Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was purchased by us for this review. Thank you!

I'll admit, I wasn't very impressed when I first saw Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Although the game was pretty impressive visually, and the voice acting itself was decent, it felt like the script was off, like it was based on some cheesy 1970s show that hasn't aged all that well. However, I'm glad to say that my initial impressions based on those trailers were wrong and that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a highlight of 2024!

The game starts in a Peruvian jungle, recreating scenes from the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, which is a really strong way to begin. It brilliantly showcases the game's visual potential and draws in fans of Indiana Jones by faithfully recreating scenes from the movie.

After this short prologue, you're thrust a year into the future, 1937, which is where Indiana Jones and the Great Circle begins its own unique narrative. This is an excellent move by MachineGames to not just adapt one of the films to the video game format, which would draw constant comparisons between the films and the game. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has a fantastic narrative that equals the Indiana Jones films of old, and it's perhaps a damning indictment of the newer films that this game has a better story than they do.

The adventure will take you worldwide, from the USA to Italy, China, Peru, and more. It truly does feel like one of Indiana's globe-trotting adventures, with players given the option to either confront opponents (usually Nazis and/or Fascists) or play it more stealthily and do silent takedowns, or you can just avoid enemies altogether in some cases.

The only downside is that the game seems to be rather front-loaded. You spend a lot of time in environments at the beginning and mid-game, and towards the end, Indy switches locations pretty much every hour, or less in some cases.

It wouldn't be Indiana Jones without some light-hearted combat, and while there is a degree of violence in the game, it's not on par with other titles in the genre. While you can use your fists to have a good old punch-up with your opponents, it's far more effective to find objects in your environment, such as shovels or bottles, to hit your opponents over the head with, ideally quickly incapacitating them before they can alert their friends.

It can devolve into trigger mashing when encountering enemies, though it's perhaps not the best way to play the game. If you're spotted, you do get time to knock an enemy out before he alerts others in the area by shouting or firing his weapon. So it often involved me running up to him and frantically mashing L2 and R2 to swing punches manically at his face to knock him out, with varying degrees of success.

You get firearms with limited ammo, mainly gained by incapacitating enemies and stealing their weapons. Doing almost any action in the game will make you drop your weapon, which I found pretty frustrating with the game design. You can only hold one object, so you will drop the firearm you picked up if you need to hold anything else, even a camera. Likewise, using your whip or climbing a ladder will make you drop your weapon, preventing you from holding onto a firearm for too long. On the flip side, firearms are very powerful in the game, so I understand why they try to limit their use.

Inventory management can also be a little frustrating, handled entirely by the d-pad, making it difficult to quickly select the item you want if enemies are actively chasing you. It might take several downward clicks on the d-pad to select a bandage, for example, and if you click one too many times, you need to keep clicking to return to the bandage, wasting valuable seconds.

You will encounter plenty of puzzles in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, so if you aren't in a puzzling frame of mind, you might want to wait until you are. Some are straightforward and take seconds, but others require you to stand back and think about them. The game has a handy hint system whereby you can gradually reveal how to solve a puzzle. I took full advantage of this several times after getting stumped for a few minutes on several puzzles.

Sometimes, these can be a little repetitive. There's one point in the game where the same type of puzzle is used three or four times, and that can be a little much. However, the puzzles are generally quite varied and should keep you on your toes during the adventure. It's always satisfying to solve a puzzle and see the secret door swing open, adding to the game's Indiana Jones vibe.

I know a lot of us were worried about how the acting might come across in the game. Harrison Ford isn't voicing Indiana in this one, but Troy Baker does an excellent job of imitating Ford here. I've heard others say that sometimes you can get fooled into thinking it is indeed Harrison Ford voicing the character, and I would agree with that statement. The voice acting generally stands up here and doesn't detract from the game at all.

The visuals are also quite stunning at points. Although the screenshots above were largely taken on a Steam Deck and therefore don't really convey how pretty the game can be, here are some screenshots from my PC, which also aren't at the highest settings but give you a better idea of how the game can look.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does an excellent job of giving you exactly what you want from an Indiana Jones game. It has the puzzles and intriguing storyline you might expect. The violence is impactful yet still retains a somewhat light-hearted feel with minimal gore, and it really does feel like another Indiana Jones adventure of old.

Aside from some frustrations around how the game handles items and inventory, and the story pacing is a bit front-loaded, I recommend you pick this one up if you are interested in Indiana Jones or just want a good adventure to enjoy.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Steam Deck Performance

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle supports 16:10 resolutions, so you can play it without black borders on the Steam Deck. It also has great controller support, so that's not a worry either.

The game does have some issues on the Steam Deck, namely, character eyes can have glowing artifacts around them, and photos taken by the camera are purely black. These issues can make certain parts of the game harder, but they're more of a hindrance than a roadblock.

The beta version of SteamOS fixes the glowing eyes issue, and in my playthrough, it was generally not too bad. It was mainly noticeable when characters were in dark cutscenes. When I ran the game with the beta version of SteamOS, the performance also seemed to improve by 3-4 FPS, so the updates may help performance when they hit the Stable channel, too.

Regardless, here are my recommended settings for the game on the stable SteamOS channel as of the time of writing this review.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 30 and no TDP limit.

We're running the lowest settings we can get away with while making the game as playable as possible. I noticed intense shimmering that could cause nausea if your resolution is only slightly scaled down, so this is as high as the resolution can go while eliminating the shimmering.

I'm also using the NIS Scaling Filter with a Sharpness of 5. This helps make text clearer even at the lower resolution of 800x500 that we are running and reduces the softness of the image.

Here are the full settings I used as a reference. I'm sorry for the number of images. There are a lot of options, and the screen only shows a few at a time. You can click the images to enlarge them.

Using these settings, the game generally sticks to 30 FPS. There were a couple of areas where performance dropped into the high 20s, but I found the game to be playable, and I played through the game using just my Steam Deck. On the beta SteamOS, performance was improved and stuck to 30 FPS for more of the time, so hopefully, these figures will improve in the future and leave room for perhaps a graphical boost, too.

You should expect the power draw to be high throughout the game, mostly holding around 19-22W of battery drain. So you could get around 1.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD and around 2 hours of play from a Steam Deck OLED.

Temperatures were also high, around 65-75C during play, with most of the stress surprising on the CPU.

Accessibility:

There are some accessibility settings in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. We have UI Font Size, which defaults to Large on the Steam Deck and makes the fonts generally quite readable. We have options to reduce the camera's movement for motion sickness, subtitles and closed caption support, color filters for colorblindness, highlights around objects can be enhanced, and you can change the colors given to interactable objects.

Do note that if you happen to suffer from arachnophobia, several scenes in the game feature arachnids (specifically spiders and scorpions) in cutscenes and gameplay, and there is no arachnophobia mode to lessen that.

Conclusion:

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is one of the best adventure games of recent memory because it truly captures that sense of "adventure." Minor niggles concerning inventory management and story pacing don't deter from the solid gameplay, the intriguing story as a whole, and the immersive environments making you feel like you are playing an Indiana Jones movie. The solid voice acting is a cherry on top.

As for how the game runs on the Steam Deck, well it's up to you whether it is "playable" or not. I did find it playable and enjoyable. The image is quite blurry, but I didn't find that it hindered playing the game; having said that, it's understandable if those visuals offend your eyes. But if you want to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and a Steam Deck is all you have, it is an option to play it. I would just recommend you use a desktop instead if possible.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.