STAR WARS™ Dark Forces (Classic, 1995)

Excellent sound design and atmosphere with a fairly decent story. It’s a lot of fun running through a level taking stormtroopers down with the familiar sounds and soundtrack that makes Star Wars great. However, the game is mired by awful controls and poor level design. Where Doom excels in fluid controls and sensible level design, Dark Forces struggles with clunky controls that can make moving and shooting frustrating. Level design is often labyrinthine and confusing, resulting in a lot of wandering and backtracking. If you have the patience though, it’s worth playing to experience Doom in the Star Wars setting.

This game is from an era when Lucas Arts actually made games. You know before the mouse destroyed it. No micro transactions here just good old game play. The scope and level design of this game is massive and convincing. Just watch the ledges on the ice levels ahhhhhh. I love this game I have played it for years ever since it's debut on the old psone. Yeah Graphics are dos so what do you expect? The music and pacing as well as the atmosphere will let you feel like you are in the non mouse universe. 5/5 any less and you are a child.

I had a lot of fun with this game as a kid. For its time it was quite good. playing it definitely reminds us on how much shooters have changed. I had fun. However, the controls are absolutely atrocious, 3 on the numpad look Down!? No strafe, and X to Jump with C to crouch!? How, how did I play this game as a kid? Maybe it works better with a joystick, I don't know I don't have a joystick, and haven't used one since the 90's. Objectively a 2 star game, I'm giving it 3 for the memories.

Controls are extremely archaic, and I've played System Shock Enhanced which has the most intimidating hud of any retro game (particularly FPS) I've ever seen. Would really benefit this game to get an enhanced edition where we could configure and map our own controls. I couldn't get used to the controls the entire time I played the game and I have just beaten it. The other issue is the physics seem partially broken on my computer or something and this seems to be a fairly common issue for modern PCs when I read up on a guide to the ice level. The ice level I could barely move at all without the cleats to normalize steps on ice and the player character speed when moving forward isn't normal speed when pressing forward from what I saw of others' gameplay. I move noticeably slower which sounds like a super obvious, but the reason I hadn't noticed till pretty late into the game is everything is normal speed and this only really effects the platform sections of the game. I had to cheat to progress pass the platforming in a reasonable time in an early level but later levels of the game are just near or outright impossible to platform at my slightly slower speed. There's probably an unofficial patch to fix this game breaking bug I encountered, but if you just wanted to plug and play like me with this game. Just beware of these things and be prepared to use cheats if you aren't going to try to trouble shoot and patch it on your own time.

Dark Forces remains as good as when it was released. Using the Force Engine port along GOG's DF version makes for quite the enjoyable experience -- higher resolutions, true 3D view, quick options menu, quick saves and a bit of eye candy. The only downside in DF is that it ends.