Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995)

• Playtime: 29 minutes now, a dozen or so hours then

• Played: 2025, late 90s

• Expectation: I figured i would hate it now

Review

I came across this while i was claiming old HumbleBundle keys. Back in the day i played the first level a bunch (it was shareware) and later i got the full game, though i never got far. Mostly i was curious to see if i remembered things. I did and it was nice.

Dark Forces came out 2 years after Doom, which was basically an entire game generation back then. It's a DOS game with midi music, no FMVs (like the sequel), no manual vertical aiming, no reticule (?!), no saving, excessive head bobbing, highly repetitive textures, 2D enemies, et cetera. In other words, it's a relic. It belongs in a museum.

But still. It was cool to see that i remembered some things. The midi music is neat. And it was really really nice to go back to 1995. Before the dark times. Before the Special Editions. Star Wars was still fresh and exciting. Remember Shadows of the Empire?

Nowadays i'm not even sure if i would call myself a Star War fan anymore. So if, and only if, you want to go back to a time when we didn't get an entire movie about how Han Solo got the truck nuts of the Millennium Falcon, maybe you might enjoy this for a bit.

It’s no secret that some games from the 1990s are easier nowadays to play on an PSX emulator. Emulators allow key remapping (and proper gamepad support!), higher resolutions, and also there are some nice shaders available that emulate what the game was supposed to look like.

But in case of Dark Forces, this isn’t the best way to play this game. Raising internal resolution doesn’t improve the visuals much, and running this even on my top-of-the-line CPU is very taxing. There is a better solution though. Someone has been working on a complete engine rewrite for Dark Forces, and it’s still actively developed and works really well.

I’ve almost finished the game some 20 years ago, but for some reason lost all of my progress. So I do remember it, but quite vaguely.

The game requires you to be quite intentional in what you do. At one point you need to pick up codes, and read them in your inventory to get the combination.

There is actually a quite good story to the game. And that’s from the age when storylines weren’t common in shooters at all. You don’t just shoot everyone. There are characters, like an Empire officer that gives away information to the Rebels, and you may need to rescue that character at some point, for example.

There are some quite challenging acrobatics, even with WASD. That’s taking into account that there’s no save/load system in this game.

Was surprised to see ricochetes from walls.

I also didn’t remember there were powerups. There’s one akin to quad damage from Quake that supercharges your weapons, making them fire twice as fast, and another that supercharges your shield. In the prison level, I vaguely remember the ingenious elevator puzzle (the one where you have to align the elevators to jump on their roofs), so it wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to figure out that a blinking force field means that it’s active, while a still forcefield means that you can pass through it. I bumped into a blinking one a few times, and thought that I need to find a way to disable it, because on another floor there was a force field that you had to disable (for no good reason, that is, beside a few pickups).

As I mentioned, the storyline is pretty solid. Empire develops a new kind of troopers, called Dark Troopers, which resemble T-800 Terminators the most.

Those are unleashed on a Rebel base, and we are sent to investigate.

We find a weapon, so we look for a weapon inventor that hides in sewers.

He tells us about a research base, so we go there a find a strange metal. We then fly to a planet where that metal is mined to thwart Dark Troopers production, and fight our first Dark Trooper there as well.

In the meantime, Empire officer that was providing intel to us is captured, so we go and rescue him from an Empire prison. There is some in-game dialogues, which doesn’t have captions. Since I mostly played pirated versions in the past, I wasn’t even aware of that. You then get captured by Jabba the Hutt that is smuggling stuff for the Empire. Not sure why Empire needs anything smuggled. They are the government! There must be better, more efficient ways to do this.

As a kid I was terrified of that episode. You get stripped of all your weapons, and have to fight that huge lizard you’ve never seen before with your bare hands. Hell, I still died once in that episode even as an adult.

What I didn’t remember is that there are two lizards (they are called kell dragons) on that level. I was wondering about that, because I looked at the game sources, and there is handling of explosions for kell dragon. I thought that there are some grenades laying around in the arena, but no. It’s for the second encounter.

There’s a few slightly weaker levels in the middle. Vertical city is still amazing, though. It’s not too vertical, the engine has its limitations, but the bridge hanging above the abyss of the cosmos and some flying scrap and the sound of the wind still feels right.

Speaking of the sound and music, I took it for granted, but the developer of the engine has a whole post explaining how music was a separate program, that the game interacted with to get that interactive music that changes with game events, and not just a simple music loop. And the music sounds right. Guess because it’s either the authentic music tracks or composed by the same author. After all, this was made by Lucas Arts themselves. A few things blew my mind at the Imperial City. First, they actually implemented spotlights on the roof.

And second, the moment you walk in to the imperial building, and there’s a ton of Imperial Commandos there. What a show.

Also, I would have been surprised by Boba Fett, but I actually remembered this part, although slightly differently. I remember that he used his pistols, and here I was blown away by his rockets.

On the final level, there’s a conveyor belt that I remember felt very difficult back in the day. But on WASD, it’s almost trivial.

What’s less trivial is the amount of Dark Troopers the game throws at you in the last two levels. Luckily, by that time I had plenty of ammo for Assault Cannon. But still I found those to be more difficult than the, mostly because the final battle takes place in an open hangar with plenty of space to maneuver, while some encounters with Dark Troopers are almost face-to-face.

Last bit that I forgot – the sewage monsters. I hated them as a kid. But back in the day I played on an old monitor which was very dark, and I think I didn’t know there’s a flashlight in the game. So that eye popping out of the water followed by a bite scared me. Noways, the only difficult part with those is that they bite through your shields.