Release Date: June 1995 Genre: First Person Shooter Publisher: Lucasarts Developer: Lucasarts Platform: DOS/Windows/Playstation Network Players: 1 Classification: ESRB: Teen (T)
Awhile ago my friend Brok discovered the site www.gog.com Good old Games which sells many
classic games in an updated DRM-free format that can run on modern
systems. His main objective was to gain a working version of the X-Wing
and TIE Fighter collectors editions and we found
there was not only those but a whole host of classic
Star Wars games of which we purchased quite a few in bulk during the sale
inc X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and the
entire Jedi
Knight series. For those of you who don’t know, Star Wars Dark
Forces is the first games of the Jedi Knight series of games which also
include Dark Forces II, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy which you’ll know from a
previous review.
Once I had purchased them from GOG.com I decided to play them in order starting
with Dark Forces.
Hmm this hallway looks familiar
Star Wars Dark forces was released in 1995 the time where
the “3D” First person shooter was king and that king was for the most part the
king was the Doom
series, indeed being very similar to Doom the game was often compared to Doom
but reviewers always indicated that the game had many features that improved
upon its competitors. Dark Forces featured the ability to look up and down,
duck and jump and featured an additional resource battery powerto run various
equipment powerups such as the headlamp and night vision goggles. To make these
changes the developers had to create a whole new game engine simply titled Jedi, this allowed
them to create multi-levelled maps which unlike Doom had rooms directly above
or below each other that you could walk around, moving conveyor belts and some
objects that were fully 3D such as smaller starships (though these were quite
obvious when you saw them). It also had a much more engaging and involved
storyline then Doom, adding various puzzles and strategy to the game as well as
finding secrets and requiring keycards to advance. Atmospheric effects such as
fog and haze and animated textures and shading were also added to great effect.
You can't quite see it but there is red haze
Installing GoG games are fairly easy as the package is just
downloaded from the main site then extracted with a built in installer. This is
just as well as it uses Dosbox to run and I’ve messed around with that thing
before but never got it to work, but fortunately this did and I was able to
start playing. There has been many comparisons to GoG and Steam though there’s
one major difference that I found was summed up well by Jerry
Holkins (Tycho) of Penny Arcade,
he says that Steam is more like a jukebox that (supposedly) holds or your games
but if it goes offline or has login issues then you can’t play them, whereas
GoG is a vending machine that gives you full access to the product after you
pay for it. I’m not exactly sure which one I like more, I do like letting steam
take control of everything (installation/updates etc) and it’s great when
you’re trying to make sure you have the same game version as other people
especially with older games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Origin also helped
with Battlefield 1942 (as well as Warcraft 3) as I can remember a fair few
times where a group of us had problems getting the correct version in order to
play together.
Kyle ship The Moldy Crow currently piloted by Jan
Though the control setup menu the game provided was easy to
use, I found that I just couldn’t quite get the setup I liked, I could use the
mouse but it just didn’t feel right as the controls were set up in sections and
you didn’t have an options to change the alt fire to a mouse button (though I
didn’t use this very much). This was probably due to the fact that I had been
the Doom series with ZDoom which if you
didn’t know allows you to play any of the original Doom series with much more
features including much better graphics, and the ability to jump and use the
mouse to look free including up and down. So being used to this of course it
was kind of hard to play a whole game stuck in the same view, you did actually
have the ability to look up and down though this was used with keys and wasn’t the same as the free mouselook we’re
used to today. I did play a few levels in this mode but due to the difficulty
and annoyance of not having free look I decided to try to find a similar type
of mod to ZDoom I came across DarkXL
which is basically exactly what I was looking for and it worked very well as it
gave the game much sharper graphics and better controls.
A shot-in-shot of the DarkXL and the original in the top right
Though I soon found that although it worked well for the
first few levels there began to be many bugs inc no sound and crashing on
certain levels, impossible puzzles and blocked doors, missing cinematics and
the inability to use several late-game weapons, I found this out much too late
as it was only on the last few levels that I realised that I should have been
able to pick up certain weapons and enemies should have dropped certain weapons
though this hadn’t affected me as I did just fine with that I had. I did
eventually get through the game (and use the weapons for a short time) but only
through using various cheats though it was a lesser experience as a lot was
missing from the later parts of the game, some of which I had to go back to the
Dosbox version to see. I recently found that on the XL Engine site itself the game was actually listed
as being in its Alpha stage and 98% towards beta (if I had only waited a bit
longer XD) so basically I might go back to it again, either modded or unmodded,
but I experienced enough for this review nonetheless.
Pew pew! Forcing entry into the imperial detention centre to find Crix Madine
So with that out of the way on to the story. You play as Kyle Katarn who you may
already know from the other games in the Jedi Knight series, the developers had
actually wanted to use Luke Skywalker but due to gameplay and story constraints
they created Kyle Katarn as a completely new character. His brief history of
having previously defected from the Empire after he found they were responsible
for killing his parents (with the help of Jan Ors) and
was now working as a mercenary for the Rebel Alliance. The main story involves
Kyle investigating the Dark
Troopers which had been created by Imperial General Rom Mohc
about the massive starship the Arc Hammer,
so you basically go from level to level gathering intelligence with some
rescues and escapes along the way. Of all the planets visited during the game I
only recognised Nar Shaddaa and Coruscant
with the restincluding Danuta, Anoat, Fest, Cal-Seti and
many others which I didn’t recognise. I found the story pretty damn engaging as
it kept me going through all of the issues faced with the mod and it was great
to hear about all the new star wars lore and the origin of the Jedi Knight
series which I hadn’t known since playing Jedi Academy heaps of times.
