KitGuru Games: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a stunning achievement

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is now available to all PC and Xbox Series X/S gamers. The title is one of Machine Games' best, not just in terms of gameplay, but on a technical level as well. With this game, the studio has made a real jump in visual fidelity, with technologies like Path Tracing playing a big role in that.

Initially, there were concerns about how this game would run on PC hardware due to the game's full PC system requirements chart, which called for expensive graphics cards like an RTX 4080 Super to play with full ray tracing. It turns that the term “full ray tracing” is the context key here. During its early access period last week, the game did feature ray-tracing for shadows and global illumination. However, Path Tracing was added on launch day, December 9th. These heavier, higher-quality versions of the RT features already in the game do require higher-end hardware, but you don't have to forgo ray-tracing entirely to obtain high frame rates.

We will get into more detail on this further down but for now, I just want to say that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does not appear to have any glaring optimisation issues. If you want to play at the highest settings, or go a step further and enable Path Tracing, you will need a beefy machine and it is entirely possible that your current one won't be quite up to par. It is reasonable to add cutting-edge graphics settings into a game with the expectation that not many people will be able to switch them on at launch. If we don't allow developers room to include things like this, then we'll never truly be making the most of the high-end PC hardware available. At that point, AAA developers have little reason to include graphics settings that go beyond console capabilities.

The options menu here is vast and detailed. To me, it has been a breath of fresh air to see menus that don't have the tell-tale signs of Unreal Engine being used. One of the keys to obtaining good performance in this game will be selecting the appropriate Texture Cache size for your graphics card. If you are running an 8GB card, you want to set this to Low, while 12GB GPUs should opt for the high setting and anything at 16GB or higher can bump up to the Supreme setting. This will ensure adequate VRAM is allocated to the game and help you avoid stuttering. If you don't have an RTX 40 series GPU with access to DLSS 3, it is recommended that you leave all Path Tracing settings turned off.

With Path Tracing off, the game still utilises Ray Traced Global Illumination at a lower quality setting. However, it is worth noting that even on the lowest setting, RTGI offers a higher quality setting on PC compared to what is available on Xbox Series X. In fact, looking at the Xbox Series X and PC versions side by side, it seems there are a few areas on console where Machine Games dropped settings below the lowest settings on PC. It would be nice if we could get access to a console quality graphics preset that uses the Xbox Series X settings for those running slightly older CPUs and GPUs on the PC side.

Machine Games uses the id Tech engine for all of its games. This engine, designed for fast and fluid titles like DOOM and Wolfenstein, has been updated with all new graphics tech to pave the way for more realistic visuals and advanced lighting effects. Like other titles from this studio, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is designed to be played at 60FPS or higher and those kinds of frame rates are perfectly achievable here while still maintaining high fidelity.

I've been playing on a PC equipped with a Ryzen 9 5900X processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM and an RTX 4080 graphics card. This is a high-spec machine, meeting the requirements for full Path Tracing. In my mind, the main reason to switch on full Path Tracing is for the added indirect lighting effects. However, this is far more expensive to turn on compared to RT Shadows and Reflections, leading to the biggest drop in frame rate out of all the graphics settings available.

In the gallery below you can see some 1440p screenshots from the game at each graphics quality preset, starting with Low settings and moving all the way up to Path Tracing, a feature that is only available in the PC version of the game:

The game looks incredible no matter what preset you use. Even at low settings, Machine Games perfectly captures the distinct visual style of the films, to the point where this is one of the few games where I have opted to leave things like Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain switched on. Overall, this game gives even the most visually impressive UE5 games a run for their money and the fact is, the game runs remarkably well for the level of fidelity on offer. While I have had issues with some older games that use the id Tech engine, the latest version in use here has a number of improvements, including:

• No more Mega Textures – used since id Tech 4 and caused stutter in several older titles. The removal led to an increase in texture fidelity and geometric detail.
• Enhanced Global Illumination and particle system for atmospheric volumetrics and more vibrant particle effects
• 250FPS frame rate cap increased to 1000FPS.
• Rewritten ‘jobs' system to take better advantage of multi-thread CPUs

More specifically, the branch of id Tech 7 being used here is codenamed ‘Motor' and was customised by the development team on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. As a result, tech behind the game is upgraded even further beyond what we saw in DOOM Eternal, which was the first id Tech 7 game and the first title using this engine to support ray-tracing.

