Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb

The fistfight is the thing. Most licensed adventures of the era treated melee as a filler animation between shootouts, but The Collective made hand-to-hand the centre of the game: Indy blocks, throws combinations, grabs an opponent by the collar and puts him through a table. Pick up a bottle, a stool, a shovel, a length of pipe. Shove a thug backwards off a scaffold and the level does the killing for you. It is crude compared with the counter-driven combat that arrived a couple of years later, but it has weight, and the sound of a chair breaking across someone's back still lands.

The structure runs 1935 pulp faithfully, from a Ceylon temple opening through Prague, Istanbul and Hong Kong to the tomb of the first emperor, with Nazis and a Chinese crime syndicate both chasing the same artefact. Between brawls there is a lot of climbing, and here the whip earns its keep: Indy swings across gaps, yanks enemies off their feet and hauls himself up beams. The revolver and the odd rifle exist, mostly so the game can stage a shooting gallery now and then, and they are the weakest part of the package. Aiming is stiff, cover is nominal, and the game knows it — ammunition stays scarce enough to push you back toward your fists.

What holds it together is how readable the environments are. Ledges, hooks and breakable furniture are placed with intent, so a room can be scanned for tools rather than just cleared. The Hong Kong bar sequence is the one everybody remembers, a long escalating scrap in a cramped space where every surface is ammunition.

Against it: the camera fights you on narrow ledges, several platforming stretches ask for precision the controls do not reliably give, and checkpointing can send you back further than a missed jump deserves. The PS2 version runs at a lower resolution than the Xbox release and the textures show it, especially in the wide desert and tomb interiors. Indy himself is animated with real personality, though, hunched and scrappy rather than heroic, and the voice work stays on the right side of imitation.

It came out in 2003, sat in the shadow of the series' own adventure-game legacy, and was quietly one of the better film-licence action games of the generation. Two decades on the rough edges are obvious and the appeal is undimmed: a game that understood the character is at his best when he is outnumbered, improvising, and losing.