From visuals to soundtrack, action to scale, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a triumphant port on the Switch 2
It’s blockbuster season, it’s popcorn and frozen cokes, it’s 10 PM theater trips. It’s “reclining so far back into the chair that we’re spilling all that food and drink on us” season.
It’s summer!
And the perfect Summer experience is Indiana Jones. It’s action, it’s music, sounds and sights. And to have that in a game, to launch that game just as summer blockbuster season is kicking off, that’s perfect timing. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has been available since 2024 (on Xbox) and then last year on PlayStation, but now it makes its way to Nintendo’s Switch 2, where a feverish number of dads will likely find it when they put down Mario Kart World.
It’s been a few years, but, it’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage. And this game has that good, weathered mileage on it, like a warn leather jacket that we know has a couple tears, a few scuff, but it has all the pockets in the right spots, the comfortable weight when it’s on our shoulders, and still fits just right.
I’ve played a few Indiana Jones games in my time, and they’ve generally been all over the place in what they bring. Some focus on action, some on storytelling, some on gimmicks. They’re ideas about Indy, aspects of Indy, like a caricature of Indy, but not INDY Indy. This game is actually, truthfully the most accurate depiction of not just the character of Indiana Jones but the movies themselves. It’s so much so that the opening scene easily has me doing a double take if we’re just playing a rehash of a very specific moment, until everything breaks and we come to see how this adventure fits in to the grand plan. The advantage of the Switch 2 version is that we have the capability to play in a couple of ways. There are aspects when handheld mode is perfect, like sneaking the game to the office because I can’t put it down, or playing late into the night in bed, but it’s almost necessary to regularly jump back into docked, full screen beauty. Because this is, for all intents and purposes, a playable movie that’s also very highly interactive.
The game itself carries all of the globetrotting and treasure hunting that makes the films great. It’s SO action heavy in first person that I do genuinely feel like a young Harrison Ford throwing fists and bottles and whipping Nazis. From a performance standpoint it’s quick, it’s responsive, and Indy carries the right weight when moving around. There are some situations where we can sneak past enemies or take them head on, and it all depends on how comfortable we are with the game at that point. Sneaking, especially climbing and jumping along rafters and ledges, does require a little more precision than we’d expect from a first person view game, so a little practice when no enemies are around goes a long way. Should we decide to go action-heavy we have a ton of options, from throwing items to distract enemies, throwing items to INJURE enemies, grabbing items to attack enemies head-on, or even taking out our gun and shooting with some level of accuracy at the bad dudes. The real magic is Indy’s famous whip, obviously, and we can use that to stun foes and slow them down, or just go whip crazy like Simon Belmont in Dracula’s castle. The whip isn’t so much as a physics-based thing here, at least from the uses I’ve put it through, and feels a little canned for what it can do in certain situations, but it’s still fun. We can even use our whip to grab onto and swing around places, so that’s always a fun, Spider-man like experience.
Now, there are a few issues. There’s some pop-in, some weird dithering when things are up close, like cloth and leaves and shadows, and sometimes the scenes sort of quickly end and jump into the next one, but those mostly only appear when in handheld mode. Again, docked is the way to play this, because we do want to see everything on the big screen. And because the game is so freaking huge, around 16+ hours for the main campaign, we have a lot of great visuals to see. Without spoiling, the Vatican has some truly memorable areas that are hard to be matched in recent games. Oh, and that’s before we even get into the Order of Giants DLC; I’ve dipped into it a little, just to see how it performs, and thus far it expands on Indy in some fun ways without changing what the full game’s focus is.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a marvel of a port. It’s the rare type of game that I’ll play on the big screen and my family will be compelled to watch, as if it’s a movie, because so much is happening all the time. From story to action it’s all tied together so well. The game is a triumph, a wonder.
Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.
This review is based on a Nintendo Switch 2 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for May 28, 2026.
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