Our hero Kyle Katarn, looking a bit older then he does in Jedi Academy
General Mohc, Darth Vader and the Republic Informant Crix Madine
As I mentioned playing the game with the DarkXL mod made it
much better (at the start at least) I could move freely with the WASD keys I
could look freely with the mouse, I could crouch and jump and touch buttons all
good, the graphics were much, much better as you could run the game with your
native desktop resolution. Basically the game plays the same way as Doom with
you running around shooting enemies and completing objectives though armor is
represented by “shield” power, I spent the majority of the time not using
cheats as compared to Doom as I found the difficulty not too bad. The guns in
the game are good and I had fun shooting down piles of Stormtroopers, you start
with a generic laser pistol before almost instantly getting hold of the
Stormtroooper laser rifle which basically becomes your mainstay weapon
throughout the whole game, the thing is that good, the ammo is plentiful (most
imperial soldiers drop rounds) and it shoots damn fast. My other weapon of
choice was the imperial repeater gun, this thing has even more pewpew and
shoots very fast but has weaker shots and takes power cells which are harder to
find, and my last weapon of choice was thermal detonators which are plentiful
on certain levels, when thrown these detonate on impact (unless using secondary
fire) and you are able to throw a ridiculous amount in a short period of time
(like 3 a second!) so taking down bosses with these was no problem at all.
Me pew-pew-pewing with the Stormtrooper laser rifle on Tak base, an early mission
Other weapons included the Jet fusion cutter which was a powerful but slow
firing laser bolt gun, the I.M mines which are basically claymores, the Mortar
gun which speaks for itself, the Stouker concussion rifle which is a long range
AOE blast that tore apart most standard enemies and the Assault Cannon which is
used by Dark Troopers and shoots both Plasma and rockets. The last three I
unfortunately didn’t use very much due to them not beingimplemented in the mod yet and me having to
add them in using cheats.
Fighting General Mohc with the Assault Cannon
I mostly plowed through the levels as I enjoy the fast pace
of these style of games but I did notice the subtle differences from the Doom and
Jedi engines that I mentioned before, specifically things like
"room-over-room" multi-levelled stages which had much more lift and
platforms then Doom and made traversing some levels very confusing when you had
rooms right on top of each other, there was also many instances which required
you to solve puzzles which included changing switches in a sequence to open
doors and moving entire ships to change from one section to the other. The game
had multiple objectives which were part of the storyline so it gave the game
much more depth than just randomly killing (and occasionally obtaining
keycards) to get to the end of the level. One thing I didn’t like was that you
couldn’t save anywhere you wanted like in Doom, you had respawn points but if
the game crashed for example you could load a save you just had to start all
over again which was a bit annoying.
As some places were multi-levelled, the map was had the ability to change which level you were looking at though it was still tricky. You also had the ability to view your weapons, inventory and objectives which was a great help.
I didn’t cheat throughout most of the game
(the actual invincibility cheat could not be used with the DarkXL mod) but I topped
myself up with health and ammo at times towards the end. In regards to pickups
there was you basic health and shield pickups as well as your laser ammo, power
cells for those weapons that took them were a bit more sparse the same with
mortar shells and rockets, most of the time you were overloaded with the ammo
that the enemies in the level dropped. Then there was the other items that used
battery pickups such as your headlamp, infra-red goggles and the air mask, the
latter of which I could not work out which button it was to use it lol as there
was also extra lives and restart points for when you died. Though by far my
favourite was the weapons supercharge which triples your rate of fire for a
short period of time, heaps of fun to use and together with the rest of the
pickups made the whole experience more fun and interactive.
Me fighting Dark Troopers and other enemies using a variety of weapons about the Executor, this also shows me using the weapons supercharge and smuggling myself on the Arc Hammer
As I mentioned before the graphics for the original game
were (understandably) quite poor as they only went up to 640x480 but the DarkXL
mod you could have your desktop resolution which made it great looking and much
sharper, whether you had the mod or not the locations still looked great, there
was plenty of areas that I recognised from the movies such as the white interiors
of some ships from that first scene in episode 4 and everything had that
distinct Star Wars flare. The new engine was able to create gameplay and
graphical elements such as fully 3D objects, atmospheric effects such as fog
and haze, animated textures and shading which was evident in the levels as
there were lots of things moving around such as bridges moving and ships flying
around outside and many kinds of moving 3D objects. The textures do lack that
flair that Doom had with the all the demonic imagery and gore but as this was a
Star Wars game the developers had to stick to the content and the game being as
old as it was you couldn’t do too much with just textures. The game’s retro sounding
star wars score soundtrack really stood out to me and it was great when you
recognised a tune and really added to the atmosphere and the situational music
helped too, the sound effects were equally great, all in stereo as well.
Some levels inc this ice level on Anteevy which features flowing water and moving assembly lines
Although my experience with Dark forces wasn’t fully functional
I suppose you say, I enjoyed it anyway and much more so with the Dark XL mod
and when the mod is fully finished I dare say I’ll play it again. It was great
to see the beginning of the Jedi Knight series one of which I am going to
continue playing to see out the series. As I’ve said before Star Wars Dark
Forces is not just a Doom clone, it has a whole new engine and many elements
that make it different if not better and I will maintain that stance throughout
the years to come. It’s said that almost every gamer has played an ID Software
shooter in some form but this is a game every Star Wars fan of all types should
play.
JD
Score: 8/10
Things I liked:
Overall storyline and missions designed very well.
Level design very dynamic, multi-level system new for the time
Fun and effective weapons and powerups
Things I didn’t like
Control system obviously dated and not able to be configured enough.
No save-anywhere feature, respawn system annoying when have to start again from game crash
Level textures somewhat dull due to nature of Star Wars Universe
I fist a Kell Dragon and then shoot up Jabba's ship
