Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003) is an action-adventure follow up to the N64 and PC classic, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999). It was the only Indiana Jones game for the original Xbox, and was also released for the PC and PS2. It was developed by The Collective, and published by LucasArts. Bethesda recently announced a new Indiana Jones game, and I wanted to go through some of the older ones to see if they still hold up!

Emperor’s Tomb brings us an original storyline that takes place in 1935, bringing us on an adventure that takes us all over the world. It starts off with Indiana Jones searching for treasure in the jungles of Ceylon. After climbing, rolling, and whipping his way to the treasure, he returns to his job as a professor, where he soon accepts a mission to find an ancient pearl that gives incredible power to whomever holds it. His mission begins in Prague to collect a piece of a mirror he’ll need to track down the pearl.

The story takes place before the movies, but it doesn’t require any knowledge of the series.

The backwards compatibility team at Microsoft has done an incredible job making sure we can play it on modern consoles. If you’re playing on the Xbox One X or Xbox Series X, you’ll get to see it rendered in nearly 4K, and it looks great. This game also natively supports widescreen and has an option for subtitles, which was rare in the early 2000s.

The sound effects and music are excellent, and the latter takes inspiration from John Williams' classic soundtrack. The voice acting isn’t amazing, and there’s no Harrison Ford, but Indy’s voice actor does a decent job.

The game is pretty linear, you’re usually moving from point A to point B, sometimes grabbing key items along the way. Most of the levels have some kind of puzzle to figure out, and there were times where I was lost and had no clue what to do. You might have to search around for explosives to break through a wall, or find coins to unlock a gate. I would have liked a little bit more guidance as to what you need to do.

Indy's whip is used as a tool to help you navigate the levels. You’ll need to use the whip to swing between platforms. The timing window is pretty exact, so you’ll want to get some practice in early.

The focus is on hand to hand combat, and it feels satisfying when you’re doing a combo on someone. They take a lot of hits to go down for good, and there’s not a lot of bullets for the guns in the game.

There aren’t any checkpoints in the levels, and some of the jumps are tricky, which can lead to frustration. Luckily, the levels are relatively short for the most part, and you can speed right through once you know what to do.

Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb is a flawed but endearing classic. The platforming and lack of checkpoints can be frustrating. It takes about 12 to 15 hours to beat, and if you have the patience for that, it's a fun but challenging game.