Into the Vault: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings

Sometime later this year, PlayStation owners will get to experience the greatest Indiana Jones game to date, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But in the meantime, what can they do to satiate that classic action/adventure fix? Well it just so happens that an older Indy game was released on PSN recently for a mere six dollars. Is that going to fill the need until the latest adventure of Henry Jones Junior arrives? Alas, if you know your gaming history, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings is not going to be that game…

So a little bit of history; Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings started off as a far more ambitious game than what the product ultimately turned out to be. There were lesser Wii and PS2 versions being made but the real focus was a much more impressive Xbox 360 and PlayStation version featuring a much more impressive engine with better… well everything really. But after a long and troubled development cycle, the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions were ultimately canned and we got several other versions instead (PS2, Wii, DS and PSP), none of which featured any of the promising graphics and advanced gameplay seen in those initial trailers for the version being developed for higher-end consoles.

I’m sure somewhere in the history of gaming, having a troubled development cycle and having to focus on versions on lesser platforms has turned out fine, but it definitely is at best a rare occurrence and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings is certainly not one of those instances. The game looks perfectly ok for a late gen PS2 game but frankly it just runs poorly with stuttered loading, sloppy combat, and some not great collision detection to boot.

With Indiana Jones and The Staff of Kings being released on PSN, what if any improvements were made to this version? Well it’s properly formatted to play on an HD TV, but aside from that literally nothing. And I get games like this, released for a cheap price, don’t get a lot of work put into them but there wasn’t any work even put into the loading even which just feels like it makes the game stutter.

Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings was just another in a long line of mostly mediocre games based on Indiana Jones back when it was released and time and no-frills port to the modern PlayStation platforms have not done it any favors. If you really want grand adventures in lost civilizations that echo the classic cinematic adventures of Indiana Jones while waiting for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle to come out for Sony fans there are far better options out there…

That’s all for today, next week is a little packed for me so that may be it for the month of February but I will see if I can slip one more entry in before the month is out. Either way see ya real soon!