Spending three hours with a preview version last month, Indiana Jones Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has the hungriest hands this side Thief 2014. They always pop up, relentlessly reaching out for objects as you explore, because there are always so many things to touch: photos and letters; pipes, frying pans and other blunt utensils; relics which translate into “Adventure Points”, used to “unlock” skill books; camouflaged levers and other musty, exotic comic bits that harbor horological secrets. Sometimes Indy’s magical fingers help you glean an item you need from the game’s piles of religious Lucasfilm memorabilia. Sometimes they wear you down: please, Dr. Jones, for the love of George. Stop trying to pick things up. Let me look at “ancient history” for a moment.

The game’s almost sensual need to put Indy’s gloves on everything says a lot about Indiana Jones as a character who figures things out when he encounters them. It’s also a testament to The Great Circle’s unsurprising and rather mind-numbing portrayal of “history” as a collectible, but let’s not get too pious right off the bat. Let’s start with Indy himself.

Harrison Ford’s original character from the 1980s is one of the great comic improvisers – not quite on par with Jackie Chan or Charlie Chaplin, but well ahead of James Bond and his pocket of Chekov gadgets. Indiana Jones action scenes are all poorly coordinated blunders and miraculous accidents – sagging bodies turning parked planes into rotating death traps, childish impersonations and thrown handfuls of sand, John Rhys-Davies punch a guy through a newspaper. Making do with what’s immediately at hand is the name of the game, and that’s overall how MachineGames wants you to approach the Nazis in The Great Circle.

This is especially reflected in the scarcity of permanent equipment, which might shock a player fresh from the developer’s previous Wolfenstein shooters. Indiana Jones isn’t really a gear guy, as you’ll learn when you pack his suitcase for him during the prologue, shortly after a deadly encounter with an oversized museum thief. He has some backup equipment: his whip, used for trapping ankles and swinging on highlighted surfaces, and his pistol, for which he rarely has enough bullets. Beyond that, he’ll make do with whatever’s available: a broken bottle, an ornamental goblet, a metal fly swatter, a broom, anything with a handle and heavy enough to break a bone.

All of these items are entirely disposable, usually breaking after a hit or two, freeing your hands to grab something else in the next room. Often, of course, you rely on Indy’s fists: he can parry, counter, jab and haymaker. But in the absence of self-replenishing health, it’s just fragile enough that, more often than not, you want to open a punch by roughly throwing a roll of bandage or erasing one of the the most muscular hitters with a hammer.

These free exchanges are at the heart of a game that, as with the developer’s Wolfenstein shooters, sometimes feels like it wants to be an immersive simulation. There’s an alley in Rome where you have a choice of higher or lower routes as you pass patrolling blackshirts. You can sneak around and knock people out, hide bodies, listen to discussions about Mussolini, and find keys to side areas housing collectibles. Later, a relatively expansive Giza map lets you roam dig sites, tent cities, and Nazi encampments, talk to various NPCs, and complete main and optional quests in any order. It’s the basis for a collection of miniature scenarios that might see you briefly donning a disguise or searching for a hidden crawl space after purchasing a key item from the market along the way. But these flourishes are never fully realized in Dishonored, and the game’s love of improvising with randomly grabbed tools is most compelling when it forms the basis of slapstick comedy.

I spent five minutes in one particular Egyptian tomb participating in a pipe-throwing contest with a single Nazi soldier on a gantry. Everything was very Naked gun. I rather liked that little screaming goose step. I don’t speak German, but it looked like he was enjoying it too. I could have shot him, I suppose, but The Great Circle’s shot is deliberately gruesome. Indy’s gun has a gleaming cowboy charm, but it’s mostly a difficulty modifier, drawn Every time you can’t fight “properly”. You can also pick up dropped guns such as rifles and machine guns, but Indiana is no BJ Blaskowitz, and this gun will be tossed aside as soon as you empty the magazine.

Taking into account that this is a pre-release version with wonky AI, the enemies don’t seem ready for gunfights either. Guards that make useful melee opponents lose all conviction under fire: they wander into your lazy line of sight, rarely taking cover. Again, I think this is more deliberate than not: the shooting is presented as a last resort. Every time I got my hands on an MP35 or something, I always felt like the Nazis were slightly embarrassed for me. But then I would find another frying pan and everything would be fine.

