MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had high expectations to live up to, but the first-person action-adventure title passes most of its tests with flying colours, delivering a densely packed and finely crafted globetrotting journey. The game is, in fact, also a much beefier experience than most would have anticipated, which means there’s plenty going on that players have to get to grips with right off the bat. As you dive into The Great Circle’s swashbuckling offerings, then, here, you can find a few handy pointers that’ll make your time with the game a little bit smoother.
INCREASE HEATH AND STAMINA
You start out Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with a fairly limited number of health and stamina bars, though thankfully, there are ways to change that. Scattered throughout the game’s multiple semi-open world maps, you’ll find collectibles in the form of dozens of medicine bottles. These bottles can be handed in to specific vendors found in each map in exchange of increases for your health and stamina.
FORTIFY YOUR HEALTH AND STAMINA
You’ll be picking up a vast variety of items that you find scattered in environments as you play through The Great Circle, and a good amount of it will be food that you can store and consume. We can’t oversell its importance- eating food items fortifies your health, essentially acting as armour on top of your base health, while eating fruits and vegetables does the same for your stamina. Our advice is to keep both fully fortified at all times, and to keep your food supplies topped up.
REVEAL COLLECTIBLES ON YOUR MAP
Each of The Great Circle’s multiple semi-open world maps is densely packed with a vast variety of collectibles to find and pick up, and though you can, of course, simply explore the map organically and find things yourself (which is a ton of fun in its own way), you can also make things easier by a significant margin, if you want. In each map, you’ll find vendors who sell pamphlets that can reveal the locations of those different kinds of collectibles. We would recommend at least purchasing pamphlets for books whenever possible, since that tangibly affects progression and gameplay.
UNLOCK LUCKY HAT
Speaking of books, though there’s a vast variety of them to find and unlock skills with, one in particular that we’d recommend priorotizing at the earliest is Lucky Hat. It’s one that you find pretty early one, and it’s difficult to miss. In a nutshell, Lucky Hat gives you a second shot at life if you’re ever on the verge of death, as long as you can crawl to your hat and put it back on within a limited window. So make sure to spend those Adventure Points to unlock the skill as soon as you find the Lucky Hat book.
MAKE FULL USE OF MELEE WEAPONS
Unlike MachineGames’ past output, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is very much not a first-person shooter, even if it is primarily a first-person game and does allow you to use guns. That usage, however, is highly infrequent, and more often than not, combat (if you do engage in it) will be melee-based. You can, of course, use your fists in brawls, but the best way to deal with foes is by using melee weapons. The game allows you to pick up a vast variety of things and improvise them as weapons, from pots and pans to hammers and brooms, so make sure you’re always trying to get hits in with melee weapons and making use of them to the fullest extent possible.
USE YOUR GUN AS A MELEE WEAPON
Even when you do use your gun as a weapon, you don’t have to waste bullets. You can simply turn it over in your hand by pressing X, and then pistol-whip your enemies with the butt of your gun by using it as a melee weapon. You can only do it a limited number of times before it breaks, however, so keep that in mind. You can do this not only with Indy’s own pistol, but also any firearm you find and pick up in the environment.
KEEP REPAIRING WEAPONS
Melee weapons can only be used a handful of times before they break, which, as we’ve mentioned, includes your guns, if you’re using them as melee weapons. Thankfully, scattered throughout the game, you’ll also find repair kits, which do exactly what the name suggests. Make sure you keep using these kits to repair your weapons, melee or otherwise, because you won’t always find things lying around in your surroundings that can be used as weapons.
TIME YOUR RELOADS
Of course, though using your guns as melee weapons is a lot of fun in The Great Circle, you can (and occasionally will) use them as actual projectile weapons as well. When you do, however, you’re going to have to ensure you conserve your ammo, place your shots, and most importantly, time your reloads. Indy’s six-shooter, for instance, takes quite a while to reload, so if it can be helped, make sure you don’t wind up in a situation where you’re having to do that in the middle of a tense fight.
PLAY ON MODERATE ADVENTURE DIFFICULTY
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle allows you to set the difficulty for stealth and combat separately from the difficulty for puzzles. The latter is determined by the Adventure difficulty setting, which we would recommend setting at Moderate (the other option being easy). In addition to making puzzles more engaging and satisfying to solve, Moderate Adventure difficulty also makes exploration much more unguided and organic, so keep that in mind if that’s something that you care about when playing a game.
PAY ATTENTION TO NPC CHATTER
A lot of the NPC chatter that The Great Circle throws your way is obviously just flavour text, which is what you’d expect, but every once in a while, you’ll hear more important things- if you’re paying attention, at least. That can range from conversations between characters or NPCs calling you over, with things often leading to discoveries of side quests or hidden mysteries that you could have otherwise easily missed.
KEEP TAKING PICTURES
In the early hours of The Great Circle, Indy will get his hands on a camera, and we’d recommend using the tool every chance you get. Not only does it come in handy with hints and tips for certain story-tied puzzles, you can also take pictures of a vast variety of things and points of interests in the world for Adventure Points in return. Every time the game prompts you with the camera icon, make sure you pull the device out and take the picture it wants you to take, because this will become one of your primary ways of earning Adventure Points.
LOOK OUT FOR DISGUISES
Stealth plays a major role in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and a good chunk of it comes in the form of social stealth. Players will often find themselves behind enemy lines and trying to blend in while wearing disguises, and though some of these are handed to you as you progress further in the story, others are optional and have to be sought out. Our advice? Find those disguises, because then you’ll have way more freedom to move about that map and go about your business.
USE SIGNPOSTS TO FAST TRAVEL
Maps in The Great Circle aren’t too big, but more often than not, you’ll be on foot, which means traversal can be slow. Thankfully, fast travel is an option- albeit with limitations. You can’t freely travel to and from anywhere, but you can find signposts scattered throughout every map that you can use to fast travel to parts that you have previously visited.
YOU CAN (AND SHOULD) RETURN TO PREVIOUS LOCATIONS
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s story takes Indy all over the world, but though the story itself never turns back, the game does give you the option to. Simply open up your journal and open the travel sub-menu to travel back to an older location, following which you can wrap up any optional quests, exploration, or collectible hunting you may want to get back to. We definitely recommend returning to previous areas, especially because some parts of some maps are only accessible with tools that you don’t acquire until later in the game.
KEEP REFERRING TO YOUR JOURNAL
We’ll wrap things up with a more general tip, but one that you should keep in mind at all times when playing The Great Circle. True to the movies, Indy’s journal is his best friend in this game, and players have full access to it at all times. From any and all notes that you’ve found to maps, puzzle hints, collectibles, quest tips, and more, there’s a treasure trove of useful information that can be gleaned from Indy’s journal, so ignore it at your own peril.
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