Star Wars: Dark Forces

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!