I have to say i'm loving it. With so many games being kill kill kill to get to the end of the tunnel (face it, most make it impossible to take a wrong turn anymore), i find this refreshing. Loving running around the vatican and following the different quests.
It sounds like you're still early in the game, but if you enjoy it, more power to you. It grew extremely tedious for me as soon as I got Gina involved and it was just continuous fetch quests to get her to just give me another one after that.
If you want to play great Indiana Jones games, play through the Uncharted series - amazing.
This felt like a backstep considering those
Uncharted games
were essentially the video game versions of Indiana Jones everyone had always wanted, on top of it being a successor to
Tomb Raider, another series made to scratch the Indiana Jones itch. I thought Great Circle could've been cut down to an even smaller game--short and sweet--with high octane adventure one after the other. Get rid of all these redundant fetch quests with no import on the story, tighten up the story to Indy actually doing the leg work instead of running errands for others to tell him what's going on, make this an even more linear and story-driven experience cutting down cutscenes to the minimum, and sell it for 30 bucks. I don't think it would've solved all the game's problems, but I would've been a lot happier living the best moments of the game in succession rather than spend 10 hours walking around looking for bones inbetween the really fun stuff.
Thanks for this insightful review. I've seen positive reviews and none of them really comment on how well the game captures the feel of the Indy movies outside of "Troy Baker sounds just like Harrison Ford" and you "punch Nazis". While I still contend that a 3rd person perspective would've been FAR more preferable, I didn't think it couldn't still be a solid game. Your assessment doesn't surprise me though. For such a cinematic character, forcing game play to be done from a 'non-cinematic' perspective is naturally going to hamstring the immersion.
Lauding punching Nazis feels like a mindless platitude to mention as a positive in the game. Many of whom saying that probably only played it for a few hours in a review copy. I played on hard difficulty to try and get more out of the experience, and punching Nazis or sneaking around them in a "Far Cry Lite" system got real old, real quick.
I think the game tries to capture the spirit of Indy but it really lacks polish, finesse, and really, Spielberg's sense of direction. I don't know how to describe it but the game tries to force "fun." The bad guys are big, loud, hammy, petulant children, stomping their feet and yelling any chance they get, and Indy plays a real goof-ball buffoon in this compared to all his counterparts he meets or briefly joins throughout the story. It almost feels like an AI watched the movies and had to try and replicate and distill the "charm" and "fun" about them.
I mentioned there are two really big set pieces in this that absolutely worked for me and I wish there were more moments like them considering the length of the game, and happened more frequently. The first is after a kinda dull expedition to a Nazi naval vessel stranded in the Himalayas (which is a really cool visual but, again, you're just sneaking around for all of it), Indy is suddenly thrust by magic into the Japanese bombing campaigns in Shanghai, where he gets a bi-plane (not by his own prowess, sadly) and then commandeers a Japanese zero fighter mid-flight to escape. The second is a lamentably short boat chase through the Thai jungles after Nazis and Italian fascists catch up with Indy and party at the very end of the game. They're really fun visual set pieces that just have hours of absolutely nothing filling the gaps to get to them.
I played the game doing the majority of the side-quests and that netted me about 35 hours of total gameplay when, I think, the optimal way to play this is on the easiest difficulty setting just doing the main quest and not bother engaging in the nothing-burger that makes up the bulk of the gameplay. That's about 8-10 hours if you do that. The story isn't all that good but if you can breeze through a lot of it, I'm sure you'll have a much better time.
