Star Wars: Dark Forces

The Good
First off, let me say that I played Jedi Knight BEFORE I even looked at Dark Forces. But even after playing the sequel, I still enjoy playing the original.

The gameplay is quite simple. You play the role of Kyle Katarn, a mercenary-for-hire agent employed by the Rebel Alliance. Your first mission is the theft of the Death Star schematics (Kyle says in the game "Much too easy", and even of the difficult settings, the first mission is indeed a cakewalk). After this mission you embark on a series of missions revolving around a new breed of weapon that the Empire is developing called the "Dark Trooper". So you play through detailed levels trying to find out what is happening.

The graphics are very good considered the year it was released. The blasters look real, and the game has that Empire "Sterile" look to it, although that doesn't really work in the outdoor levels. The movement on my P233 is ultra-fluid, even with all the music, SFX's, and graphical detail cranked to full, so it is very immersing.

The sound is superb. Come on, it's Star Wars! John Williams infamous music is playing in the background, and sampling the sounds of the blaster shots give the game that "Star Wars" feel to it.

The control is good, especially the keyboard, when it setup for your tastes (more on that later)

The computer AI is okay, but fighting the Dark Troopers themselves can be very discouraging. They are tough on any level of difficulty.

The Bad
The control setup for the keyboard is extremely frustrating, mainly due to the fact that the setup is done OUTSIDE the game environment. For example, if you have the "Fire" key mapped to the "G" key, and you find that that isn't working well for you (let's face it: ANYONE who maps the "Fire" key to "G" has NEVER played a 1st person shooter before grin), you need to exit the game, run the setup program, change the key, save the settings, and restart the game. Come on LucasArts, even id could do on-the-fly keyboard mapping, and that was in Wolfenstein 3D.

The cutscenes were animated (much like the cutscenes in X-Wing). I find they were poorly animated, and the voice-over were sub-par. The voice-overs in-game were much better.


The Bottom Line
Despite all its drawbacks, You have to give LucasArts credit for its accomplishment on its very first 3D shooter. They managed to make a convincing environment to play make-believe in, even though it is rough around the edges. A great game all-around.

The Good
This was an early, and extremely good, clone of 'Doom'. It was single-player only, and there was no light sabre, but the 'Star Wars' setting, effective, semi-animated 'X-Wing'-style cutscenes made up for that, as did the great levels designs and attractive graphics. Rather like the later 'Build' engine, as used in 'Duke Nukem 3D', this game allowed you to look up and down, and also allowed multi-levelled environments. The levels themselves were nicely-designed (a dash through a docking tunnel sticks in the memory, as does a level set partially within one of the 'blockade runners' from the beginning of 'Star Wars IV'), and were larger and more complex than those of Doom. It's overshadowed now by the superior sequel, but is still good fun, and available as part of a Lucasarts compilation of classics.

The Bad
It wasn't perfect, though. One level in particular had an off-puttingly hard set of puzzles, and the fact that you could not save a game until the end of an episode made some of the harder bits (in particular, the last episode) drag on too long. After a while it suffered from the same problem as other FPS games - the endless corridors and similar environments seemed to blur together in the mind, leaving less of an impact than they should have. The contemporary Playstation version was awful, but that's something else.

The Bottom Line
A fun, early 'Star Wars'-based FPS - with probots!

The Good
Until I played Dark Forces, I was never much of a FPS fan. While I did reckonize the innovativeness of such games as Doom and Wolfenstein, I was never really able to get "into" them because no matter how fun they were at first, after several levels of running around cramp dark corridors blowing away wave after wave of enemies it started to seem a bit pointless. However Dark Forces was a large exception, not only was it fun, but it somehow managed to pull me in, in a way Doom never could.

Perhaps the main reason for this was that this game had a point which was greater than simply "kill everything in sight". Each level was mission-based and followed a general trend rather than random key-hunting and button-pushing. Sure, key-hunting and button-pushing were part of the gameplay, but you always got the feeling that your actions had a higher purpose than "proceed to the next area". Each level proceeded logically from the previous level, and you got the feeling your were going through an evolving story rather than being sent from one random killing field to the next. The game had an actual overarching plot which was revealed to you via mission briefings and a few animated cutscenes. Although certainly not pulitzer winning material the storyline and cutscenes which revealed it were pretty good in a comic book sort of way. The plot built up quite nicely starting with the prologue raid on an Imperial base and culminating in a final attack against the Dark Trooper-infested Arc Hammer.

As far as I know, Dark Forces was the very first First Person Shooter with a personality. Enemies shouted a variety of challenges at you such as "Stop Rebel scum" or "Set blasters on full". Your character Kyle Katarn would make the occasional quip, but most of the in-game dialogue was supplied by your partner, Jan Orz, who would make a variety of amusing comments about your situation over your comm-link, and helped to alleviate the usual FPS feeling of claustraphobic loneliness.

I really enjoyed the Star Wars theme used throughout the game. Although I wasn't a big fan at the time, I did reckonize the characters and somehow got more satisfaction blowing away the Imperial Stormtroopers and hostile aliens than I did killing the faceless monsters of many other FPS.

Each of the different levels had a distinct look and feel which made them unique to each other, ranging from Imperial installations, sewers, a mining facility, an Ice planet, and even the Empire's heavily defended capital city. The length of the game was also "just right". Although there were only 14 levels, each level was well crafted, with almost no repetition or feelings of tediousness. Also, although there are some puzzles which may get you stuck for a while, I found nothing overtly unfair and was able to complete the game by myself without needing to refer to a walkthrough.

Gameplay was also quite fun. Graphically the game was amazing, with very colorful textures and enemies and considerably less pixelation than Doom. Dark Forces also featured the ability to look up and down as well as jumping and ducking, which added new elements to the gameplay. Weapons and enemies followed the Star Wars theme quite nicely (especially the blaster bolts, which traveled across the screen in quick streaks true to the movies), and while many of the weapons seemed to have been invented specifically for this game they do fit in with the general space opera feeling. Most of the enemies can be reckonized from the Star Wars movies, ranging from Stormtroopers and attack probes to the boss-like Dark Trooper battle droids around which the game's story revolved. Not to mention a special guest appearance and boss battle with bounty hunter Boba Fett.

The Bad
Not much, really. It's true the game didn't have any multiplayer support (which was a big point of complaint) but personally I didn't even have a modem at the time, so the single player game was all I was concerned about, and the single player game was damn good.

It's also true the game wouldn't allow you to save in-game, but instead automatically saved your status after the completion of each mission. While this may be another point of complaint for some people, I actually think it was a good idea. It helped the level designers maintain control of the tension within the levels, and none of the levels were too long or difficult that they couldn't be finished in one sitting (although many were quite large and complex and might need a few goes to get through). There was also an "extra life" system so that even if you did die in a level you wouldn't have to start all the way back at the beginning.

The Bottom Line
Lucasarts is famous for releasing quality games. Whether it be their Star Wars flight simulators or their quirky adventure games, they seem to be able to give a game a special "personality" that makes it stand out. It's nice to see that they've managed to do this with their first foray into the FPS market as well.