This article contains spoilers for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” Twenty hours into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I found myself echoing the Man with the Hat's famous line. But, instead of falling into a pit filled with hundreds ꦑof the wriggly, writhing creatures, I was facing off against one massive serpent in the waters outside the Sukhothai Hidden Pyramid. And I had to meet it on its home turf, too, plunging into the lake to find an underwater entrance to the seemingly impregnable structure — all with the hungry reptile nipping at my heels.
As I swam, I realized that there was only one right way to do it, and that going astray for even a moment would mean becoming the snake’s lunch. And it was easy to go astray as your air level ticked down while you searched out the next hole you needed to squeeze through to progress. I tried the hazardous swim again and again, and finally managed to find my way into the temple by trial and error. But the road there was paved with a dozen Indy corpses as I slowly figured out the correct path through the small holes and tunnels. It was just the latest example of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle attempting to build the kind of set𝕴 piece seen in Indy movies and falling short thanks to a mechanical toolkit that was made to do something entirely different.
Indiana Jones Being An Immersive Sim Was A🍬 Galaxy-Brained Choice
Uncharted was the obvio🌟us way to adapt Indiana Jones, so The Great Circle gets to be a lit𝐆tle weirder.
Into Extremely Charted Territory
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle couldn't avoid comparisons to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series. And, that's fair enough, given that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted has faced comparisons to Indiana Jones since its 2007 debut. MachineGames wisely took Indy in a very different genre direction, emphasizi༒ng adventuring over adrenaline, and puzzle-solving over pulse-po🧸unding action. Most of the time, at least. The times when the Great Circle flies in the direction of pure action, it falls flat on its face.
When Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has action scenes, it feels like it’s going beyond the bounds of what the game was designed to do. And when I say ‘action scenes,’ I’m not referring to combat, stealth, or platforming. The game does all of that fairly well — I had a good time with the boss fight against the colossal snake that followed, and the platforming section that took Indy through the spiraling interior of the pyramid. No, The Great Circle runs into problems when it attempts to gamify the kinds of moments that would serve as action set👍 pieces in the movies.
This snake encounter isn’t the only time. I was similarly unimpressed by the sequence with the U-Boat stranded in the Himalayas, or the scene where Indy and Gina need to escape Shanghai in a Japanese warplane. The game seems to realize its limitations, too, leaning ha♕rd on cutscenes or on-rails elements in some of these moments.
Uncharted To The Left Of Me, Spielberg To The Right
The result is that a core part of the appeal of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Indiana Jones movies is missing from the game. As much as I enjoy the characters, settings, and stories, the main reason I watch the Indy movies is Steven Spielberg’s facility with set-piece direction. The series is filled with excellent action-packed moments that Spielberg directs to perfection: the car chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the minecart ride in Temple oܫf Doom, the circus train fight in Last Crusade, and many more moments, including the opening of Raiders, which The Great Circle adopts as its own.
This touch for action was also noticeably missing from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, despite director James Mangold'😼s best efforts.
Spielberg draws maximum tension, maximum excitement, and maximum humor out of these scenes. But in The Great Circle, it feels like these moments are afterthoughts, not the thing the game is designed to showcase. That’s⭕ fine — it gives us a new take on Indy in game form — but when the game needs to try to be Uncharted, it can't quite keep up.
Much like the Indy movies, Uncharted is built around nailing those set pieces. The verbs you use most often — shoot, run, jump, climb, drive — are the ones that are most essential for pulling off this kind of action. Outside of character-driven beats, the most memorable moments in Uncharted revolve around using those actions in exciting ways. Riding a motorcycle along a speeding train. Having a shootout on a massive ocean liner. Climbing through the innards of a clock tower. Destructively driving a Jeep through a village as it crumb🎐les around you.
The most memorable moments in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, on the other hand, tend to center on slowly exploring. I loved p🅰oking around Vatican City, seeking out all the medicine bottles in Gizeh, and finding hidden puzzles along the rivers in Sukhothai. It's a game that's about Indiana Jones the adventurer, not the two-fisted fighter. That's why it's great. But it's also why it falls flat 𝔉when the story calls for Indy to be an action hero.
ꦰ Is IP Like Indiana Jones And Bl⭕ade The Savior Of Immersive Sims?
Immersive sims have alwa🐼ys been a niche ♎genre. Can IP change that?
