Merry Christmas everyone!
I finished Indiana Jones last night and I have to say, it's rare for anything in gaming to surprise me these days but this one did. Before launch I thought the trailers were strictly average, showing weak combat and puzzles, and my impressions were colored by my opinion that the last 2 games from this studio were subpar, to put it kindly. Then the review embargo lifted and early access started and virtually everyone was saying that the game was an amazing immersive sim-lite and one of the best of the year. I kept wondering whether to get it or not but what finally pushed me over the edge was a post in this very thread a couple of hours before release that said that the path tracing in the game was as good as anything we've seen since Cyberpunk 2077. Played it for the last 2 weeks and ended up with this -
I'm not one to usually care about achievements and it's been years since I bothered to get every achievement in a game. This one was worth it. Before release I thought the game didn't look good, wouldn't be good and wouldn't do well commercially. I was wrong about the first two and I think, unfortunately, correct about the last one. So I'd like to share some thoughts about the game.
I'll start with what it did well; Making the game an immersive sim was an
inspired choice. It fits perfectly with the theme of the Indiana Jones movies which were always more about adventure than action and, somewhat ironically, serves to differentiate this game from Uncharted and Tomb Raider which are all out murder fests. It must have taken a lot of restraint for this first person shooter studio to de-emphasize combat so much and the result is that it kind of sort of plays like a point and click adventure game but from a totally new first person perspective in a large, open 3D world. The game has the level design ethos of immersive sims like Dishonored and the disguise based social stealth system of Hitman.
The next great thing about the game is that the writing, dialogues and performances are really well done and you can clearly tell that it was created by people who have a reverence for the IP. The plot of the game could easily be compared to one of the (older, good) movies. These days you often see creators who seemingly disregard the original, beloved source material to deliver their own 'reinterpretation' or original stories with the IP being used simply as a delivery device instead of being the north star guiding light. Not in this case. These developers set out to make Indiana Jones as it always has been. As an example, you must have seen the whip being used in combat in trailers and, quite frankly, it's not really a great gameplay system but it's still in the game because that's what Indiana Jones does in the movies.
Another great thing about the game are the visuals. It looks stunning most of the time but the atmosphere and environmental art in dungeons is absolutely phenomenal. The idtech 7 engine continues to impress as it runs really well even with full path tracing enabled. I know the requirement for hardware based raytracing was controversial and a quick look at the Steam hardware survey shows that only about 60% of users have hardware that can run the game. Which means they've straight up excluded 40% of the addressable audience, and practically more because I don't know if the game would run acceptably on low end RT enabled hardware. The tradeoff is that you get spectacular visuals everywhere. One clever thing the game does is that it gives you a lighter early on to illuminate dark areas in dungeons and such. This allows them to make levels that are actually dark without unrealistic lighting anywhere because
you are the light source most of the time. With path tracing you can control the lighting of scenes in dark areas and there were instances where I would put a lit torch down on the floor in different spots in a dungeon area to change the lighting and mood for screenshots. It truly is a show case for path tracing and what lighting should look like in future games.
The game itself is a jet setting adventure that takes place around the world with a handful of linear levels and three large open world areas that you spend a majority of your time in. The open world areas are filled with enemies but you can get disguises (like Hitman) which let you freely walk around among them. You can find different disguises that give you more freedom to wander around in restricted areas but there are still enemies who can see through your disguise. This system allows you to explore and discover most of the map relatively peacefully. That's where the adventure/exploration comes in. That said, using the disguises isn't even mandatory because every area has multiple entry points and pathways that allow you to explore in full stealth if you want to. That's where the level design feels a bit like Dishonored or an immersive sim. The game has a main quest that takes you through the entire plot and I'd say it's about 15-20 hours long. Each area has a handful of major side quests that can take about 30-45 minutes each, and then it has a few more, smaller quests that take 2-10 minutes to complete and finally there are a ton of collectibles that are often hidden in secret areas or require some sort of puzzle solving. All in all, the game will take between about 20-40 hours depending on how much of the content you engage with. When I play RPGs I personally try to do all the side quests but I typically ignore all the collectibles/busywork. But when I play immersive sims, I like to explore every nook and cranny of the map. If, for example, there's an area that has four ways to enter it, I won't just find one way and move forward. I'll usually keep looping around and find all four ways and explore everything before moving on. As a result, I ended up doing all the puzzles and collecting nearly everything naturally in this game and it was only when I was a little less than half way through that I decided I wanted to go for the 100%.
