“First you must choose. But choose wisely.”
Mixing stock platforming with varied chase sequences, Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures gives gamers the chance to play through the storylines of the first three Indiana Jones films, its title unintentionally but accurately suggesting that the subsequent fourth and fifth films are, in fact, not great. To be clear, though, no one should approach the game as some sort of substitute for the films. Love Lucas and Spielberg’s revitalization of the pulp adventure serials of yore or hate ‘em, those era-defining blockbusters are thoroughly abridged here, providing little more than reductive bookends to the short and sweet levels. This leaves us with a streamlined experience that stands or falls on the merits of its gameplay alone.
It mostly stands, with its pleasant if middle-of-the-road platforming broken up by frequent and diverse “cinematic” segments, such as escaping a burning building, riding in a minecart, manning a biplane, and evading that rolling stone from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Okay, the rolling stone stage is actually pretty annoying, appearing early in the game and essentially requiring the player to memorize the entire level layout. A few other sections suffer from a similarly frustrating design, while the general platforming is frequently marred by cheap enemies and obstacles that gradually chip away at the player’s health.
Otherwise the game does a fine job of recreating the film’s most iconic moments within the bounds of its medium, and some of them are even rendered in a 3D perspective using Mode 7. Evading gangsters at a Shanghai nightclub, duking it out with Mola Ram on a rickety rope bridge, fighting Nazis on top of tanks—most of the good stuff is here, even the beloved sword vs. gun encounter. And it all has a high quality presentation, with the smooth animations, multi-layered stages, and 16-bit rendition of the iconic score meshing into a pleasant aesthetic.
Developed by independent German developer Factor 5 using the same engine as Super Star Wars and its sequels (and re-using the Han Solo animations, if you were looking for some useless trivia to whip out at parties), the game equips the player with Indy’s trusty whip and pistol and a handful of grenades, grants him the ability to jump about six feet high, and sets him loose upon a set of vaguely nonlinear levels that mimic something like Super Castlevania IV but lack that game’s refinement and creativity in design, both of which are necessary to elevate a platformer to the upper echelon.
If only it played as well as it looked. Behind the famous façade, Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures is a fairly standard left-to-right action platformer, fun for the few hours it takes to run through it but easy to forget about once complete.