Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PS5) Review – This Belongs in a Museum!

If you missed the initial release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, don’t worry – so did seemingly everyone else. The game received critical acclaim when it arrived for Xbox Series X/S and Windows in December 2024, but it never felt like it dominated the gaming community’s conversations. It’s a shame, because it’s good. Very good, in fact.

The good news is if you happen to have a slow PC or feel allergic to the Xbox’s weird controller (I said what I said), Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is finally here on PlayStation 5!

Set in between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the player takes control of Indy (voiced by Troy Baker doing a 10/10 Harrison Ford impersonation) who embarks on an adventure across the world to stop the baddies from attaining power linked to the mysterious Great Circle. Yeah, yeah… It’s pretty much the premise for every action-adventure movie of the past century, but why mess with a winning formula, right? Due to the nature of the globe-trotting story, every mission is unique and immerses you in a different setting that makes the progress rewarding. From dangerous jungles to the pyramids of Egypt, each location offers an experience unlike the one before it, while unlocking the bigger storyline picture.

Much like the films, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s gameplay blends action and adventure with puzzle-solving moments. Fisticuffs will be exchanged with baddies, while Indy will do a lot of running against the clock and having to use his noggin to escape dangerous situations. Oh, and you use the whip, because it wouldn’t be Indiana Jones otherwise. It’s never boring – that’s for sure – even if certain missions require more critical thinking than others that are almost too easy.

Perhaps the biggest compliment that can be paid is how authentic Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is. You feel like you’re really Indy and like every second matters here – if you fail, you get sad that the world will be in peril (though with the way everything is right now, maybe that’s a blessing in disguise). It’s not often that you find video game adaptations of film franchises that capture the magic of why people fall in love with them in the first place. Fortunately, Bethesda Softworks gets it and applied this to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that I love the PlayStation 5 port of the game, especially because I raved about the Windows version and didn’t understand why more people didn’t talk about it when it was released. That being said, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feels like it belongs on PS5 and plays like a dream (with the occasional bug and glitch, because that is gaming nowadays). It does make you wonder, though, if the title might not have been more successful had it launched on this platform first. I guess we’ll never know.

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