You could say that a current-gen Indiana Jones game was long overdue. For without old, Nazi-punching, snake-fearing Indy, there wouldn’t be a Tomb Raider or even an Uncharted. Sadly, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle came in quite late to the party. To set things apart from Uncharted, the devs chose to stick to a first-person view, essentially turning Indiana Jones and the Great Circle into an FPS adventure game. That, however, could be detrimental.
The official trailer has been unveiled ahead of the game’s December 9, 2024 release date. To be fair, there’s no doubt it commendably captured the spirit of the Indiana Jones franchise to make it distinct enough from Uncharted already. Just take a look at it in its full glory:
The first-person view does have its benefits for the title. For example, lever-pulling and ancient death trap buttons are more precarious and personal. So is shooting Nazis or whipping them on the ground.
However, any video game’s slower and more methodical sections, such as platforming and environmental puzzles, are best played in a third-person view. Even the devs of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle know this. We can see it snapping back to the third-person view for the more delicate platforming sequences.
Indy is at His Best When You Can Actually See Him
And let’s not forget the most obvious reason why third-person is simply better for action-adventure games or even story-driven games: you get to see your character. You get to appreciate the effort that went into the motion capture. You get to see the finer details of the face animations.
Heck, even being in third-person view is already another huge layer of gameplay since it justifies customization and skins. Sadly, you’re confined to only seeing Indy in cutscenes or when you’re traversing ledges.
First-person gameplay works better when you’re actually shooting or are constantly in combat. That said, anyone who’s a fan of Indiana Jones knows he’s not that fond of guns (except for that one meme’d scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark). He tends to be more fluent with his fists, and first-person fist-fights are not exactly flashy or even serviceable.
It would be interesting to see how many layers of gameplay they can squeeze into the FPS structure without it devolving into a WW2 shooter to break the ice. However, I believe that seeing a young Harrison Ford (voiced by Troy Baker nonetheless) in action in an overdue video game is a lot more incentivizing than playing as a gun-toting version of him.
There are some cases where the FPS perspective works well, such as in Cyberpunk 2077, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, or Deux Ex games. But then, those are RPGs, and they have deeper gameplay. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a linear action-adventure FPS game. I fear its FPS view might not be enough to immerse players when you lack agency and are just along for the ride.
