Oh, throw me in an ancient tomb and lob some snakes down there for good measure, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle got some DLC this week. I can’t imagine why that might have flown under the radar a bit. Anyway, the Order of Giants has brought with it a patch that makes a few noteworthy additions to the base game.
Watch on YouTube
Getting right into it, Indy update five adds a new “Very Light action experience” difficulty option aimed at folks who “prefer to be challenged by the exploration and puzzle solving, and prefer not to find the combat too challenging”. Tell your nan who likes visiting historical sites and doing crosswords, now’s her chance to whip some Nazis in a video game.
That’s one of these few additions, but the main one that’s piqued my attention’s this: “New Radio MCs have been added to the Jazz and Opera radio stations found on radio sets in Marshall College and the Vatican. You can also now tune the Vatican radio sets to hear news broadcasts that cover the events from around the game’s world.”
That’s a cool touch, being able to turn a knob and hear about what that knob Voss is doing from the 1940s Italian equivalent of those dorks on BBC radio four. Beyond that, Machine Games have whipped out some extra-swanky ray tracing for Indy’s hair, via support for RTX Hair on 50-series Nvidia RTX GPUs. “We recommend enabling this feature only on higher-end GPUs with 16GB of VRAM or more,” they wrote. That’s you told, no uber-luscious trim fidelity for those without top hardware.
The final new feature’s a little tweak to the inventory screen that’ll let you know which of your outfits will act as safe disguises for the area in which you’re standing, and which will instantly alert the guards that there’s a Harrison Ford sneaking around. For all the bug fixes and minor tweaks, you can check out update five’s full notes here.
Our Brendy wrote the following in his Indy review:
Machine Games have reproduced the experience of the Lucasfilm movies in a 99% accurate form. And they have done so in a manner only a megafunded Bethesda studio with a lot of Nazi-killing experience could. Yes, the video gamey seams stand out as you scarf down croissants for health and hear another bigot coughing behind a wall. But just as I’m not interested in Baker’s performance reaching some unobtainable ledge of authenticity, I also don’t want my adventure to abandon the language of games where it doesn’t make sense to do so. I’m happy for this to be exactly the kind of expensive, cinematic, blockbuster explorathon it seemed predestined to be. Sneeze away, little Nazi. I know where you are.
Oh wait. If I’ve got Vatican FM, the holy city’s haven for the hottest hymns and coolest choirs, turned up to max, will I still be able to hear the telltale bodily noises of Hitler’s goons?