Video Game Review #156: Star Wars: Dark Forces

Star Wars: Dark Forces

PlayStation

Nostalgia Factor:

I have a long, tortured relationship with this game. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. When Dark Forces came out for the PC in 1995, it seemed like a match made in heaven for me. A Doom-like first person shooter set in the Star Wars universe? Yes, please!

I got the game for my birthday that year. Unfortunately, I was not able to play it. I tried every trick in the book, but for whatever reason this game would absolutely not run on our family PC. I gave up on the game and ended up having to return it to the store, where I got Corridor 7 for the PC instead.

Dark Forces came out for the original PlayStation about a year later. I didn’t have any money at the time, plus my infatuation with first person shooters had started to wane. I ended up simply renting Dark Forces. I had the game for a full weekend and I recall not getting very far in it. I must have made it to the fourth or fifth stage, tops. My only real memory of my time with the game was that it was too hard. The levels were enormous, and I was constantly getting lost or stuck in them. When I took the game back to Blockbuster, I can distinctly remember being very disappointed that I hadn’t liked it all that much.

20 years passed where I did not play or even really think about Star Wars: Dark Forces. That was when I noticed the game on sale for the PlayStation 3 on the PS Network. It was pretty darn cheap, so I bought it. I didn’t play it right away though - I had all the time in the world to get around to it. A few more years ended up passing before October of 2018 rolled around. I was looking to play some of my downloaded PS3 games so I could clear out my online collection. Dark Forces was the title that jumped out at me. 23 years had passed since my failed attempt to play this game on my old PC, 22 years since the weekend where I had rented it and walked away from the experience frustrated. But hey, later was better than never. I was finally going to play to completion the game that had tormented me for so long when I was a kid.

Story:

You play as Kyle Katarn, a mercenary working for the Rebel Alliance. Your first mission acts as a bridge of sorts into Episode One: A New Hope. You have to storm an Imperial base, guns blazing, and steal the plans for the original Death Star. Then you get the heck out of dodge. At one point, this was actually accepted Star Wars canon… until Disney bought the whole shebang and came in and erased a lot of the non-movie event canon. Obviously, the events of Rogue One are what is accepted now. But hey, in an alternate universe this is how things “really” went down.

After the first mission, the plot of the game changes a bit. The Alliance has gotten word of a new ultra-powerful Stormtrooper armor design. These new troopers are referred to as Dark Troopers. Hence the name of the game: Dark Forces. Katarn is sent out to gather more information on these troopers. Eventually he is tasked with tracking where these suits are being created and destroying the source of their production. Katarn’s mission takes him through 14 different stages, ranging from an ice world to Coruscant, Nar Shadaa, a prison, a space station, a giant Imperial vessel, and more!

Gameplay:

If you have ever played a first person shooter from the 90s you should know what to expect here. You play the game from the perspective of Kyle Katarn. He holds a weapon up in front of him and he blasts things. Simple enough!

Unfortunately, the analog stick doesn’t work with this game, as it was created before those were a thing for the PS1. Instead you have to use the directional keypad, which takes some getting used to. Normally your character moves at an accelerated walking pace. You can hold down one of the trigger buttons to turn it into a full-on sprint. You have a standard firing button. You’ve got a jump button. You’ve got an action button that opens doors and so forth. One of the trigger buttons you can hold down to have your character look up and down. It’s not exactly the smoothest way in the world to look up and down, but you’ll get the hang of it as you play.

There were a few things with the control scheme that tripped me up a bit. I didn’t bother reading the instruction manual for the game (if they even have an instruction manual for the online version), so there were some actions that I didn’t know how to pull off. An example is that you often have to crouch under low hanging ledges in order to advance in the game. You crouch by holding the L2 button and triangle at the same time. The first time I had to crouch under something, I didn’t know how to do it because I didn’t read the manual and it does not tell you how to do this in-game. I tried every button on the controller and nothing worked. I thought I was stuck and wouldn’t be able to advance. I think this happened back in the 90s too, when I rented Dark Forces, and that is one of the reasons I was not able to make it very far in the game. Luckily in present day I was able to look up the solution online.

