At the end of today’s Xbox Developer Direct, Indiana Jones finally made his big appearance. And it was packed with game scenes and information!
The leaks turned out to be right once again: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the title of the next adventure by Professor Henry Jones (Junior). Developer MachineGames (including Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus) had a lot more up its sleeve – especially a lot of meaningful scenes directly from the game.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes place between the events of the films “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. One evening at Marshall College, Indy catches a hulking burglar stealing a seemingly worthless artifact from the museum. Of course, Indy investigates the matter and quickly uncovers a big mystery. This turns into a world-spanning adventure: Among other things, the route leads to the Vatican, to the pyramids in Egypt and to the Himalayan Mountains. Indy is assisted by reporter Gina, who has a personal interest in getting to the bottom of the mystery. Her opponent turns out to be the intelligent and ice-cold Emmerich Voss from Germany.
In terms of play, Machine Games relies on a mix of fist fights, shootings, whip swings, chases and puzzles. According to the developers, there will be numerous different puzzles, traps and challenges – some of which are part of the story, but many of which are optional in nature. You can also solve numerous situations in clever ways: for example, crack the (generally versatile) whip to distract an enemy or find a way to sneak past them. You experience all of this primarily from the first-person perspective. However, at certain moments, such as when climbing, the game switches to a third-person view.
The Wolfenstein makers MachineGames are actually working on a new Indiana Jones and there is a first teaser for it.
Visually, the scenes and locations shown exude an excellent Indy atmosphere, not least thanks to great lighting and many details. The faces of the main characters look very stylish and show fine facial expressions. Nevertheless, the graphic style known from the Wolfenstein titles, with a slight comic touch, is always retained.
The music for the action-adventure comes from composer Gordy Haab, who was already responsible for the soundtrack to the game Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. More recently, he was involved in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, among others. His compositions are (of course) based on John Williams’ film score in order to acoustically create the maximum Indy atmosphere.
The MachineGames team also uses a similar approach for the main character. Indiana Jones does not have Harrison Ford’s voice or face in the game. However, the cutscenes in the trailer show that the game has followed the model very closely in this respect too. The facial expressions, among other things, have very clear characteristics of the “real” Indy.
A specific release date for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has not yet been announced, but a rough time frame has been given: Next summer you should be able to experience Indy’s biggest (video game) adventure to date, on Xbox Series X|S and PC. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass upon release.
Well finally! Machine Head has shown the first scenes of gameplay and cutscenes from the new Indy adventure Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Cool. And it’s coming to PC, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass this year.