I don’t feel like the game’s unlockable skills will change these beats much. So far I’ve seen a lot of annoying passive boosts, like weapons taking longer to break or more health, although there is the odd power-up, like being able to resurrect after a KO if you can crawl back into your discarded fedora. This last skill involves a cutscene where Indy dusts himself off, that famous smirk slowly emerging from the corner of his scowl. It’s even funnier when the Nazi who flattened you is still in the background, but then again, that could be a quirk of the draft.

Indy’s kleptomania in The Great Circle therefore seems true to the character. It’s less convincing when it comes to interactions with other characters, which result in familiar ludonarrative disconnects. At one point I met a friendly archaeologist who was trying to thwart the Nazi looting of local historic sites. “Soon there will be no trace of history left in this place,” she lamented, as I wandered absently around her tent, stuffing pieces of ancient Egyptian sandstone into my pants. In doing so, I came across one of his own drawings, a tender pencil portrait of a woman. Wasn’t that, at least, a little pillaging too many? “Just a little sketch I made,” the character says blithely, without even looking. “Take it if you want.” The drawing disappeared into my inventory with all my other loot and obligingly turned into points.

In general, the world of The Great Circle feels like the usual triple-A compromise of impossible brilliance at the cost of some liveliness. After leaving my archaeologist friend, I entered a bazaar on the Giza map and experimented with air whipping. The sound of the whip reverberated like thunder through the crowded stalls, but the locals paid it no attention. It’s perhaps the closest blockbuster game comes to punishing dick-swinging Western protagonists in exotic colonial settings. You don’t even get called a damn tourist, you’re just politely treated like a ghost.

At times, Indy’s constant need to pick things up feels like a caricature of The Great Circle’s insatiably fanboi approach to both the films it’s based on and the eras and places they themselves represent— same. Everything from Harrison Ford’s smirk to the clownish punch to the jaw of the Third Reich has been reverentially plundered from the archives and paired with a bunch of apparent 3D renderings of actual museum objects, including j ‘d like to trace the precise roots.

The presentation is beautiful and glossy enough that it’s easy to forget that you’re engaging in an interlocking, broken set of influences: a romanticizing 2024 video game a romanticizing 1980s film of 1930s cinematic romance of various “lost” cultures, brought to light through the use of modern imaging techniques and asset libraries. It’s about memories nestled within memories, a commodification of commodification. Enough to make you dizzy.

Sometimes the game asks you to think critically about the origins of all these things, rather than encouraging you to pick things up willy-nilly. The very first puzzle, in fact, is identifying the museum relics scattered on the floor and returning them to their display cases. It’s a fun first twist: after barely showing you the ropes of combat and movement, The Great Circle suddenly needs you to recognize cuneiform writing and distinguish between photographs of Syrian and Iraqi archaeological sites. As you explore later levels, you’ll also gather a journal of sketches, scribbled lenses, and photographs taken using Indy’s nicely noisy camera, but this mostly looks like a screen of glorified codex, with some hints at optional secrets.

At the risk of appearing both pious and naive, the museum curator’s conundrum could have been an opportunity to move away from the eye-catching pomp on display elsewhere. This could have been an opportunity to reflect and reflect on the pulpy colonial history of the Indiana Jones films – the stories behind the props and riddles these stories use to define and structure the “ancient cultures” they reduce to boxes of traps and treasures. .

I don’t think it’s totally unrealistic, or just a requirement to make statements at the expense of fun. This is the kind of self-referentiality found in MachineGames’ Wolfenstein projects, which manage to be mindless, mindless shooters while also being chaotic feats of historical recombination. Imagine the satirical energy that has entered this all-American Nazi main street since The New Colossus applied to Indy Temple tropes, like golden heads on pressure plates or the use of sun rays on a hidden door. I think it could be fun. However, this kind of gamble is not really the agenda of a successful licensed game: the goal is to refine the relics and display them. You could at least let me crush one over a Nazi’s head, mind you.