Another irritating feature is in the game’s pause menu. There is a normal pause menu for the game, which is fine. But in order to use some of the game’s more advanced features (like using the map or checking the progress on your mission objectives), you have to open up a menu within the pause menu. Not only does it take a long time to load, the controls within this extra menu are a bit sluggish and slow to respond. I don’t know why, but this bothers me. Why couldn’t they have just put these things in the regular menu? Speaking of the regular menu, you have to pause the game every once in a while when the game gets too dark to turn on either your headlamp or your night vision goggles. This is another thing that I don’t know why it annoys me so much – having to pause and unpause constantly to adjust your light situation. But don’t you dare forget to turn off your lights when you don’t need them anymore. You’ll run out of power and you won’t be able to use them anymore. And there are just a ton of really dark areas in this game where you virtually NEED to be able to see what you are doing in order to move on. Running out of batteries for your headlamp can be very very bad news.

Your typical level consists of completing your mission objective and returning to the start of the stage to get picked up by your ship. What are the objectives like? Well, I already mentioned one: stealing the Death Star plans. Other objectives involve rescuing captives, planting explosives, or stealing classified Imperial documents. Backtracking to the beginning of the stage to get picked up is a little annoying, but luckily the really long levels don’t make you do this.

Graphics:

The game doesn’t look great. I mean, this came out in the mid-90s so you can’t expect it to look too good. But you know me, I am often willing to overlook an older game’s graphical shortcomings if I can see the classic charm in its presentation. I struggle to do that here. A lot of the landscapes are really bland. There are many levels that look muddy and ugly. Everything is very pixelated, especially your enemies when they are in close. There are levels that look pretty good, especially those that take place on the inside of an Imperial ship or facility. But the ugly ones I think far outweigh the good ones.

What is good about the game’s graphics is that the atmosphere of the game feels very in-tune with the old classic Star Wars movies.  I mean, a lot of the levels don’t look pretty, but they do feel as if they could have been ripped directly from the world of the old movies. I don’t know how to explain it, but the world of the game feels just like classic Star Wars. Not the new movies. Definitely not the prequels. But classic Star Wars. And that is pretty darn cool.

Sound:

Most Star Wars games completely nail it in terms of music and sound effects, but Dark Forces is the exception to the rule. I mean, the sound effects are fine. Just as how the game’s look captures the feel of the classic movies, the blaster shot noises and the bleeps and bloops and explosions do the same. You really can’t go wrong when the movies have such great source material for sound effects to pull from.

If I had to nitpick, which I love to do, it is that some of the stage music is a little generic and repetitive. I mean, most of the music sounds great and sets the tone for the game perfectly. But every once in a while you will stumble upon a song that simply feels out of place and not nearly as epic as the music from the rest of the game. With such a great library of music from the movies to sample from, they definitely could have done a lot better with the music.

Overall:

When I first started this game up, I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about it. All the memories from my younger days came rushing back to me. I didn’t have a great time with the game when I was a teenager, and playing this game again in present day, I could totally see why I didn’t like it that much.

The level design for this game is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have big stages with multiple objectives and lots of things to do and places to explore. That’s a good thing! But they go a little bit off the rails in this game. Lots of passages that look exactly the same. Buttons that are hard to see because they blend right in with the surrounding environment. Obscure objectives. Lots of backtracking. Lots of wandering around for hours at a time looking for that one switch you may have forgotten to throw. It is nice that the levels are big, but it is very easy to completely get lost while playing this game, especially when the game doesn’t tell you how to do simple but crucial things like duck under ledges. It doesn’t help that there is no mid-stage save feature. That’s right, the game only saves in between stages, so if you have to stop playing mid-stage, you lose all your progress and will have to start the stage over again the next time you play. 

As I played the first few stages of the game, my interest immediately started to wane. I didn’t like the game much, and it became my goal to just rush through the thing and beat it so I could move on to whatever I want to play next. It wasn’t until I hit the fourth or fifth level that my opinion started to change. I had mastered all the moves. I had become pretty a pretty good shot with the game’s weapons, the level design of the game started to make more sense to me. All of a sudden, rather than feeling like a chore, the game became fun and challenging to me. The more I played, the more wrapped up in the world of Dark Forces I became.

