Dan Geeks Out: 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.