Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

The Xbox brand is primarily associated with Microsoft's consoles, but it’s unlikely to stay that way for long. Recently, the company has undergone a dramatic shift in strategy. While the Series X and Series S are still on sale and Microsoft swears it will continue producing gaming hardware, its priorities are changing. According to the new vision, Xbox is no longer just a "box" in your room but an ever-evolving ecosystem accessible on as many platforms as possible. The transformation resembles what SEGA went through years ago, only on a much larger scale.

Over the past few years, the graphics in games have hardly changed. We have become accustomed to high detail, high-quality textures, and realistic faces of characters. Perhaps the situation will change after the release of new video cards, but in 2024, the graphics remained at about the same level as before.

That is why, when compiling this article, we primarily paid attention not to the number of pixels in the hero's boot, but to the artistic component. Combined with advanced technologies, it is able to impress even today.

The fourth year of the ninth console generation, 2024, has clearly shown that the performance of gaming systems has once again become a bottleneck for PC game development. While in 2022 and 2023 developers amazed us with cutting-edge graphics technologies and occasional innovations, the past year's major releases seemed to abandon the race for visual revolution. However, we’ve still found 10 games capable of pushing any modern PC to its limits.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is one of the most original games of this year, which Microsoft carelessly «threw into the cold» (the game was released in December) without a proper marketing campaign and at the most inopportune time for gaming. Even though another game appeared in the Xbox collection that received high ratings from the press and fan base recognition, it went almost unnoticed by the wider audience. The game didn't even make it to The Game Awards tier list due to its late release date, although its chances of winning could have been very high. In this review, we will explain why you should pay attention to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, even if you have never been a fan of the Indiana Jones universe.