If you would have asked me after I had only played through the first couple of stages I would have said that this was a D quality game. By the end of the game, I was starving for more. I was actually a little bit sad when it ended. Going back to my teenage years and all my struggles with the game – my PC copy not working, the shitty time I had when I rented the game – I didn’t like this game one bit, and I didn’t expect my opinion on it to change.

I am pleased to say that it did! This game probably isn’t for everyone, as younger gamers may not be able to see past the game’s flaws and rough design edges. But if you like Star Wars and you like classic first person shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, this game is perfect for you. If you stick with it, Dark Forces can be a fun, fairly rewarding experience.

Final Score:

B

If you liked my review of Star Wars: Dark Forces, check out some of my other game reviews:

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter

Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition

Quake 64

Super Star Wars

Video Game Review #155: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

GameCube

Nostalgia Factor:

Eternal Darkness owns the distinction of being the very first GameCube game I ever purchased. It was either late 2003 or early 2004. The GameCube had recently dropped to just 99 dollars in price. I thought that this was too good to be true, so I braved the frigid temperatures and hopped on the bus to the nearest mall with the intent of picking up one of these dirt-cheap next-gen systems. Not only did I buy a new GameCube, which came bundled with a super awesome Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition disc, but I also purchased the Resident Evil remake and a game I had never heard of before: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Usually I don’t buy games that I have never heard of or read reviews for, but it was only 5 bucks so I figured why the heck not? If it sucked, it was only 5 dollars down the drain.

Little did I know that this would end up turning into one of my favorite GameCube titles of all time. I played the heck out of this game with my old girlfriend Jessica. The game scared the crap out of both of us. The insanity effects were something completely mind-blowing for its time. The game seems easy to me in present day now that I understand its mechanics, but back in the day I got stuck quite often. This was before the days of prevalent internet access, before the days of every game having an online guide you could easily look at whenever you’d get stuck. A friend of ours owned the game and had beaten it, so whenever we’d get stuck we would have to call up this friend and find out what to do next. Sometimes she’d give us handwritten notes about how to solve certain puzzles, or what spells to use in what situations. Ah, the good old days.

Every few years I pop this game in and give it a go. Since last week was the week of Halloween and I wanted to play a scary game, I figured it was the perfect time to play Eternal Darkness again.

Storyline:

The main character of the game is Alex Roivas. Alex receives notification from the police that her last remaining relative, her grandfather, has been murdered in his Rhode Island estate. The police are stumped, so Alex comes to the estate to investigate his death. Hidden around this mansion are chapters from a book entitled The Tome of Eternal Darkness. Each chapter tells of an ancient evil that has been awakening over the centuries, and the encounters that people have had with this evil since its inception. Whenever Alex finds a chapter, the game flashes back in time to the story on the pages. Each chapter takes place in a different era of time. You’ll visit Ancient Rome, France, Cambodia, and even the very mansion that the “main game” takes place in. Some of these locations you will visit multiple times, albeit each in a different time period. Each chapter is like a piece of the puzzle, the more chapters Alex discovers, the more she is able to piece together about the evil’s present day threat.

As Alex discovers and reads each chapter, she also learns the spells and magic contained on the book’s pages. When you get to the end of the game and discover that the ancient evil is festering *spoiler alert* directly under your grandfather’s estate, Alex is well equipped to head down and kick some ass using the information she learned from the book.

Gameplay:

This game plays similarly to a Resident Evil game, minus the tank controls. You walk around a fully 3D environment, using the left trigger button to break out into a sprint. Be careful with how much you sprint, however, as your character will become fatigued and start to move at a snail’s pace if you run for too long. This feature of the game is…. very annoying to say the least. The other trigger button brings up your weapon. You can target different body parts of your enemies using this button as well. I always found it beneficial to go for the arms first. Some enemies can be taken down with one solid hit to the head, so you can never go wrong aiming for the head either.

The other buttons are used for investigating things that look out of place, or picking items up. Pausing the game takes you to an interactive menu. Here, you can manage your inventory, equip different weapons, check out the game map, save your game, and manage your spell book.

