Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - The Order of the Giants DLC Review

There’s a certain thrill to cracking open a new chapter in Indiana Jones’ leather‑bound ledger. The whip, the fedora, the reckless grin in the face of ancient architecture —  all the ingredients of pulp adventure are there, and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and The Great Circle captured that in ways we hadn’t seen since LucasArts first handed us a mouse to click through temples and tombs. But a good sequel or DLC carries a different weight: it has to justify its existence without feeling like deleted scenes stapled together. The Order of the Giants, the first expansion for The Great Circle, manages half of that brief. It retains the core feel — the rhythm of exploration, puzzle‑solving, and Indy’s irreverent commentary — but stumbles into the shadows a little too literally. What could have been another grand archaeological romp is instead a claustrophobic shuffle through a single, dingy underworld, with fewer thrills and far too much retracing of footsteps.

The expansion opens with promise. A whispered legend of a subterranean order lost beneath Europe, a map fragment smuggled out of a collapsing monastery, Indy’s sardonic one‑liners to a reluctant ally — it all feels comfortably within the character’s wheelhouse. There’s momentum in the setup, and for the first thirty minutes I expected the DLC to peel back into another globe‑trotting mystery. Instead, it doubles down on the subterranean. For its entire five‑to‑six hour runtime, The Order of the Giants never really leaves the cave system it introduces in the prologue.

Thematically, it makes sense: this is a story of giants, of titanic architecture and myth carved into rock. But in practice, it’s like being locked in the same musty museum wing for hours. MachineGames excels at crafting stone corridors, dripping caverns, and flickering torchlight, but the repetition erodes the sense of discovery. What felt atmospheric in the opening descent becomes increasingly oppressive, not because the game wishes to unsettle but because it cannot surprise. By the third hour, the sight of yet another moss‑laden archway or half‑collapsed bridge drew more sigh than gasp.

If The Great Circle balanced its set pieces with puzzles — alternating between collapsing ruins and head‑scratching contraptions — The Order of the Giants leans almost entirely on the latter. There are, depending on how you count, three or four main puzzles, each sprawling across multiple chambers. They’re good puzzles, too, including a redirection of water flow through serpent heads; a labyrinthine door mechanism that tests memory and timing; and a multi-layered combination door puzzle involving a map and compass points. They’re tactile, logical, and faithful to the series’ legacy of cerebral challenges.

The problem is one of pacing. With so few central conundrums, the game builds entire hours around ferrying pieces back and forth, flipping the same switches in slightly different orders, and retracing entire paths to fetch a forgotten relic. Instead of feeling like a relentless forward push through danger, you feel like a caretaker fussing over an ancient boiler. The grandeur of the puzzles can’t mask the backtracking that surrounds them.

The most glaring omission, however, is the lack of set pieces. The Great Circle was bursting with them: crumbling ziggurats, Nazi shootouts on moving vehicles, improbable leaps to safety. That theatricality was its lifeblood, the reason Indy remains a pop‑culture monolith. Here, the set pieces are conspicuous by their absence. There are no chase sequences, no desperate scrambles across collapsing bridges, no last‑second escapes. The absence feels deliberate, an attempt, perhaps, to pivot the DLC toward intellectual challenge rather than Hollywood bombast. But when you strip Indy of spectacle, you risk sanding down what makes him Indy. Without the pulse‑spiking highs, the lows of the endless corridors feel lower still.

And yet, for all these frustrations, The Order of the Giants isn’t a failure. The dialogue retains its bite. Troy Baker’s turn as Indy still has the right mix of weariness and bravado. The ambient detail — echoes bouncing realistically in caverns, the creak of rope bridges, the way Indy mutters under his breath when solving something — is superb. Even the puzzles, stretched thin as they are, exude craft and care. There’s a fidelity to the tone of The Great Circle, a sense that this belongs to the same world rather than feeling like outsourced filler.

The narrative, while slight, also has its moments. The titular “order” is an intriguing footnote in the mythology, and unearthing their rituals does lend a shiver of the arcane. A late‑game revelation about their connection to medieval myth ties neatly into the broader series themes of power and hubris. It just never coalesces into the kind of yarn you’d excitedly recount over drinks, the way you might after dodging boulders or melting Nazis.

Performance, at least, is rock solid. The base game’s engine handles torchlit gloom with aplomb, and even when entire chambers shift or reconfigure themselves as part of a puzzle, the frame rate holds steady. On console, load times between cavern sections are mercifully short. There’s some texture pop‑in when you first enter larger grottoes, but nothing immersion‑breaking.

The art team deserves credit for wringing variety from a limited palette: shafts of light cutting into vast chambers, skeletons slumped in niches, and murals that hint at giants striding across medieval Europe. But the sheer duration spent underground makes it hard not to yearn for a glimpse of sky. Even a brief interlude in a ruined monastery courtyard would have gone a long way.

Ultimately, The Order of the Giants feels like a side‑story that mistook length for depth. It captures the voice and mannerisms of Indy with fidelity, and its puzzles are well‑constructed, if stretched thin. But its insistence on a single environment, its lack of set pieces, and its reliance on backtracking make it feel more like an extended riddle room than an adventure.

For fans who simply want more time with Indy, whip and wit intact, this DLC delivers that. It’s a serviceable return to a well‑worn fedora. But for those hoping for another cinematic chapter — something that expands the mythos with the same energy as The Great Circle — this underground detour may feel like a dimly lit cul‑de‑sac.