Dec31
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Personally I've never been a fan of the Indiana Jones franchise, and before playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle I didn't know much about the brand.
However, I was intrigued by the idea of having Machine Games create a fairly large title, tailored around the character originally played by a movies giant like Harrison Ford.
The plot of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is very interesting, and sees the protagonist traveling the world in search of different relics, fighting in the meantime, against caricatured versions of fascists and Nazis, represented by the typical ironic style of Machine Games.
I found the cutscenes and the CGI animated interludes very well made, as they manage to faithfully represent both the most unbridled action scenes, and the most tense moments between the characters.
The gameplay of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes place in several linear, vast and freely explorable open-maps, full of secrets to discover and secondary missions to be carried out in parallel with the main campaign.
There are several ways to complete the missions, which mainly consist of exploring monuments and wild places, which often become enemy outposts.
They can be tackled through direct fights with numerous firearms and improvised melee, or through stealth.
The combat system is not excellent because despite being well made, it appears a little too flat and not very layered and favors hand-to-hand clashes, making the use of firearms unfavorable.
Even the stealth is simple and not too advanced, and is based only on the direct sight of the enemies, without considering their reasoning or hearing.
The game therefore gives the best of itself in exploration, which is much more varied and advanced thanks to more platform sections, the crypts to explore, and above all, to the complex but not frustrating environmental puzzles, solvable with simplicity and satisfaction.
The part that is most out of line with all the experience, is unfortunately the one related to the technical sector, which highlights several very evident smudshes.
On Xbox Series X, the game's graphics perform quite well in its simplicity, and manages to show off wonderful settings made with great care that, however, have a lack of detail and an acerbe graphic engine, which leads some visual elements to appear and disappear.
The models of some characters (especially those of outline for the enrichment of the scenarios) are not very well cared for and appear much rougher than the protagonist's model.
The animations are also poorly cared, but what ruins the experience the most, are the numerous bugs and glitches that are often encountered during gameplay, which are sometimes so absurd as to become hilarious.
And finally, there is also the artificial intelligence of non-playable characters, also poorly realized and very raw, typical of games of some past generations video games.
What raises the technical sector of the title is everything related to audio and music.
The orchestral soundtrack is made with great care and offers tracks that adapts perfectly to what happens on the screen, while the dubbing (both original and in languages) is of excellent quality, and performs well especially in the cutscenes, which are very close to small pieces of animated cinema.
In conclusion, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is undoubtedly one of the best titles made by Xbox Games Studios in recent years, an adventurous and interesting experience that allows fans of the saga to experience the pleasure of putting themselves in the shoes of the most famous archaeologist in cinema, and neophytes to discover a decades-old franchise "living it firsthand".
However, the title is not without technical smudgers, which are however compensated by an excellent plot and excellent sections of free gameplay, in which the interest in exploration and discovery far outweighs the attention to details and the obvious defects of the title.
Machine Games has always been a studio capable of developing excellent but technically imperfect experiences, and in this case it has tried to develop a much larger title than the previous ones and in any case better realized than others.
8/10