The ability to cast spells is one of the main things that makes Eternal Darkness different from your typical survival horror game. Each chapter, your character picks up different runes and artifacts and learns new spells. When you learn a new spell, the game tells you what components make up the new spell. You then have to craft the spell in order to use it. Early in the game, most spells are three-pointed, weaker quality spells. The deeper you make it into the game, the more complex and powerful spells you can learn.

Here are a few examples of spells you learn as you play: Enchant Item, which you can use to repair broken items (like a key that has been snapped in half). You can also use this spell to juice up your weapons and make them more powerful. There is a Shield spell that absorbs enemy damage. Reveal Invisible, which reveals hidden items and puzzles. Recover, which helps to fill your magic, health, and sanity meters. More on the sanity meter in just a moment! There are other spells you can learn too, some of which are useless and I never used, and some of which are essential to move on in the game.

OK, the sanity meter. This is the function of the game that put Eternal Darkness on the map. Whenever your character sees a supernatural enemy, which is quite often in this game, your sanity meter starts to deplete. The lower your sanity becomes, the more crazy, fucked up shit your character starts to experience. The screen will start to bleed. The music changes. You hear weird screams and babies crying in the background. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The game really tries to mess with your head. You’ll walk into a room, and a trap will trigger that beheads your character. The game over screen comes up. Oh wait, just an illusion. Walk into a room, and you’ll be walking on the ceiling instead of the floor. Psych! My personal favorite is when the game opens up your save files and goes through and deletes them all one by one. As I played, I purposely let my sanity meter run low just to see what kind of tricks the game had up its sleeve. You have to be careful, however, because if your sanity meter hits rock bottom your health will start to drain, and that is no fun at all.

Graphics:

I think the game looks pretty darn good, especially for its age. But when I go back and read other reviews on sites such as Metacritic, I find that people tend to bash the game’s visuals. I think it looks fine, though. The character models look good and are not ugly. The environments are well detailed and nice to look at. The Roivas estate in particular is one of my favorite locales in video game history.

The game goes out of its way to creep you out with its freaky and grotesque characters and environments, and the graphics definitely hold up their end of the bargain. I have zero complaints in this area. I don’t know what other people are tripping over.

Sound:

The music and sound effects of Eternal Darkness may be its strongest point. The game sounds great! The voice acting is good, if not particularly spectacular. Where the game shines is in its music. The music blends perfectly with the game’s haunting scenery and visuals to create a truly terrifying gaming environment. There is a distinct sense of dread that you feel as you explore the world of Eternal Darkness, and it would not be possible without the game’s music.

Not only is the game’s music very haunting, but its sound effects add to the feeling of dread as well. You are walking around, exploring an abandoned mansion, when BAM BAM BAM, there comes a knocking sound from seemingly out of nowhere. Is there someone at the door? Is a monster about to jump out and bash your head in? No, it is just the game trying to scare the crap out of you. As I mentioned earlier, when you start to go insane you will hear babies crying and random screaming sounds in the background. Eternal Darkness definitely creates a very dark, disturbing atmosphere and it wouldn’t be possible without its music and sound effects.

Overall:

I had a terrific time with Eternal Darkness in the early 2000s, and I am pleased to find that I still enjoy the game in present day. The graphics, the music, the atmosphere, and the game’s controls still hold up. Not only that, but it is still very fun to play as well. This does not mean that the game is free from my criticism, however.

The game’s puzzles can be a bit vague and obscure. Example: the hub manor. Now that I have played the game several times, I know that there is nothing to be confused about. You find a chapter of the book, you play through it, you come back to the main hub, you use whatever knowledge obtained in the chapter to help you find the next chapter of the book. So on and so forth. The formula is pretty straightforward. But to a new person, it may not be so easy to figure out. I remember when I was new to this game, I didn’t realize that I was supposed to open my inventory and read the chapter that I had found. I thought it was just another inventory item that would come in handy later on. I continued on trying to explore the manor to find out what to do next. I spent a countless amount of time in the room with the giant telescope and all the cranks you have to spin. I didn’t know that I was wasting my time and would have to come back later after reading several chapters in the Tome of Eternal Darkness. I was stuck before I had barely even begun to play. I also got stuck later on in a wine cellar because I didn’t see a door that was concealed and very hard to see on the side of the screen. I had been wandering around for hours, completely lost, before I finally stumbled upon it. Why did they make it so hard to see? I got stuck again in the same dang cellar later on in the game, because I didn’t realize that you were supposed to investigate ALL of the wine casks. I had checked out two or three of them and they all gave me the same generic message about there being nothing to see here. So I left. Turns out that ONE of the casks had contained a hidden secret. One of the ones I hadn’t checked, of course. Another several hours down the drain. All I am saying is that the game could have done a better job directing me where to go next.

