Indiana Jones and The Great Circle review: MachineGames takes you on a proper adventure in one of 2024’s best games

An unforgettable adventure that easily outdoes the most recent movies it’s based on.

MachineGames/Bethesda

The term “slapstick” comes from a physical instrument: the Italian batacchio, a club with two wooden slats that clash together when struck, producing a comically loud slapping sound without injuring the person it connects with. In the Wolfenstein games, developer MachineGames relied on gore to sell its violent scenes – let’s call it slurpstick. Still over-the-top, Nazis in the series exploded in a shower of gore as bullets tore up the scenery. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle might still have Nazis, but its ESRB Teen rating means they don’t spill a drop of the red stuff.  

Instead, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is full of sticks to slap Nazis with: brooms, shovels, hammers, and rakes; pots, pans, and ladles. Almost every prop becomes a weapon in Indy’s hands. With a rake, Indy might hook it between their legs and pull it back to squeeze their nether regions. With a hammer, he might tap them on the shoulder before uppercutting them with the claw. 

The way they fall sells it. 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle / Bethesda

After taking so many hits, fascists often end up unconscious on their feet, going stiff as a corpse before falling, the clang of the skillet you just smacked around their head still ringing in their ears. MachineGames could have left it at that, but you can also interrupt this canned animation and send them into a ragdoll with another hit. It never stops being funny. 

I once stunned a Nazi on his feet and smacked him in the side of the head with a bell, sending his skull careening into a wooden chair, which shattered to pieces as his body relaxed and splayed out in the debris like an octopus on a skate park. 

To set expectations, this isn’t a shooting game. It’s a punching game. There are guns in the same way there were guns in Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay – another game made by MachineGames’ founders. Indiana Jones shares more DNA with Riddick than Wolfenstein, with its open hub areas, third-person camera cuts for climbing, crunchy melee combat, and optional quest givers. There are plenty of things you can do with a Nazi in The Great Circle, but shooting them is easily the most boring. 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle / Bethesda

Not only is ammo limited, but alerting a compound is a quick way to die. You’re better off creeping around or fighting hand-to-hand, which is where combat shines. Whenever you have a gun in your hand, you feel like you’re playing this game wrong. It speaks volumes that the usual reload button – X on the Xbox controller – flips the weapon around in your hands so you can use it as a melee weapon or throw it at an enemy. The developers want you to forget old habits. 

MachineGames has created a satisfying and fun melee system in first-person, where every punch you land feels impactful, while firearms feel weak and ineffective – a conscious decision on the developer’s part to nudge you into meeting the game halfway. You’re supposed to get into the Indy mindset, using your whip and wits. Yank the weapon out of an enemy’s hand and use it against them. Pull them backward off a chair with your whip coiled around their neck. I haven’t even mentioned the dedicated push button yet… 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle / Bethesda

I didn’t even fire a gun for my first ten hours. You could play 99% of the game without ever doing so. Silent infiltrations are more satisfying and always a safer bet. 

The studio has done some of its best level design work here, giving you almost immersive sim-level options to approach enemy camps from different routes. There are breaches in fences, scalable watchtowers, open windows, crawlspaces, and more. The fantasy is at its best when you’re crouched and watching, taking covert photographs as the fascists below complain, ironically, about their boots hurting. If you explore enough, you can even unlock disguises to walk through enemy territory without restriction. And when you’re not avoiding Nazi patrols, you’re solving puzzles in forgotten tombs. 

It always makes me laugh when we come into The Game Awards season and lump random games into the action/adventure category because they’re difficult to define. If they have a third-person camera, they usually qualify. Well, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is here to remind us all what an adventure game is. 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle / Bethesda/MachineGames

Every country I visited in this massive, 40-hour-plus journey, felt like a proper adventure. It’s packed with intelligent puzzles, surprising secrets, and looping level design where locations are often more than they first appear as you progress through them and open up shortcuts back to earlier areas. Each tomb you pick through has unique dangers and mysteries, and they’re all visually distinct. It’s a journey. You never know what’s coming next, but you’re always excited to see what it is. 

God, it’s a gorgeous game, too. A masterwork. I would compare its impossibly intricate visuals – gilded, patterned surfaces, reflective red marble, scorched sands, hieroglyphs, volcanic rock formations, and more – with the Sistine Chapel, but that’s just one of the places you can visit in-game, recreated perfectly. 

The attention to detail isn’t just texture, either. The Great Circle feels like a celebration of culture. In every country you visit, people speak their language, serve their food, tell their stories, play their games, and work their jobs. You’re transported to these places, learning about their customs, architecture, and history while being told a great matinée adventure-style story. And you get to slap fascists with inanimate objects along the way. Bonus.  

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle / Bethesda

Every member of the cast brings their A-game. Directed by the great Tom Keegan (performance director for the Wolfenstein games), Troy Baker delivers the goods with his pitch-perfect impression of a young Harrison Ford – from the whip cracks to the voice cracks – which he somehow manages to pull off while doing some of his best character acting. And he’s often outshone by Marios Gavrilis, who plays Emmerich Voss, a rival Nazi archeologist who’s a truly horrible pantomime villain. MachineGames knows how to make a horrible Nazi, and these are some of the worst (in a good way). 

As much as I wanted Wolfenstein 3, MachineGames has pulled it off. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the first true triple-A adventure game we’ve had in ages and one of the best games of 2024. People jumping in expecting it to be Wolfenstein in everything but name might be disappointed, but settle into its pace and you’ll be treated to a whirlwind world tour that only video games can deliver. Actually, cancel that. This is a fash-bashing experience only MachineGames could deliver – an unforgettable adventure that easily outdoes the most recent movies it’s based on. 

Score: 10/10

Version tested: PC