Ford impression; the gorgeous, planet-spanning environments; a plot that feels like it genuinely could have slotted in between Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Last Crusade in the franchise’s chronology. (Temple is a prequel! Don’t yell at me in the comments!) In many ways, it’s the best Indiana Jones game since at least adventure game classic The Fate Of Atlantis, and a decent contender for the best of all time. With just one teensy, painful little caveat: I kind of hate playing as a version of Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., who gets his ass kicked more often than not.
I admire what the game is doing with its combat, I genuinely do: Indiana Jones is not a character who should be able to take on a whole squad of Blackshirts or Nazis in open warfare, at least not without some pretty snazzy improvisations, and the brawling in Great Circle reflects that. Try to take on a truncheon-wielding thug without one of the game’s highly fragile melee weapons of your own? Gonna get your ass kicked. Swing relentlessly with your fists, burning through Indy’s precious supply of stamina, which also powers your meager defensive moves? Gonna get your ass kicked. Piss off the men with guns? You’re gonna get your ass kicked, even if you can drop a few with a stolen rifle of your own. Indiana Jones is an adventure hero, not an action hero, and Machine Games has done a great job of replicating that experience.
But playing a game with a potentially high amount of combat, as a character who’s not very good at combat, is nevertheless kind of a bummer. There are moments when it works, to be sure, especially once you’ve started getting more upgrades under your belt: Whipping a gun out of a Nazi’s hand, grabbing it off the ground, and shooting him with it? That’s some classic Indy shit, right there. (To say nothing of the game’s incredibly clever take on reviving yourself in combat, which involves crawling to your knocked-off hat and slamming it back on Indy’s head.) But a frenetic pell-mell scramble where you’re just barely staying alive is the kind of thing that’s cool in theory, and even once or twice in practice, but which can pretty quickly become tedious once it becomes a part of regular play.
It doesn’t help that the alternative to fighting is typically stealth, which not only carries most of the frustrations sneaking is usually burdened with in games like this—it’s slow, it’s kinda boring, and once it fails, it fails dramatically—but also way less supported by the upgrades system, which is largely geared toward fighting. It’s certainly true to the franchise for me to see a big camp of fascists standing over a precious archeological dig and think “Ugh, not again”—but that doesn’t make it a persistent source of fun.
Life out of combat is better, if still not perfect: Like every video game, ever, I would like Indiana Jones three times better if he climbed about three times faster, and it’s amazing how many Ubisoft-style collectibles Machine Games has managed to cram into these gorgeous maps. (That being said, god bless a game that knows how to dole out meaningful rewards for completing major sidequests; the upgrade system in Great Circle, based around buying skills from books you find, is a ton of fun, and well-supported by its structure.) But both I, and the game, know I’m not, like, dying to do Vatican parkour or sneak through a desert camp site for their own merits; I’m doing it to clear the icon, get a few more points toward my next skill, and get a little bit more of Baker’s gruff, wonderful take on Indy.
I haven’t finished Great Circle, so it’s possible that either a) I’ll fully acclimate to the combat (or get some skills that make it feel better), or, b) get so sick of it that I just give in and sneak everywhere, leaving a trail of quietly whip-strangled Nazis in my wake. For now, though, I’m in the middle ground of wanting to enjoy the fighting, but being hampered by Indy being, well, Indy. I love him; I conceptually love it. I just wish I didn’t regret getting my wish quite so much.
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