For a while now, I have been yearning to play The Order of Giants DLC for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. As you probably remember if you’ve read my review of the base game, I loved the original experience that launched late last year, rating the game 9 out of 10:
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an excellent adventure/action game that features one of the best Indiana Jones stories, great level design that rewards exploration, and awesome ray traced visuals. This might just be the best game dedicated to Dr. Henry Walton we’ve ever seen.
Indeed, the game received widespread critical and fan acclaim, although its late release prevented it from attempting to win prizes at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards. It is only natural that many players, myself included, have been looking forward to the story DLC, which was known to be on the way even before the base game’s launch.
Its focus on The Order of Giants felt on point, too, as that was definitely one of the core mysteries from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that fans wanted to learn more about. However, what we got left me quite a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong: most of the things that were great in the base game can be found here, too, such as the gameplay and especially the puzzles, which are even more complex this time around. The problem is that, despite being billed by the developers in my Gamescom 2025 interview as a ‘story-driven DLC’, The Order of Giants completely fails in this regard. Not only is the narrative thread extremely thin, but it also does not provide much in the way of answers, and, worse yet, it ends with a whimper, so much so that most players will inevitably get slack-jawed, and not in a good way, when the DLC’s logo flashes right after the only boss fight of The Order of Giants.
That boss fight is pretty good, and there is a (predictable) plot twist before that, but it’s just all too short and not that meaningful to the overall experience. I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who played the game at launch (before, in fact) and returned specifically for it, but I am pretty sure the same could largely be said for people who played the DLC as if it were one of the various side content pieces available in the game. Even from that perspective, The Order of Giants would inevitably feel weak compared to the rest of the content. The DLC barely manages to properly introduce the Cult of Mithras before it’s all over. It had potential, that’s for sure, but it should have been fleshed out in much greater depth.
Even the promise of entering Rome proper, as exciting as it sounded (especially as an Italian), is essentially betrayed by the fact that you’ll spend most of the time in the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s ancient sewer system. Sure, venturing into sewers makes sense for such a game, but failing to add some actual monuments and streets seems like a wasted opportunity.
The best reason to play The Order of Giants is, honestly, to bask once again in the game’s excellent visuals, which have been enhanced even further since I last played. Indeed, back then, neither path tracing nor NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction were available, and that’s not everything. A prior update added ray traced local lights, which ensure that ray traced shadows include all light sources, increasing their quality especially in interiors. This update, on the other hand, introduced RTX Hair, a feature that takes advantage of the LSS (linear swept spheres) primitive available on GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards to render hair in a much more realistic fashion. The improvement is obvious, though since this is mostly a first-person game, you’ll only notice it during cutscenes – and there aren’t many of those in the DLC. Again,
Overall, the game looks simply magnificent. Even more important is that it runs nearly flawlessly, too, a testament to MachineGames and their MOTOR engine (derived from the idTech 7). Worry not about the stuttering, for there is practically none here.
So, I would still highly recommend getting Indiana Jones and the Great Circle if you haven’t already, but I cannot do the same with The Order of Giants DLC, at least not until it can be purchased for a lower price than the current $19.99.
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