1937, Marshall College, Connecticut. Renowned archaeologist Indiana Jones is back teaching when an imposing man breaks into the college and steals an ancient cat mummy. An incensed Jones pursues the man, following clues to the Vatican, where the Catholic Church is negotiating a delicate coexistence with Mussolini's fascist government. Allying with an old friend and an intrepid Italian reporter searching for her missing sister, Jones runs afoul of an old German nemesis and embarks on an epic journey that will take him all over the world in pursuit of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.
Indiana Jones is one of the most beloved film franchises of all time, with the collaboration between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford delivering two of the best action-adventure films ever made, two okay ones and one stinker (your mileage may vary on which is which), whilst also delivering a ton of decent spin-off media, including books and a TV show. However, the franchise has often faltered in the sphere of video games. A lot of titles have been generic action games wearing a Fedora and leather whip skin, diverting but not really nailing the spirit of the movies or the character. Arguably the last all-time classic Indiana Jones video game was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, released way back in 1992.
Now there's a new challenger. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has an original story and was developed by Machinegames - best known for the Wolfenstein action series - for Bethesda and Microsoft. The game is mostly played from a first-person perspective, and sees the player controlling Indiana as he goes on a round-the-world trip to stop the Nazis from getting their hands on a number of powerful, ancient artefacts. Harrison Ford declined to return as Indy, so omnipresent voice acting superstar Troy Baker takes up the role, delivering a performance which both nails Ford's sound and cadence, and is a good performance in its own right.
Where The Great Circle really succeeds is taking a step back and thinking thoughtfully about who Indiana Jones is and isn't as a character. Jones is happy to whip out a gun and shoot enemies in a pinch, but he isn't a seasoned sharpshooter. He's happy to sneak up on a bad guy and knock them out, but he's not a stealth assassin. His main skills are deduction, speaking a dozen or more languages, and exploring ancient ruins filled with curiously well-maintained traps. He is also kinda goofy as a character, prone to the occasional terrible joke and being a bit cack-handed, factors which the game also tries to invoke.
As a result, the game allows you to fire guns, but sees this as a fail state and usually this results in you getting overwhelmed, unless you are able to escape in the confusion, or you're dealing with very isolated enemies. Indy is awkward with guns and sometimes panics during reloading, which can be frustrating but does dissuade you from relying on them (headshots or pointblank shotgun blasts not resulting in instant kills is very dumb, though). You can sneak up behind people and knock them out, but doing this with your bare hands is tricky, so grabbing a blunt instrument and whacking them on the back of the head is often a better move. In theory, enemies are supposed to panic and sound the alarm upon discovery of bodies, so you can move bodies elsewhere, but in practice this only seemed to work about half the time, and never if you've moved the bodies from elsewhere. Fighting a bunch of bad guys in the Vatican and hurling their bodies from a balcony just to find the enemies below politely stepping around them without comment was odd.
Indy's most reliable weapon is his straight-from-the-films ability to wear somewhat flimsy disguises and, despite not looking like any locals at all, immediately fit in. Arriving in a new location can see a lot of careful travelling until you find a local uniform and then just stroll into enemy bases. Of course there are ways of still being discovered - enemy officers know who all their men are and will get suspicious at a new guy loitering around - as well as there being drawbacks. Otherwise friendly locals may refuse to help you if they see you in a German military uniform, but you can find local garb or just Indy's standard gear to regain their trust.
The game isn't an open-world affair, but instead has three open-ish maps which you can traverse, each one of which has multiple ruins you can explore, to service the main story, side-quests or optional activities. Penetrating ruins requires some jumping, using your whip to traverse distances or climb to higher exits, and solving puzzles. All of this is done in a very enjoyable way, and after years of solid Tomb Raider and Uncharted games, it's satisfying to see their main inspiration finally getting a game worthy of his name. Optional activities include finding relics for a museum, taking photographs of impressive sights and locating notes on everything from local cuisine to personal correspondence. Indy also spends a lot of time undercover in Italian and German military camps, where he can find locked safes and cases containing useful equipment. There are also collectibles including comic books and more useful skill books, which allow Indy to learn new skills to enhance everything from combat to stealth to improved medical skills.
