4/5 ★ – Lord_Hazenberg's review of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

A huge surprise for me. I did not expect to enjoy this game so much knowing this is the same studio that made Wolfenstein the new colossal turd. Maybe Todd Howard brought the magic touch as executive producer, because lord knows that man needed a win after Starfield. I won’t discuss any story spoilers in case any reader wants to play for themselves. I played on the Series X & it took me just under 20 hours to finish the game + all side content besides collectibles. On console the game is locked at 1080p to keep a mostly consistent 60 FPS with HDR, ray tracing, & an optional high resolution texture pack. The only noticeable frame drops were in cutscenes, but gameplay remained very smooth. Gameplay mostly consists of stealth, puzzle solving, & melee combat. There are disguises to help with moving around unnoticed, and a wide array of usable objects to help in either combat or stealth. However guns were very disappointing. It takes almost the whole magazine to kill 1 enemy and it alerts every guard to your presence. Level design is split between open areas with plenty of social stealth & side missions that you could easily spend several hours in, and shorter linear set piece missions akin to something out of Uncharted. The story starts off very strong with investigating the mysteries in the Vatican, but it does quickly devolve into “race villain to macguffin” for almost every single mission after that. The finale was great though, so it was worth a couple of repeated story beats. One of my favorite moments in recent video game memory also happens in a cutscene. A villain takes the name of God in vain and is immediately struck by lightning. There is a ton of Christian imagery & quotes which is perfect for Indiana Jones, but still shocking coming from the game studio that thought “punching Nazis” meant American conservatives back in 2017. Troy Baker does a convincing Harrison Ford impression as long as he’s not yelling then it’s very noticeable. The main girl Gina is okay, but had some head scratching dialogue lines. Like saying “I didn’t need to be saved,” after you untie her from a literal Nazi prison camp. The main antagonist Voss is decent, but the same cannot be said for the sub villain Gantz. Talk about the least intimidating borderline goofy retard of a military commander. Side characters range from great like Father Antonio & Locus (played by the deceased Tony Todd RIP) to meh like the Egyptian archaeologist lady and the Siam rebels. I did encounter a game breaking bug near the end of the game that almost heavily impacted my opinion of it. Got stuck in a story temple with no way to climb out because the climbing animation broke, so I had to reload an old save and hover around an NPC until he said a specific line of dialogue. How that fixed it I don’t know, but I was able to go back and get past where I was stuck. TLDR; Indiana Jones & the Great Circle is a blast. Gameplay is fun, graphics are gorgeous, & the story is mostly good. It’s a shame the Geoff Keighley awards didn’t include the game, because it seems Xbox finally made a game tailor made for game journalists. Hopefully more people played this on game pass, because the Steam numbers were abysmal. But bravo to Machine Games, a huge comeback in quality after two utter pieces of crap like Wolfenstein New Colossus & Youngblood.