I just finished playing "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" and I want to get my thoughts down on it while it's still fresh: incredibly underwhelmed.
I finished the game earlier this week and, while I agree with some of the things you said, I disagree with most of the others. I'm gonna copy here my impressions from the COW, which I think are a fair review where I don't try to oversell the game in any way:
It is a solid game, not quite a great one, but it dared to try something different gameplay wise while feeling far more in line with the Spielberg movies than James Mangold ever was. It can be rather clunky at times, somehow it manages to consistently look both impressive and flawed for much of its duration. For every nicely timed animation there's a stiff counterpart, for every strong example of level design, another instance where the game fails to telegraph its intentions. In fairness, this was never going to be a PlayStation Studios type of painstakingly polished production, so I'm not really complaining, just stating what it's like. It's certainly the most ambitious Indiana Jones videogame ever made, and sometimes it may even be too ambitious for whatever level of resources they had. Still, the devs win you over by how earnestly they believe in their own game, and how plain their love for the Indiana Jones movies is.
Never since the Factor 5 Star Wars games or Rare's take on James Bond with Goldeneye I've seen a game studio so preoccupied with attention to detail as these guys. You can see the faithfully recreated interior of the Mk VII shoulder bag each time Indy opens it to grab something from inside, the same trinkets you remember from The Last Crusade sitting on Indy's desk down to the brass magnifying glass, winks at Douglas Slocombe's cinematography in the way levels are lit (the interior of the Hovito temple during the opening tutorial being pretty much a flawless screen-match that even evokes the same old Hollywood interior fake lighting), or Michael Kahn's playful editing during cutscenes—with a special shout-out to an imperfectly executed, yet very welcome beat when the noise made by some Nazis masks Indy's punch on a bad guy just as the camera switches shots, much like it happened with the book stamp gag in Crusade. It's stuff like this that brings in the Spielbergian humor that was so sorely missing in Dial of Destiny. And even if not quite there yet, it's the realization that the game developers clearly were able to correctly read the tone and feel of the movies what sells it. One major caveat would be the soundtrack for me, composed by Lucas' old pick Gordy Haab. He sure knows how to remind you of John Williams, but his reticence to use any leitmotifs whatsoever, or even echoes of the Raiders March for the vast majority of the game leaves you wondering exactly what he was thinking when asked to compose an Indiana Jones score—be it for an exploration game or not.
Which takes me to the game itself. The first person perspective is the elephant in the room here, and thankfully it works. Frankly, I'm not sure the game couldn't have existed just the same in third person, and it does switch to third person as often as possible, but I suppose the first person adds an extra touch of immersion when inspecting all the stuff lying around. The end result is some weird mix between stealth games like Hitman and exploration adventures like Firewatch. I'm a bigger fan of the latter, but considering shooting is not well suited for Indy and whip/punch mechanics work just right in first person, I'll also take the stealth. It differentiates it enough from Uncharted and Tomb Raider while greatly emphasizing the exploration aspect, which seemed to be the goal. It will never not feel strange to play an Indiana Jones adventure without equal doses of cinematic action and puzzle solving, but that's just the path these guys took and the sooner you accept it the sooner you start having fun. Perhaps the most common critique on this area is the AI, which feels rather clumsy and archaic, but chances are it is that way to allow for the level design and first person too.
I wanted to keep this spoiler free so I'm not gonna go into much detail on the story. I'll start by saying Todd Howard's "
great idea" was already covered in one of the official Bantam novels from the 90s, but luckily for anyone OCD about this the plot of the game can actually coexist with that book because of how the events transpire in each one. Personally, I was not a fan of the Mystery Box approach for the narrative, with the nature of Indy's actual goal kept hidden until the very last sequence in direct contradiction with the films' structure, or any well-plotted storyline for that matter. However, this is extremely frequent in videogames, so it bothered me less than it would've in any other medium. The ending is tremendously derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but once again the developers hit just the right note to earn your favor, and they bring a healthy dose of sense of awe that the story from the Bantam book I mentioned earlier was lacking. I was not sold on the villains, all of them cartoony in a cringey lowbrow way and uttering lines that would've never come to pass on a movie. The same cannot be said for Indy though, who sounds and moves exactly like himself. Troy Baker does an exceptional job at nailing Harrison Ford's mannerisms and tone, and to anyone thinking the guy's voice is becoming tired by now, I'll say he's done the best rendition of the character on a game to date. All in all, The Great Circle gives you the illusion of embodying Indy in some globe-trotting adventure, maybe with less excitement than Emperor's Tomb, or taking less narrative chances than Infernal Machine, but ultimately ending near the top end of Indiana Jones games so far.
And that's that I guess. I'm glad the game is doing well, and I hope they make more, if not with these guys, some other studio. I really don't care as long as they devote themselves to the franchise in the same way, which luckily everyone has done to some extent during all these years. I consider myself a very demanding person, and yet, even though no mainline Indy game is considered groundbreaking outside of Fate of Atlantis, I'm happy we can still say that all of them are at least
good to this day.
the phases of life we go through…IMO Best game ever for ps1…
