Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

 

With the latest Microsoft Xbox developer conference we have ourselves another year of promises from the industries most battered and disgraced 'leaders'. Microsoft has taken so many knocks on the chin when it comes to their first party delivered titles that it's becoming a little bit of a joke whenever something is announced as Xbox bound- being that it's 'exclusivity' is a punishment, not a community boon. To see their big show stopper of last year turn out to only be 'alright' was a huge disappointment, even if the game itself did ultimately perform well in the monetary department, I would be very surprised to find out that Starfield has even half the life span of your average Bethesda game. But we're not talking about Bethesda today. Instead let's talk about the brand new game that the company are throwing their crossed fingers and whispered prayers behind. Let's talk about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

We've all known that Bethesda have had an Indiana Jones game up their sleeve for the longest time. So long, in fact, that I don't even remember if the title was ever actually officially announced or if it just 'became known' at some point and everyone just rolled with it. Like how Starfield got leaked back in it's conceptual stages and just became the unspoken badly-kept secret Bethesda was poorly shying away from at each conference. Machine Games wasted no time with announcements when it came down to it, just shoving their work in our face after all this time in hopes it lives up to the dreams and expectations and I have to admit to being somewhat interested in the game. But maybe it's my grumpy suspicion or perhaps just the clarity of space from the Xbox ecosystem over the past few months, but I'm not exactly blown away.

Which doesn't mean anything real, I hasten to add. There are a great many games that would never knock off my socks until I get behind the controller and spend a few hours getting into the game, experiencing the story, feeling the gameplay- there's no substitute for playing a game, provided it's marketing can do enough to get you in the door in the first place. For Indiana Jones, the game has done it's job. I very much want to play it and will happily jump into the game when it launches in the mysterious miasma of 'sometime' 2024- which I suspect is code for "The absolutely best guess gives us a 2024 release, but reality says we're probably getting delayed until 2025." Heck, we had two 'Fall 2024' announcements, there's only so much further on this game can be to not even get a release season announced! (I guess I just thought that after all these years we'd be a bit closer to launch for the reveal.)

Machine Games are of course best known for their brilliant work bringing the Wolfenstien series back from the graveyard and turning it into a genuinely cinematically compelling alternate history epic... which seems to get further and further away from the possibility of having a satisfying conclusion with every passing year lacking a finale reveal. With that legacy behind them I was actually quite excited to see the team try something different, which is why I was genuinely shocked to discover this game looks so much like Wolfenstien. The first person perspective despite having a visual icon as their protagonist, the stealth action gameplay sections, the in-your-face combat and well-composed but plastic-model cutscenes that painfully scrape across the unreal valley line in a manner that shifts from atmospheric to unnerving largely depending on the lighting of the scene. (I kind of hoped they would have upgraded a little by now to be honest.)

Now again, Graphical fidelity that matches the true-to-life sheen of your average PS exclusive isn't the be-all end-all of game development and no Wolfenstein game before this has ever been sullied by the old weird looking character model- I just would have thought we'd be seeing Xbox generation leading games that can at least match what PlayStation has been achieving since the late PS4 days. The slightly-below-top-shelf look is becoming something of a sad-trademark of Xbox and I, for one, don't like it! But I guess the characters are recognisable enough as Indiana Jones, and maybe if we get a half decent performance out of whoever it is the team have doing a young-Indy impersonation, maybe I'll forget all about it. (Who knows.)

What The Great Circle seems to be going for is a later Tomb Raider style of game, with exploration mixed with puzzle solving and peppered with action/stealth sections. However with the pedigree of Machine Games I do hope that action is quite a bit better than what the Tomb Raider Remake games proposed, given how fiddly they always tended to be. (Although it's really hard to tell right now.) Personally I still hold fond memories of the level based third person adventure of 'Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb' from 2003 and hope for an experience something akin to that. Going first person doesn't destroy that dream, but there were some really dedicated platforming sections and environmental puzzles that stood out well in that old game, I'm not sure a forced first person perspective can fully take advantage of the full breadth of adventure gameplay like we might want.

'The Great Circle' does not give the sense that it was designed to be a showstopper game like I kind of always assumed it was all those years in production. But maybe what we have here is one of the quiet monsters that hides it apocalyptic impact beneath an unassuming form. I still think there's just enough wistful sentiment towards the Indiana Jones franchise that a half decent outing will win over a sizable audience provided it hits the key gameplay sectors like it wants to. (And Machine Games proper have yet to make a dud so I would be genuinely surprised and shocked if they didn't.) I mean it won't ever be a 'Hogwarts Legacy' sized hit, in my humble estimations, but maybe slightly sore feelings after 'Dial of Destiny' can be relieved with another crack at Indie in his prime!

I think that's a strangled and garbled way of conveying mixed sentiment towards what we witness with just the slightest bit of disappointment for not being blown away. But I suppose at this point Xbox just really isn't the company for delivering bangers anymore, are they? Unless they pull a reverent miracle and somehow manage to revive and seize control of the KOTOR Remake, as some have begged them to do, I don't see Xbox 'retaking' the generation anytime soon. Every year it seems we get told how Xbox are investing in studios, letting their eggs nest, waiting for that hatching- and year after year we either get mediocre spreads or scatterings of 'decent' games- I'm hoping that The Great Circle is a little bit better than 'decent'. I'm not holding my breath.