Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings

By 2009 the PlayStation 2 was a museum piece, which makes this one of the odder artefacts in its late library: an Indiana Jones adventure that exists on Sony's old machine largely because the ambitious version died. LucasArts had spent years on a next-generation Indy built around euphoria-style physics and cloth simulation, the tech demos of which circulated for ages. That project never shipped. What did ship was a smaller game from Artificial Mind and Movement, built for Wii and ported down, and the compromise is visible in every frame.

The fighting is where the design puts its chips. Indy throws hooks and grabs, but the point is the scenery: chairs, bottles, frying pans, broom handles, anything bolted loosely enough to be swung at a thug's head. Grab a mook and shove him through a window. It is a decent idea, rooted in the films' habit of turning every bar into a wrestling ring, and for the first hour the improvisation carries it. Then the encounters start repeating, the camera picks fights with the walls, and you notice how few actual animations are cycling.

The whip handles the rest. Swinging across gaps, yanking weapons out of hands, pulling levers at a distance — all of it functional, none of it surprising, and on PS2 the traversal is strictly on-rails in the sense that the game tells you exactly where the anchor points are. The story sends Indy after the staff Moses carried, through San Francisco, Panama, Nepal and Istanbul, with Nazis in pursuit and a period-appropriate serial-adventure tone. The plotting is competent pulp. It does not stay with you.

What holds up is the texture rather than the execution. The score, the fonts, the map-line transitions, the willingness to have Indy punch a man in a kitchen for two minutes straight — the game understands what an Indiana Jones sequence is supposed to feel like, even when it lacks the technology or the budget to build one properly. Aliasing, muddy textures and a frame rate that dips during crowded brawls are all part of the deal.

It is the last Indiana Jones game LucasArts made before the studio's long decline, and it plays like a company working from memory of its own better ideas. Worth an afternoon for the punch-ups and the sheer curiosity of a 2009 PS2 release; not much longer than that.