The game doesn’t really explain things well when it comes to the spell system, and how different colored spell types are more powerful than other colors. Often I would know what I was supposed to do and what spell I was supposed to cast, I just wasn’t casting the right colored spell. For example, there is a green rune on a dresser that indicates to you something invisible is hidden there. I cast the Reveal Invisible spell, but nothing happens. Oh wait, there are three different color types of spell. The rune is green, let’s cast the green spell! Nothing happens. I immediately think I must be on the wrong track, so I leave the room and start looking somewhere else. Nope. I was in the right room the whole time. What I needed to know is that the red spells are more powerful than the green spells, so I should have been casting the red Reveal Invisible spell rather than the green one. D’oh! An hour of my time wasted when the answer was literally RIGHT in front of me.

If this is your first time playing, you’re going to get stuck on small little things like this quite often. Oh look, there is a monster behind a barrier wall. Simple enough: I just need to cast Dispel Magic to knock down the barrier and kill the creature. Well, if you are trying to cast a three pointed spell when the creature is being protected by a five pointed spell, you are only going to end up wasting a lot of magic power. Then you realize you need a five pointed spell. But in order to create a five pointed spell, you have to craft it first. Then you have to make sure you are casting the right color. On and on. It is easy to get stuck in this game when it comes to the magic system, especially when the game doesn’t explain things very well for you.

Another issue of mine: backtracking! Many games are guilty of making you do this, but Eternal Darkness seems especially egregious. Especially when your characters get winded all the time and you are constantly having to stop moving to catch your breath. This issue is particularly bad towards the end of the game when you have to activate a portal by turning on all its switches. Each switch you hit, the game teleports you to a faraway location and you then have to painstakingly make your way back to the portal to hit the next switch in line. Then you get teleported away again and have to backtrack to the portal again. This happens I believe 18 times over the course of the game’s final two chapters, and it is a major pain in the behind.

All these gripes of mine, and I haven’t even mentioned one of the boss characters you have to fight using magic late in the game. I wanted to rage quit SO MUCH during this fight! You have a dozen or so spells at your disposal, a limited amount of health, magic, and sanity – and the game gives you no hints at how to kill this thing. Not only that, but its patterns are wild and unpredictable as well, which makes it even harder to figure out how to proceed. I was NOT a fan of this fight, one tiny bit. Even having played this game multiple times in my life, I still nearly got stuck against this boss on my last play through. I will never look at black and white tiled floors the same way again.

With all this nitpicking, you would think that I hated this game. I do like it, I really do. I just found it too easy to get stuck or lost with no idea on how to proceed next. If you take that away (and all the backtracking), the game is outstanding. The story is terrific and I like how the game jumps around to different locations and time periods and you get to play as multiple characters. You really have to use your brain to complete this game, especially with the spell crafting system. It takes a bit to get used to, but once you figure it out, the game becomes exponentially easier and makes you feel very, very clever. Not only this, it is also one of the scariest games I have ever played. The sanity meter is something that will live on in video game history forever.

If you like survival horror, you should love Eternal Darkness, flaws and all. Once you get the hang of this game, it is a very rewarding experience. I am still waiting on that sequel or HD remake, which I am sure will be amazing if and when it ever comes.

Overall:

B+

If you liked my review of Eternal Darkness, check out some of my other reviews:

Resident Evil: Director's Cut

Resident Evil 2

Silent Hill

Silent Hill 2

Resident Evil VII: Biohazard