As much as I've gushed about the game so far, there were some significant flaws as well and I'd say the game is great, but not an all time great because of them. The biggest problem for me was the poor enemy and NPC AI. The issue with the enemies is that they are stupid as shit. The game is not strictly a stealth game but it is meant to be played that way. Guns are rare, ammunition is extremely limited, it can take multiple bullets to kill someone and shooting will alert enemies all over the place and you will get swarmed by them. The levels are designed to let you move around them in stealth and take out patrolling enemies one by one with melee combat. This means that there are only ever 3-5 enemies in any area so even if stealth breaks you can take them on in combat without getting overwhelmed. The problem is that the stealth is kind of broken because enemies don't react properly to your actions. There can be two people standing next to each other and when you engage one of them, the other guy won't notice it. If you get spotted there's a circular bar above an enemy's head that fills up before they actually notice you and react. If you hide before getting noticed you're fine. This leads to ridiculous situations where, for example, you can pick up bodies to hide them and an enemy standing right there will see you but won't react because you weren't in their line of sight for long enough. I played on normal difficulty and maybe it's a bit tighter on hard, and it's not like I wanted this to be a hard as nails pure stealth game, but this really does break immersion throughout the experience. Every combat area is littered with items you can use as melee weapons. These range from real weapons like batons to items like hammers and crow bars to somewhat ridiculous things like fly swatters and brooms. It's really funny the first time you bash someone's head in with a guitar or a frying pan, and it's still funny the 20th time you do it, but eventually you come to realize that between the few number of enemies you need to engage and the busted AI, the entire combat system in the game is broken. You can just walk into a room, pick up the first item you see and go and bonk an enemy in the face. Odds are that the dumb as fuck remaining enemies won't notice it so you can just keep repeating this. Even if they do notice you, there are only less than a handful of them you need to deal with so it's never going to be a problem. This means stealth is never required and it invalidates the entire level design of combat areas. Why would you need multiple paths and objects to hide behind and to study enemy pathing when you can just walk up to them in a straight line and deal with them anyway?
The other problem is NPC AI. I mentioned that there are 3 large areas you explore in the game but they are actually massive and seamless open world zones. Apart from enemies there are regular NPCs walking around and going about their business. They're there to make the areas feel lived in and so that the maps aren't just empty other than enemies. These NPCs are supposed to wander around or talk to each other and so on but their pathing scripts seem to break all the time. You'll see them clipping through doors or lamp posts, walking sideways, staring at walls, getting stuck behind one another and blankly looking in the same direction and so on. My somewhat uneducated guess is that their pathing scripts are proximity based and they are only active when you are close to the area they are in. When you go away they just stop working until you come back and the code isn't robust enough to handle it properly when the restart is meant to happen. This isn't something that happens once in a while that you can just ignore. I'd say that if you go and stand in a populated area and look around you'll probably see one or more borked NPCs at all times and it completely ruins the immersion that they are put in to provide in the first place.
That brings me to the point that the game does feel quite buggy and you can tell that it's stretching at the seams in the later areas. The bugginess becomes more apparent the more you engage with the extraneous content (i.e. the collectibles). The main and side quests seem relatively bug free but if you go to the Steam forums or reddit they are absolutely flooded with complaints about the collectibles. There are some critical path blockers as well (like for example an NPC is supposed to unlock a door for you and they bug out) but for the most part the complaints are always about the collectibles. Items that are supposed to be granted to you that didn't happen, items that are supposed to spawn in the world that were missing or invisible or can't be picked up and so on. I'd say the game has approximately 350 collectibles. Imagine how annoying it would be if you spent an extra 15 hours playing the game, revisiting old dungeons and mazes, solving puzzles and such and then end up getting 349/350 and you can't get the last thing because it's bugged. Or even worse if you get stuck on the critical path. The game released in the second week of December so the developers almost immediately went on holiday and your issue isn't getting fixed for at least a month.
In the end, despite the issues, I think the game is really great. It was very expensive to buy in my region but it was worth it to me for how much I enjoyed it. If you have gamepass it's a no brainer to try it out and it's easily worth paying for a month of gamepass too. I hope they continue to patch the game and fix the issues so it'll be a better experience in a few months time. One of the main reasons I got the game was because we don't really get many high budget FPS games these days and while I won't classify this as an FPS in any appreciable sense, I'm still glad I gave it a shot because wow what a surprising and delightful game it turned out to be.
