The first time I saw an Indiana Jones movie was in an odd way. It was at a sleepover at a mate’s place and they loved to watch the cricket, and nothing bores me more than cricket. Luckily for me, the game rained out and Channel 9 cut to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I loved it, not just because it saved me from the cricket, but because, well, it’s great, isn’t it? From then on I was a fan, and a fan of games and other media that explore mythology and myth, even if they play fast and loose with it.

That influence of Indiana Jones not only got me into similar media, but the movies themselves influenced both film and games for decades. We see shades of Indiana Jones in so many games, but there hasn’t been a great Indiana Jones game for the longest time, possibly even longer than you’ve been alive. So the experts in Nazi punching at MachineGames took a shot at it, and we know it’s good because it’s won so many awards. I almost bought an Xbox because of it, but I’m glad I waited, because not only is this game fantastic, the Switch 2 port is a tremendous version as well. If the age of impossible ports is over, this might just be the exception.

Set between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, the game kicks off at Marshall College before you’re let loose upon the world, complete with red-line-on-the-map travel montages. From the perfectly recreated Vatican to the Himalayas, you’re travelling to the ends of the Earth to figure out why your cat statue was stolen, if that sounds a little basic, don’t worry it all unravels from there. In typical Indy fashion, the game skirts the mythological and the paranormal, while hitting the right comedy beats along the way.

The writing is superb, and you can tell they’ve watched and absorbed so much Indy media to get this right. The performance of Troy Baker as Indy is also phenomenal. To say he’s a soundalike or doing an impression is underselling it, he’s embodied Harrison Ford’s younger aura. But it’s the accompanying cast that really seals it. Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi), an investigative journalist who joins Indy on his trek, plays off him brilliantly, while the main antagonist Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis) is not only a physical match for Jones, but a mental one as well. The giant Locus, played by the late and very great Tony Todd, brings another terrifying and imposing foil for Indy as well. Everyone has done a terrific job bringing it all together and, again, cliché as it sounds, this could have been another movie.

With that said, had it been a movie, you wouldn’t have got to play this tremendous game, would you? Because as much as the game presents itself as well as any of the movies, actually playing it, and its first-person perspective, really gives you that Indy feeling. You can play through the game however you like. You can stealth around, perhaps maybe a little too much, or you can approach things more aggressively. But whatever way you do it, you can do it cheekily: push a Nazi off a cliff, whack them with a frying pan from behind, or throw yourself into a fistfight. It’s all part of the charm.

There are guns here, but Indy’s revolver kinda sucks, and you’ll soon run out of ammo from enemies anyway. Every thud, whack and shot perfectly captures the vibe of an older adventure movie. The other satisfying part of the game is using Indy’s whip. You can use it to climb and traverse tombs (funny how there’s always conveniently placed spots to grab onto, ah, video games), smack a bonehead soldier in the head before wailing into him with your fists, or trip enemies up and leg it. The enemies are all kinda dumb, and even on harder difficulties it’s not too hard to escape and run away, but giving them a good old slap with the whip never stops being fun.

The game’s not all combat though, especially depending on how you play. There are puzzles here too, and it’s amazing that these thousands-of-years-old buildings still have all these traps working, but that’s why we love it. The implausible and maybe impossible is always fun. The puzzles, and the combat too, can all be adjusted with fully granular difficulty settings. The game’s good that way, you can do as much or as little as you want as you explore the game’s areas, although it’s not great at telling you that, so you can end up just doing side missions until it’s 2am and you haven’t moved the story along at all.

But it’s all worthwhile because the game is rich with people to meet and help, and things to do. You can speedrun the main thread if you like, but you’ll miss out on so much. The only real blip is that the Vatican section of the story is perhaps a little too long, and good lord is it hard to navigate around that place. The constant going around in circles, over roofs and along ledges just to get around did drag a bit.

The Nintendo Switch 2 port of the game, aside from some wonky lower-resolution details off in the distance and some DLSS weirdness in places, looks every bit the part compared to the other consoles, albeit at 30fps. Looking up clips from the other versions, I can appreciate the smoother 60fps presentation, but I didn’t mind the 30fps cap here. That’s not a coping mechanism either, it genuinely feels closer to a movie with the slightly slower pace.

It’s not just about raw resolution or frame rate though. The game is absolutely oozing with Indy atmosphere. The cinematics could have been shot by Spielberg himself. The lighting on characters’ faces, the transitions from outdoors to indoors, the mood deep in tombs, atop the Vatican at night or deep in the jungles of Sukhothai, every area invites exploration. The music is terrific too. Of course the main Indiana Jones theme is sprinkled throughout and it’s hard to beat that, but they’ve also done a great job with the rest of the soundtrack.

The Switch 2 features are also well utilised, with both gyro and mouse controls included. They’re as tweakable as the rest of the settings in the game, and it’s great to see developers not only include both options, but make them genuinely adjustable as well.

It’s a bit of a cliché to start off a review with “what this franchise means to me”, because at that point you might lose people who’ve never seen the franchise or alienate younger folks who might only know the newer Indiana Jones movies, or haven’t seen any of them at all. Some games rely entirely on nostalgia, but even if you’re not a fan of Indiana Jones, or have never seen the films, this game gives you that full Indiana Jones experience people used to get from the movies. It’ll make new fans out of people born this side of the millennium.

When a game comes late to Nintendo platforms, you sometimes wonder, was this really worth all the fuss when it first released? Were we missing out? The answer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an emphatic “you’re damn right it is”. While the game’s mechanics are things we might have seen before, we’ve never seen Indiana Jones treated with this much respect for such a long time. MachineGames have nailed it, and the Switch 2 port shows that the age of the impossible port isn’t over, because you lose almost nothing by playing it here.

We might not get another Indiana Jones movie again, but if we can get another Indy game as good as this, we’ll be just fine.

Rating: 4.5/5

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is out on the Switch 2 on May 12th, 2026 and will release with the full game on the card, as a well as digitally via the eShop.