To get a good idea for expected frame rates at different quality levels, I took Indy out to Vatican City and roamed around the Belvedere courtyard, one of the more taxing areas of the game due to the amount of NPC activity. Below you can see my average FPS results with the RTX 4080 at each quality preset with native TAA, QHD resolution and DLSS Frame Gen OFF:

Low – 102FPS

Medium – 93FPS

High – 89FPS

Ultra – 87FPS

Supreme – 84FPS

If you switch on DLSS 3, those numbers jump up significantly. With DLSS set to quality and Frame Generation on, I can net over 120FPS in the same area with the Supreme quality setting. DLSS 3 with Frame Gen is also a necessity for getting smooth frame rates with Path Tracing switched on. I found that while the Path Tracing settings for shadows and reflections didn't bring much of a performance penalty, path traced indirect lighting can cut the frame rate in half. It is still playable on an RTX 4080 machine, but there are areas that will dip into the low 40FPS range. With that in mind, if you want smooth, high frame rates at all times, I recommend toggling Indirect Lighting off, or forgoing Path Tracing altogether. I have no doubt we'll see a wave of people revisiting this game in five years time, armed with more capable graphics cards, marvelling over how good this game looks with all the options toggle

The game also equally balances workloads across all my CPU cores. Typically, a 12+ core CPU like the Ryzen 9 5900X isn't going to be as good for gaming as an eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X, as most games aren't designed to take full advantage of the larger core-count CPUs we have on PC. That is not the case here, with this title making great use of all 12 CPU cores and additional threads by distributing the load more evenly.

Gameplay Impressions:

So the game looks great and runs well but what about gameplay? This is where Indiana Jones and the Great Circle surprised me the most.

Many of us have played Tomb Raider or Uncharted over the past two decades, two titles that each capture a level of Indiana Jones flavour. Due to this, the decision to make this title a first-person game rather than third-person ended up being somewhat controversial. Having now played a good chunk of the game for myself, I believe the choice to stick with a first-person view point was the right one. We would lose so much immersion by pulling the camera back behind the player. By putting us directly in the shoes of Indy, every gameplay action is more meaningful. Stealth sections are more intense, combat is more up close and personal, and exploration requires more engagement on behalf of the player.

Keeping players engaged in that exploration is one of this game's biggest successes. I was not expecting a licensed game based on a film franchise to pack so much attention to detail. There are secrets to discover all over the place and some of them do require quite a bit of effort to get to. Every time you choose to explore all available routes; you will be rewarded.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is broken down into three main types of content. Adventure Quests will push you through the main campaign, but only doing these quests would be a disservice to the game as a whole. We also have Fieldwork, which are large side quests that introduce additional characters and sub-stories. These are well worth doing as they include some of the best character moments in the entire game and really flesh out the world building.

Finally, we have Mysteries, which are smaller treasure hunts that you may learn about in passing by listening to NPC conversations, or by finding a note or just stumbling across a puzzle box in a room. You won't have to tread far to solve these and will ultimately be rewarded with Adventure Points, which you can use to upgrade your player stats.

The amount of secrets to discover will keep you exploring all available routes throughout the game. Like Dishonored, this title also encourages a blend of stealth and action gameplay. You are an archaeologist after all, not a one man army, so combat can be tough at higher difficulty levels, particularly if your improvised weapon breaks and you have to resort to bare-knuckle boxing. The stamina bar is quick to refill but also quick to deplete, so if you are having trouble taking on enemies, be sure to invest some Adventure Points into improving stamina, weapon durability and health. Early on in the game, you will also get access to a Lucky Hat perk, which essentially gives you a second life.

Another tip – remember to crack your whip once in a while, it can stun enemies so you can land a quick punch, and it can scare off guard dogs.

As fantastic as I have found the game so far, there are some bugs, primarily to do with certain audio queues being too loud or too close to the player, which can throw you off in stealth situations, or with enemies not detecting you when it clearly looks like they should be able to see you. Occasionally, I have also seen slight clipping with NPCs and the environment. These are minor problems that will be fixed with patches. Outside of that, I have had no issues with crashes or progression-blocking bugs. That doesn't mean those bugs don't exist, but they aren't popping up in my save file.

As this is a licensed video game, the target audience here is primarily Indiana Jones fans. I did watch the films as a kid but I never grew up with a particular fondness for them. I primarily became a fan of these adventure style games through the Tomb Raider series. Despite not being enamoured with the IP, I fell in love with this game pretty quickly, so I'd encourage anyone who enjoys games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted to pick this one up. Going a step further, I'd also recommend this game to anyone who enjoys Immersive Sims. It isn't as action-heavy as Prey, or as RPG-heavy as Deus Ex, but the game does a lot to scratch the immersive sim itch without crazy skill trees or conversation dialogue options.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is available now on PC (via Steam, Windows Store) and on Xbox Series X/S consoles. The game is also playable through the cloud, via GeForce Now for the PC version or Xbox Cloud Gaming for the console version.

KitGuru Says: Have any of you picked up Indiana Jones and the Great Circle this week? How are you finding the game so far? 

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