Gaming News XPH Network September 9, 2025 0 Comments

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants Review

Single-player, story-based DLC that gives me an excuse to return to an impeccable single-player, story-based adventure that I adored the first time around? Unlike an out-of-his-depth Marcus Brody, MachineGames really knows how to speak my language. The Order of Giants is a roughly four-hour side quest for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that’s heavy on puzzles and features a string of tremendously atmospheric caves, catacombs, and canals to explore through the belly of Rome. After not having visited The Great Circle for many months, I was quickly hooked all over again. Even if it’s just for an afternoon, The Order of Giants is an effective refresher on most of the things I love about MachineGames’ take on the finest fascist-hater to ever find himself under a fedora. However, I have to concede that its presentation as a belated quest from early in The Great Circle’s story does make it feel noticeably less special and crucial to play than a more overtly separate adventure could have been, and the final fight falls a little flat.

Slipping The Order of Giants directly into what’s basically the first act of The Great Circle’s story obviously spoke to the MachineGames team in an irresistible way and, to a degree, I can see the elegance of blending it into the existing game in this fashion. Accessing the mission actually happens from within the Vatican level itself – it isn’t an individual mode or level you can directly hop into via the main menu. It’s an interesting approach, since it makes The Order of Giants feel like a segment that was left on the cutting room floor. If you’re playing for the first time it’ll just be there from the outset, and for returning players it’s a little like watching a familiar film with a lengthy deleted scene re-inserted. It’s a neat and tidy solution, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making the DLC feel a little inessential overall. That is, it wasn’t here initially, and it doesn’t change anything now that it is – whether you play it or not.

Troy Baker’s performance as Indy remains hard to fault, and the music is again outstandingly faithful to the films.

While The Order of Giants kicks off within the existing Vatican level, the mission quickly distinguishes itself by placing Indy into a previously unseen interior – and subsequently whisking him out of the Vatican entirely, and into Rome. Troy Baker’s performance as Indy remains hard to fault, and the music is again outstandingly faithful to the films. There are some really stunning underground locations throughout The Order of Giants, and I regularly found myself poring over the details of its crusty catacombs.

What We Said About Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle nails nearly everything about the best parts of the storied franchise upon which it’s based, from the title card and location fonts to Harrison Ford’s finger waggle, but its successes go way beyond its faithfulness to the finer points of the films. With a host of gorgeous and lavishly detailed levels, satisfying combat hinged on jawbreaking haymakers, and a focus on slow-paced exploration, platforming, and puzzle solving (interspersed with a handful of high-voltage action scenes), The Great Circle is an irresistible and immersive global treasure hunt for Indy fans who’ve felt underserved by the likes of The Dial of Destiny and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Moreover, it sets itself apart from this decade’s increasingly homogenised third-person action games by opting for a classic first-person perspective inspired by the likes of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. If you butt your head against its generally basic stealth systems, cracks will show – but when played as intended, The Great Circle immediately ranks amongst the best Indiana Jones games ever and its story is closer to Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade than anything that’s come after. Some pundits may claim it belongs in a museum, but museums are for dusty old relics you shouldn’t ever touch. The Great Circle doesn’t belong in a museum; it belongs on your hard drive where you can play the heck out of it. – Luke Reilly, December 6, 2024

Score: 9

Read the full Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review

The action, meanwhile, is typical of The Great Circle itself: a mix of light first-person platforming, some puzzle solving, and some scattered stealth and brawling against Italian soldiers and a group of mysterious and violent red-robed cult members. This isn’t the sort of DLC that adds a radically different new layer of combat, so don’t expect them to display any new tricks.

The puzzles, though, are absolutely the highlight. I liked two of them in particular more than any in The Great Circle itself. One is a well-crafted water puzzle, and the other is essentially a giant marble maze you need to solve without losing your flaming ball and starting over. There is one particular text-based brainteaser where the link to the physical puzzle pieces seemed a little obtuse initially, but shortly afterwards made me feel like a mild idiot for not figuring it out sooner. Sometimes that’s the best kind of puzzle.

There aren’t any dramatic action sequences in The Order of Giants akin to the fighter plane skyjack in The Great Circle – or tobogganing down the Himalayas on a huge, Nazi battleship. It’s a slower-paced affair overall, but I don’t mind this since it’s seemed to have resulted in a pumped-up amount of puzzles to mull over. It does crescendo to a slightly unexpected miniboss fight in a very neat location, but it’s not a particularly inventive battle – it’s just run, ranged attack, run, ranged attack, run, etcetera. It probably went on a little long considering how repetitive it ended up being, wrapping up just as I’d started wondering whether what I was doing was even the right thing.