Back on May 4th I started my post by saying I had two candidates from the franchise to play in honour of ‘Star Wars Day’ and ultimately chose ‘Rogue Squadron’ on the N64 because the other option required installation. This was that ‘other’ game; ‘Star Wars: Dark Forces’.
If memory serves me correctly this was part of a whole bundle of Star Wars games I bought from GOG a couple of years ago. At the time I asked around the internet to check if it was a good option for a non-Star Wars fan and the consensus seemed to be positive, and Dark Forces was one of the reasons why.
As a PC game released in 1992,this is not something that comes with Xbox One controller support as standard and, as I don’t believe in playing with keyboard and mouse, I had a little fun setting up joy-to-key before I could get stuck in, and then tweaking my assumptions during the first mission.
Fun fact: The XB1 controller has exactly one too few buttons to assign every command you’d like in Dark Forces, but luckily I haven’t found a reason for the dedicated map screen as the overlaid version is so useful.
Also, I know there are plenty available, but other than joy-to-key I didn’t use any other mods or tweaks.
The first mission of this game involves you stealing the plans for the Death Star, which obviously led me down a ‘Rogue One’ internet rabbit-hole of fan theories about this game inspiring that movie. None of them seemed to really bare out or even be particularly interesting, but I guess it does mean that the version of events seen in this game are no longer ‘canon’, even though they involve the same character.
This is possibly for the best as “land spaceship - shoot guys - grab plans - run” does not make for a particularly enticing plot synopsis for a 133 minute movie.
It’s news to no-one that Dark Forces follows in the footsteps of Doom, but the inspiration of the ID classic on Dark Forces extends beyond the simple fact that it’s an early-to-mid nineties first person shooter. The level layouts and even some of the background textures bear more than a passing similarity, and the ‘switch/key/door’ mechanics are clearly from the same stable.
But to call Dark Forces a Doom-clone would be doing this product a huge disservice, there’s a massive amount of style and polish in the artwork for the story scenes, and the in-game sprite work is exceptional, with all of the enemy types and characters immediately recognisable from the Star Wars universe.
The abundance of in-game speech, allied to some quality sound effects, does wonders for the atmosphere too.
Levels, at least those I’ve encountered so far, are more geared towards exploration than those found in classic Doom, and the game does it’s best to differentiate areas and missions with the limited palette and textures available.
The maps are the real star though, and their use as mission sized puzzles brings to mind the best in the action-adventure genre.
All this adds up to a game it’s really hard not to enjoy.
Obviously on a modern PC it runs incredibly smoothly (once the initial setup is taken care of) and there’s a real charm to this style of presentation when seen at it’s best.
As someone who grew up with a PlayStation it’s really interesting to see how much better PCs of the same era were doing 3D games.
That box art though… yeesh!
If memory serves me correctly this was part of a whole bundle of Star Wars games I bought from GOG a couple of years ago. At the time I asked around the internet to check if it was a good option for a non-Star Wars fan and the consensus seemed to be positive, and Dark Forces was one of the reasons why.
As a PC game released in 1992,this is not something that comes with Xbox One controller support as standard and, as I don’t believe in playing with keyboard and mouse, I had a little fun setting up joy-to-key before I could get stuck in, and then tweaking my assumptions during the first mission.
Fun fact: The XB1 controller has exactly one too few buttons to assign every command you’d like in Dark Forces, but luckily I haven’t found a reason for the dedicated map screen as the overlaid version is so useful.
Also, I know there are plenty available, but other than joy-to-key I didn’t use any other mods or tweaks.
The first mission of this game involves you stealing the plans for the Death Star, which obviously led me down a ‘Rogue One’ internet rabbit-hole of fan theories about this game inspiring that movie. None of them seemed to really bare out or even be particularly interesting, but I guess it does mean that the version of events seen in this game are no longer ‘canon’, even though they involve the same character.
This is possibly for the best as “land spaceship - shoot guys - grab plans - run” does not make for a particularly enticing plot synopsis for a 133 minute movie.
It’s news to no-one that Dark Forces follows in the footsteps of Doom, but the inspiration of the ID classic on Dark Forces extends beyond the simple fact that it’s an early-to-mid nineties first person shooter. The level layouts and even some of the background textures bear more than a passing similarity, and the ‘switch/key/door’ mechanics are clearly from the same stable.
But to call Dark Forces a Doom-clone would be doing this product a huge disservice, there’s a massive amount of style and polish in the artwork for the story scenes, and the in-game sprite work is exceptional, with all of the enemy types and characters immediately recognisable from the Star Wars universe.
The abundance of in-game speech, allied to some quality sound effects, does wonders for the atmosphere too.
Levels, at least those I’ve encountered so far, are more geared towards exploration than those found in classic Doom, and the game does it’s best to differentiate areas and missions with the limited palette and textures available.
The maps are the real star though, and their use as mission sized puzzles brings to mind the best in the action-adventure genre.
All this adds up to a game it’s really hard not to enjoy.
Obviously on a modern PC it runs incredibly smoothly (once the initial setup is taken care of) and there’s a real charm to this style of presentation when seen at it’s best.
As someone who grew up with a PlayStation it’s really interesting to see how much better PCs of the same era were doing 3D games.
That box art though… yeesh!
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