Indiana Jones and the Great Circle belongs on PS5

The team at MachineGames really understood what makes the film franchise great. There is something so quintessentially Indiana Jones about how the story is presented and told, like the sassy ‘career woman’ love interest and the globe-trotting transitions between scenes. There’s even something in the environment design and lighting that looks so very 80s, like you’re looking at a set filled to the brim with practical effects and props. I don’t even know if I’m imagining that, but either way, the PS5 renders every thick layer of tomb dust very convincingly. That’s probably the fancy ray-tracing at work — and if you’re playing on a PS5, MachineGames promises that you’re getting even better ray-tracing and native 4k resolution (but you’ll have to be the judge of that).

As this is just a cross-console port, there are no major changes or upgrades that you need to worry about missing out on if you already own the game. But there are a few things that are unique to the PS5 version that are very nice indeed.

Feel the crack of the whip

Haptic feedback is underutilised in a lot of PS5 games that would otherwise be fantastic vehicles for it. (Only Astro Bot has done the feature justice in recent memory.) Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does tie some obvious actions to the haptics, like punching fascists and taking damage. Most of it feels just like regular rumble, but I will shout out the crack of Indy’s whip as something that feels particularly satisfying while holding a DualSense controller. The lightbars that line the DualSense light up under a few different situations, but it is probably what you expect: it glows yellow when you’re in combat or red when you’re low on health. When healing, it flashes green.  To be honest, I can’t even say I wanted more than this; at most, the DualSense lights are a fun surprise the first time you notice them, but quickly fade into the background until you just don’t notice the lights at all anymore. I’ve yet to find a game that really used them to full effect. Especially since The Great Circle was not made with the DualSenses in mind, it makes sense.

Controls still feel a little clunky on PlayStation, notably when trying to survive combat and navigating your Journal. The combat controls are the same as Xbox, using the trigger and shoulder buttons to swing punches and the D-pad to select between held items. It’s a little bit too often that my hand slips, and I accidentally whip out my camera instead of my fists, which then leads to a panicked mash of buttons when I try to correct it. I don’t think this can be totally attributed to the DuelSense’s slippery D-Pad, as I know this was a common issue on Xbox too, but it’s a shame that it’s not fixed here. Meanwhile, the Journal uses the D-pad to navigate between the copious collectable notes and letters, which would have been fine if not for the confusing layout that jumps you from the left side of the screen to right. Neither problem would have been a simple fix for a port.