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Although Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has since enjoyed a second life on PlayStation, with a third yet to come with Nintendo, I’ve not laid a hand to whip since I reviewed the game. Because of this, I’d forgotten how authentic an Indiana Jones adventure the game is—the first-person perspective proved to be inspired, the production was astronomically high-quality, and Troy Baker sounded more like Harrison Ford than Harrison himself these days.
Oddly, the menu’s Order of Giants option produces a prototypical Xbox store splash screen that explains how you activate the quest, which is by finding Father Ricci and his parrot Pio, south of the Blackshirts outpost within the Vatican level. So I made my way there, regaining my bearings and shaking off the rust along the way.
In terms of size and scope, Order of Giants effectively adds another entire play area in Rome, with its own self-contained questline, mysteries, and notes upon notes to collect. It took me about five hours to get through the adventure itself; however, to see and do everything would take a little more than that. So, as a value proposition, I think Order of Giants is a strong offering that adds a good amount of content to the existing Indy experience.
What Order of Giants doesn’t do is add any creative wrinkle to the established gameplay experience. It’s very much the same old pugilism and puzzles that made the base game as good as it was—it’s just more of it. Despite its focus on the Nephilim, there aren’t too many instances where you even encounter giants in this expansion; I’m not sure that bothers me, though. I never did find the combat against giants to be all that engaging, so the lack of it is actually welcome.
In unravelling the central mystery, you’ll find yourself in the fray with cultists, meaning the standard fare of punch-or-club knockout remains intact. Being set in the Roman catacombs, which feel much like the bleak stone-walled constructs beneath the Vatican, your whip will play a vital role in exploration, even if it remains holstered during combat.
As someone whose favourite section of Indiana Jones was Vatican, I am particularly pleased that Order of Giants utilises a similar setting in terms of aesthetic and function. It doesn’t strike me as a simple asset flip, copy and paste job of the skeleton-riddled chambers, as the team absolutely takes advantage of its Rome setting in some neat and surprising ways.
I found a few of the expansion’s puzzles to be particularly taxing and a bit more elaborate than what we’d gotten in the base game. Across the few notable chambers we navigated, there’s commendable variety in what is asked of the player. Some play out simply, like the pipe-connection tasks we’ve seen in several games, while others, like the Tomb of Giborrim and Headless Gladiator’s fire maze, which is like the same pipe puzzle as earlier, only with the pressure of time and needing to be a faultless one-shot.
If nothing else, it’s the developer’s clever puzzle design that makes this an authentic Indy experience, and I hope we get more of this down the track.
Indiana Jones and the Order of Giants, despite not exactly fulfilling the promise of its title, is a worthwhile return to this world of Indiana Jones, which continues to tick all of the required boxes for me. A stoic, albeit dryly comedic, performance from Troy Baker as Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, a wonderful selection of riddles that tie into and serve the mystery at hand, and a deliciously despicable villain that, despite existing in the shadow of Emmerich Voss, serves his purpose.
