Indiana Jones And The Great Circle preview – confirmed for PS5-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle – the man with the hat is back, again (Bethesda)

GameCentral gets to see exclusive footage from Bethesda’s new Indiana Jones games, and it looks extremely impressive.

The jury may be out on how much movie adaptations (as opposed to TV) have improved over the last few years, but the quality of video game adaptations is unquestionably far higher than it used to be. Companies can’t risk coasting on a name alone, especially when even Marvel games are no guarantee of success, and so the quality of everything from Star Wars Jedi: Survivor to RoboCop: Rogue City has been agreeably high.

RoboCop was clearly made on a budget, but Lucasfilm demands that games based on Star Wars spare no expense, as also seems to be with the case with the imminent Star Wars Outlaws. Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is clearly a very expensive game too, as has been obvious from the first trailer. And that’s despite the fact that the last film makes the wider popularity of the franchise difficult to gauge.

The last two movies may have been ill-judged, but most people still love the originals, and the magic of video games is that you can have young Harrison Ford for the entire game and it doesn’t cost anymore than any other video game character (especially as the voiceover is a soundalike – the ubiquitous Troy Baker).

By the time you read this the Gamescom Opening Night Live event should be over and we imagine it would’ve announced the release date of The Great Circle, and perhaps even something about a PlayStation 5 version. But while we were granted an exclusive early look at the game, including footage that won’t be at Gamescom, we weren’t told what the release date is beyond sometime this year.

(Update: Microsoft has confirmed a release date of December 9 on Xbox Series X/S and PC and… spring 2025 on PlayStation 5. So, once again, all the rumours were true.)

As far as we know The Great Circle will not be playable at Gamescom, which seems a crying shame given how good the game looks and how Xbox were trying to paint this as their biggest year ever for the event. Last week though we were treated to a digital event where we got to see a combination of all the footage so far and a lot of new sequences.

You likely know the drill by now: the game is set between Raiders of the Ark and The Last Crusade (Temple of Doom was a prequel) and has Indy battling the Nazis in order to solve the mystery surrounding some Graham Hancock style nonsense about all the great monuments in the world lining up to make a big circle around the world.

We’re not thrilled about that MacGuffin but literally everything else about the game looks great. It’s first person, which seems an odd choice given how poorly melee combat usually comes across, but it’s understandable given the developer is MachineGames, whose work we’ve long admired, especially with the Wolfenstein reboot games.

Although MachineGames didn’t go into too much detail, the talk of having both linear and more open-ended sections sounds very similar to MachineGames’ previous games, with the latter apparently having lots of side quests and secrets to discover, and no doubt characters to chat to. You can even travel between different areas, going back to look for things you’ve missed, so the game won’t necessarily have the breakneck pacing of the films.

It certainly has the same amount of globetrotting, with the footage we saw showing the Himalayas, Thailand, and something that looked very much like the temple at the beginning of Raiders, complete with an idol which, when purloined, starts to set off bobby traps.

Overall though, we were impressed that the game didn’t overdo it in terms of callbacks. There was a bit with mummies, that also looked straight out of Raiders, but most of the rest just looked authentically Indiana Jones, rather than just copying something that already exists and putting it in a slightly different context.

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle – this is clearly one of the open areas (Bethesda)

What we were also impressed by was that the puzzles seem to be relatively complex, more akin to Zelda than the simplistic switch-pulling so common in other big budget games. We only saw snippets but there seemed to be a lot of Zelda classics, including using fire to burn down barriers, using mirrors to move around shafts of light, and something involving water levels and a fountain.

Even just getting around seemed interesting, with Indy at one point throwing a spear at a wall so he could then use his whip as a grapple hook to get to the other side.

The idea of Indy carrying around a camera and using it something like the scan visor from Metroid Prime was also interesting, as it added background exposition but was also used as a means to discover new clues. It connects to a journal too, which fills in automatically and works as a hint guide if you need it.

We also liked the idea of Indy using disguises – some of which you can use whenever you want in open areas – and the collectible books that add perks, like being able to come back from what would’ve been a fatal injury.

The problem with making a game based on a movie, especially one with a fairly narrow scope like Indiana Jones, is that you have to add so much extra stuff to pad the running time that it loses the look and feel of the original. But everything we saw looked agreeably Indy, from hitting bad guys with a rolling pin, just because it was the only thing in reach, to trouble with an unfeasibly large number of scorpions in a hidden temple.

And you can’t underestimate the benefit of using all the classic Lucasfilm sound effects, where a simple punch sounds like you’re hitting someone in the face with a tank.

The exclusive section we saw was in an excavation beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza, which wasn’t an action sequence, but had you disguised as a worker, trying to steal a gold medallion from under the nose of some Nazis having lunch (one of which was demanding water).

So, okay, that’s very much like that bit from Raiders, which undermines our original point a bit, but we still liked the idea that the game wasn’t just 12 hours of punching and shooting Nazis (not that isn’t a fine way to spend your time, but Wolfenstein already exists).

The Q&A, after being showing the footage, wasn’t very enlightening but it did reveal that that stealth is advanced enough that you can hide bodies and that there’s a difficultly level for just the puzzles – with one of the developers admitting that some were tough enough that even they got stuck.

The two LucasArts graphic adventures are classics but there’s never been a particularly good action game based around Indiana Jones, and yet this seems to be exactly that. One of the additional benefits of the first person view is that it also avoids too many comparisons with Tomb Raider and Uncharted. We’d still like to know how well the whip combat works but, overall, this is easily one of our most anticipated games of the year.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: MachineGames
Release Date: 9th December 2024 (spring 2025 on PS5)
Age Rating: 16

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle – fortune and glory awaits (Bethesda)

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