Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

The most useful review of this game is a negative one with 368 votes, and it's not really about the game at all:

BUYER BEWARE - Check the minimum specs. For some reason this game has high requirements, but you probably won't notice until several hours in when a cutscene refuses to progress. This puts you past Steam's refund window.

That is the single most actionable sentence in the corpus, so it goes first. The Great Circle is built on id Tech with ray tracing as a requirement rather than an option, and hardware and requirements terms appear in 15 of the hundred most-helpful negatives. If your GPU is a few generations old, read the store page's minimum specifications properly before buying — not after.

What MachineGames got right

Almost everything about the feel.

This is Indiana Jones in first person, which sounds like a mistake and isn't. You use the whip to swing, disarm and pull; you punch people rather than shoot them, mostly; you photograph things in a notebook. The period detail is meticulous, the voice work is strong enough that nobody spends much time complaining about a recast Indy, and the locations — the Vatican, Gizeh, Shanghai — are extraordinarily well realised. Visuals score a 9 and I don't think that's controversial.

The puzzles deserve special mention because they're rare. Puzzle appears in 36 of a hundred negative reviews, and reading them, it's overwhelmingly praise inside otherwise critical pieces. A 357-vote reviewer who finished the game in 44 hours: "The world is stunning and feels just like the movies. The characters feel real, the pace is good, and the puzzles are excellent." These are actual environmental puzzles rather than hold-X prompts.

The design complaints

No manual save. That same 357-vote review lists it first among "simple design flaws", and save appears in 15 of a hundred negatives. For a stealth-inflected adventure where a mistake can cost you a long approach, being unable to bank progress on your own terms is a genuine irritation.

Stealth-heavy pacing. Stealth appears in 26 and combat in 30. The top negative overall, at 610 votes from a 44-hour player, argues the problem is structural: "the biggest problem with the game is in its core design, and that can't be fixed with any number of patches. This game's pacing is nowhe[re near right]." A 265-vote review is blunter: "Extremely mediocre gameplay… a lot of tedious repetition; fast travel is done via signposts located in specific [places]."

That's the honest shape of the disagreement. The world and the puzzles are superb; the connective tissue between them — sneaking past patrols, walking back across maps — is where people bounce.

Head bobbing that can't be disabled. A 119-vote review flags motion sickness and asks for a toggle. Combined with the missing manual save, accessibility scores a 5.

The technical picture, dated

Crashes appear in 14 of a hundred negatives and performance terms in 19 — which sounds worse than it currently is, but not as good as "fixed".

By year, crash reports run 1 in 2024, 12 in 2025, 1 in 2026. Performance: 4, 12, 3. Both peaked in the game's first full year. But unlike Miles Morales, where the problem genuinely vanished, 5 of the 100 most recent English reviews still mention crashing and 5 mention performance. A 71-hour player in September 2025 wrote that the game "still crashes due to poor memory management this long after I bought it."

Bethesda have kept working — eight numbered updates, the most recent in May 2026 with a June hotfix — and recent sentiment sits at 85 of 100 positive, five points under the lifetime badge. So: much improved, still not clean.

What it costs

NZ$129.95 at list, currently NZ$77.97 at 40% off, with one story expansion sold separately. That's the same bracket as 007 First Light, reviewed earlier today, and the two games share a shape — a lavish licensed adventure with real craft and a linear spine. The Great Circle has the better puzzles; First Light has the better set-pieces.

The verdict

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle earns a 7.5. As a licensed adaptation it's a success on the terms that matter — it feels like Indiana Jones rather than a shooter wearing his hat — and the environment art and puzzle design are the best parts of a genuinely accomplished game.

It sits at 7.5 because the connective gameplay is slower and more repetitive than its own admirers would like, because there's no manual save in a game that needs one, because motion-sick players have no head-bob toggle, and because crash reports have thinned without stopping.

Buy it in a sale, and check your graphics card against the store page before you do. The person whose review told you that has 42 hours in the game and got nothing for the warning except 368 people agreeing with them.