Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb

Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb is an action game developed by the Collective and published by LucasArts in 2003.

Plot
In 1935, after a successful artifact search at Ceylon, Indiana Jones signs up for another expedition which purpose is to prevent a mystical chines artifact known as The Heart of The Dragon (which belonged to Ch‘in Shih Huang'di, the first emperor of China) from falling into Nazis' hands. As the adventure continues, Indiana Jones soon finds out that the Nazis aren't the only ones who are interested in the artifact's properties for malicious purposes; in order to spoil their plan, the famed archaeologist will eventually have to enter the first Chinese emperor's tomb himself.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Good grasp of the source material. The video game's story is structured like an Indiana Jones movie, with a prologue only slightly connected to the rest of the story. The main story features many different locations and ends with a final confrontation with the villain and the paranormal artifact which finally reveals its properties.
 * 2) The video game generally lacks HUD which provides a movie-like experience for the player.
 * 3) A compelling musical score. The soundtrack features the famous Indiana Jones theme from the movies and many others composed for the video game.
 * 4) There are thirty artifacts to collect in order to unlock a special content, which adds replay value to the game.
 * 5) A varied gameplay which consists of avoiding traps, bare hand brawls, gunfights, puzzle-solving, first person shooter sections and a unique type of "whip-platforming". The game also implements possible basic stealth elements.
 * 6) There are many weapons that can be used in the game, like Indiana Jones' trademark whip. You can even use random objects such as chairs, bottles and table legs as improvised weapons.
 * 7) A solid fighting system, with many performable punch combos and grabs. The attacks are very entertaining to do and to look at thanks to the exaggerated fashion and to the dirty style of the fights which allows the player to perform headlock punches on the enemies and to kick them while they are defenseless on the ground. Nearly every weapon and even otherwise harmless objects like the canteen have a secondary attack; for example firearms' secondary attack allows the player to hit enemies melee with the gun butt.
 * 8) Smooth and responsive controls.
 * 9) The graphics are very detailed especially with the backgrounds.
 * 10) Many enemy types to fight, each one with their own gimmick attacks; sometimes there are several enemy types even in the same location. There are six different types of Nazis just to begin with.
 * 11) It is very lengthy, with ten exotic locations/levels split in many lengthy sublevels.
 * 12) Pretty good enemy AI; the enemies are capable of performing almost any action Indiana Jones can do, like picking up any weapon that falls on the ground, jumping on ledges and block attacks. They also make anything possible to chase Indiana Jones if he gets away from them during a fight.
 * 13) The presence of the enemies is revealed by their talking and conversations and even footsteps if the player pays attention, giving a good amount of immersion.
 * 14) Despite being a licensed video game, it features a 100 % original story.
 * 15) Good voice acting, with a convincing performance by Indiana Jones' voice actor. The voices for the many foreign non-playing characters are characterized by convincing Russian, German and Chinese accents when they talk in English. NPCs often talk in real German and Chinese, too.
 * 16) Some funny moments.
 * 17) A cool manual completely designed like it were Indiana Jones' journal. Every section of the manual is made like a clip taken from a book, a newspaper or a document; the combat controls section is from a training manual sent by Indiana Jones' father, the special moves list is a depliant listing a hotel's entertainment activities for the guests and the basic moves are made like a doctor's orders document. There are also "hand-written" sidenotes by Indiana Jones which mentions other characters from the franchise like René Belloq and Marcus Brody.
 * 18) The cover art has been drawn by Drew Struzan, the same artist who drew each Indiana Jones movie poster.

Reception
The Xbox version of the game received positive ratings on GameFaqs, with an average users score of 3.74 and a users review score of 4.04; a Metacritic users score of 8.6 and 3.5/5 stars on the now gone AllGame site with all the other versions following closely. The PC version recently enjoyed a spurt in popularity on Gog.com, with many users praising its funny gameplay and noting how the game has always been underrated.