Structurally, the game has some light Metroidvania elements as you can revisit previous locations with later-acquired skills or equipment to open new areas, although this element is not strongly publicised, and in fact is a bit weird: you have to wait until the game autosaves before leaving for a new location, otherwise anything you've done since will be deleted, and the game's incredibly urgent and pressing storyline means that Indy can't fly between, say, the Vatican and Connecticut willy-nilly, so any re-visits to previous areas is "non-canonical," you're really just remembering your original time in that location in a different way. This is an awkward mechanic that never really feels right, but is necessary since finding all the collectibles and side-objectives on your first visit to an area is almost impossible. It can be amusing to go back to earlier areas after levelling up your fighting skills in later areas, as the blackshirts in the Vatican are laughably easy to take out in fistfights once Indiana as even just moderately improved his unarmed combat. Watching cardinals and nuns step gingerly around a substantial pile of unconscious fascists never stops being entertaining.
You also spend a lot of the game with a companion, in this case Italian journalist Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi) who is working hard to expose the dangers of Italian fascism and also looking for her sister, an archaeologist who fell in train with Indy's German rival, Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis, who not so much chews the scenery as gloriously consumes it wholesale). Gina can be useful in helping solve puzzles and provide hints if you get stuck in a particular area, though she does have a slight tendency to get in your way and block doorways (though she gets out of the way sharpish if you have problems). Gina fits right into the classic pantheon of Indy love interests who can hold their own. Voss is also a glorious opponent, prone to tedious pontificating and lording it over Indy despite being mostly reliant on Indy to work out the location of the artefacts and then trying to steal them. Also an honourable mention to the late Tony Todd, who provided a fine performance (mocap and voice) before passing away in November.
Despite the mounds of side-content, the game does not outstay its welcome: I finished the whole game, in fact almost 100%ing it (and only being prevented from doing so by a bug), in a very reasonable 38 hours. It's refreshing to play a game that isn't so overstuffed with optional side-content that it becomes a tedious grind. The game also mixes up its small open-world-ish hub areas with much more focused interstitial levels (like a trip to the Himalayas and a side-visit to Shanghai), which also helps pacing.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's biggest success is feeling like the Indiana Jones movies. The writing, dialogue and puzzles are all on-point, and the revelation of the final objective of the game is genuinely impressive (to the point you can imagine Spielberg and Lucas cursing as to why they never had that idea). If it was a movie, it would probably be at least the third-best one in the series. Like Batman: Arkham Asylum before it, The Great Circle feels like an authentic, additive entry to its franchise, not just a generic tie-in with some iconography slapped on the top.
The game does have flaws. Although I understand why they made guns awkward to use, there are moments where it can be very frustrating, and headshots not killing someone immediately is daft. The mechanic for revisiting previous location is awkward. The game is graphically beautiful (stunning, in fact) in terms of environments and lighting, but character models aren't quite there and can slip into the uncanny valley (Indy is also prone to making some odd faces and expressions). Idle dialogue can be gratingly repetitive (the sixty-first time Gina reminded me she couldn't swim felt a bit unnecessary). There are also some bugs with the game tripping over itself in trying to track objectives and some achievements not triggering until you run backwards and forwards a few times. During the game's finale a door opened but didn't "really" open, leaving the area beyond an empty void until I worked out how to trigger the proper cut scene. Early patches have eliminated some of these issues but others remain (being on 98% completion despite completing 100% of the game, but the game not recognising the last 2%, is irritating, if inconsequential).
But overall, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (****½) is easily the best Indiana Jones video game ever made, true to the spirit of the source material and a cracking good adventure even for casual fans of the franchise. The game is available now on PC and Xbox, and should launch on PlayStation 5 this spring.
No comments:
Post a Comment