STAR WARS™: Dark Forces Remaster

I gotta assume Lucasfilm wanted their piece of the pie on this, because 30$ is insane.

Ok so if you want to play this on PC, you should check out the force engine first. What you don't get with the Force Engine is the redone cutscenes, upscaled and redrawn sprites. What you do get with the Force Engine is the ability to turn off the now pointless aim assist, and the untouched game which was already perfect the way it was. Not to mention buying a copy of the original on sale is dirt cheap compared to 30 bucks for the remaster. This game really is too expensive for what it offers on PC. However it is far and away the best console port given that the only other console port that this game ever received was the PS1 version which was not very good. I personally don't like the look of the new cutscenes and like I said, this game was perfect the way it was with no visual upgrades. Setting up the Force Engine is ridiculously easy and has so many options to make the game look exactly the way you want it to. It really is the best option for PC users. This game was really made to benefit console gamers and I'm glad it exists. However on PC I personally think 30 or even 20 bucks is a hard sell. I think Night Dive's efforts on Doom 64, Turok 1 and 2, and Forsaken were way better. Not to mention way more appropriately priced!

Call me old-fashioned but I don't think that not being able to save during a mission is good game design. $30 for a game from 1995 that only received a HD texture face lift is not justified. Especially since modders already did all the heavy lifting.

Visually and from the gameplay perspective, this is great. You can clearly see the effort that went into this remaster. But there are two main problems, the music and the price. The music should have been remastered too, even the old PS1 version of Dark Forces had orchestral music. MIDI music should of course be included as an option, too. And regarding the price, 20€ would be perfect. But I guess the problem here is Disney not Nightdive.

In short: They did it. The gameplay is solid, mouse+keyboard controls work (even if I had to tweak the hotkeys for some equipment which didn't fit all too well on a german keyboard). I play the original with keyboard only and do the same with The Force Engine. In this game I finally switched to mouse controls. It runs as smooth as you'd expect it, auto target works just like in the original (where looking up and down could decide if you could hit someone behind a balcony or not). You'd do good to replace the soundfont, that's designed to sound like a Roland soundcard with some higher quality General MIDI standard soundfont. It's still not the same as it was in the original, but the result is better. I use HQ Orchestral V3.