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Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is both a more “relaxed” Wolfenstein and Riddick plus NazisGame director Jerk Gustafsson talks us through a hands-off demo
Game director Jerk Gustafsson talks us through a hands-off demo
Image credit:Microsoft
Image credit:Microsoft
MachineGames have madea decent livingas the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight inIndiana Jones And The Great Circle- a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you’d expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there’s rather less of the bloodshed.
Wolfenstein’s antic skullbursting has given way to the clean, Spielbergian “PAF” of Indy’s fist connecting with a fascist jawbone. He’s got a pistol, true, but you’ll rely just as much and more on his whip, which is used both to trip adversaries over and as a means of swinging on things or yanking distant props. And let’s not forget his fancy fedora: there’s a skill that lets you revive from KO if you can crawl over and reclaim your dropped hat before you lose consciousness. It’s the grace note for a “light-hearted matinee adventure”, in the words of game director Jerk Gustafsson, which takes ideas from his and the company’s older first-person games and steams away their guts and grime, while adding a few sunny flourishes of its own.
Image credit:Microsoft
“When designing this game I think we’ve even been going back into a history of our own,” Gustafsson told assembled journalists during a pre-Gamescom hands-off presentation. “First-person is the primary perspective that you play in, but we do combine this with third-person [for actions such as swinging from your whip], so very similar to what we did back in the day with theRiddickgames and theDarknessgame. And also similar to those games, which were the first games we did where we put a lot of focus on character building and story combined with a lot of variation in gameplay. And that’s something that we’ve pushed very hard here. We want the player to really feel that they can take on different obstacles or challenges in many different ways.”
Larger setups give you the option of being sneaky or violent, boffing guards in a particular order and hiding the bodies, or making use of the fittings. You can lob spears to create surfaces to swing from, for example. You also have the option of donning a disguise - there are story episodes that require it, and you’ll build up a wardrobe of outfits you can change to suit the situation. One particular scenario might have you playing the servant and bringing wine to a rancorous fascist. I don’t get the impression this is an Agent 47-grade exercise in social camouflage, though the idea of a Hitman level set in one of Indy’s tombs with a cast of stymied stormtroopers has a certain appeal.
Image credit:Microsoft
Image credit:Microsoft
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle will launch before the end of 2024. Find out more onSteam.
For more of the latest news and previews from Gamescom 2024, head to ourGamescom 2024 hub.
