Review: Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995)

Dark Forces is a first-person shooting game by (who else?) Lucas Arts, based on the Star Wars film franchise.

You play as Stormtrooper-turned-mercenary Kyle Katarn. The game opens shortly before the original movie, with Kyle having been hired by the Rebel Alliance to steal the schematics for the Death Star. While this mission is not a tutorial (Thank the Maker), it is much easier than the rest of the game and serves to gradually introduce you to the game's mechanics. Those mechanics are pretty standard shooter stuff: run around, look for ammo' and medicine, and shoot everything that moves.

After that first mission, the game skips ahead to after the first film and starts up its own stand-alone plot. The Imperial General Moch has completed the construction of the first wave of Dark Troopers, robotic super-soldiers that are capable of smashing a rebel base in just a few minutes.

Your job is to track down the facility that produces the Dark Troopers and destroy it. This story unfolds over the course of fourteen decently-sized missions. The plot is simple, but is well told. It contains some fanservice for Star Wars fans (such as a boss fight against everyone's favorite bounty hunter) but stands on its own and can still be followed even by people who have never seen the movies. Like most shooter-game heroes, Kyle is a man of few words, but he still manages to have a lot of personality and be a memorable protagonist.

The combat in this game is frentic and exiting. Your enemies are pretty ruthless, and the game is quite challenging. Unfortunately, it is even challenging on Easy mode. If I could, I would have renamed "Easy" mode as "Less Hard" mode. This is a game that only those who can already blast their way through a shooter should try. That said, I am always up to a challenge, and it is good to see a game that actually requires skill and strategy to conquer. Part of that skill comes from mastering the very different play-styles required with the game's ten (counting your fist) weapons, all of which are useful throughout the campaign and several of which have alternate fire modes for even more variety.

Sadly, one part of the challenge comes from the controls. While the game does support a mouse, actually using a mouse to play is pretty awkward, and mouse support was clearly just an afterthought. The game can be played entirely with a keyboard, which is what I ended up doing. This works well for the most part, but you need to use the Page Up and Page Down keys to pan the camera vertically. This means you have to take a hand off the directional keys (which are used for walking) and reach waaaaay over there to aim at enemies above or below you, leaving you open to their fire. Turning horizontally takes far too long, and several times I found myself being killed by a weak goon with a $1.00 pistol because he was behind me and I could not turn to face him in time. The game seems optimized for use with a joystick, but honestly, who owns a joystick in this day and age?

This was also the first fist-person game where you could jump. That sounds good, right? Wrong. The developers were apparently so pleased with this innovation that they designed most of the levels in such a way that you have to constantly jump from platform to tiny, slippery platform. You cannot see your feet, you cannot try to make an especially long jump or a purposefully short jump, and you have no sense of bodily balance, so everything that would make such acrobatic stunts possible in real life is absent. I spent way more time than necessary just hopping around in rooms full of dead enemies, trying to get out through a door built into the wall fifteen feet above my head. On every mission.

I think it is worth mentioning that you cannot save in the middle of a mission. Instead, you start out each mission with three lives. (You can acquire more from power-ups you find as you go.) If you "die," you are booted back to your last checkpoint. When you loose all your lives, you have to start the mission from the beginning. This is actually less frustrating as it sounds, as the checkpoints are frequent and extra lives are not too hard to come by.

Other than the platforming sections, the levels were varied, good-looking, and inventive. To complete his quest Kyle must traverse a gang-infested city, Imperial strongholds, claustrophobia-inducing mines, noisy factories, and frigid tundra. My favorite level took place on Jabba the Hutt's luxury starship, where you are taken captive and forced to fight a dinosaur-like monster--with your bare hands. The final level, infested with Dark Troopers, is also thrilling and ends with a very intense boss battle.

All the levels are stuffed to the brim with alternate routes, shortcuts, and secret areas. This lends Dark Forces a lot of replay value, as you can play through a level several times and always find something new. The fact that the different difficulty settings actually change what enemies and power-ups appear also helps.

I feel that I should mention the music. Most of the time, I do not pay attention or comment on a video game's soundtrack, but Dark Forces has some seriously good tunes. There are a few original compositions, but most of it is adapted from John William's soundtrack from the movies and heavily reinforces the adventurous Star Wars-ish tone of the game. As soon as the opening narration starts rolling along to a 16-bit rearrangement of the original Star Wars fanfare, you know you are in for a great retro experience.

By the way, Dark Forces is also playable on the Playstation. I have not tried it, but a quick Youtube search tells me that the two versions are nearly identical. The Playstation version has slightly longer loading times and slightly inferior graphics.

I had fun with Dark Forces, but the stiff controls and high difficulty setting will turn off younger gamers. If you really love Star Wars, then give this game a try. It perfectly captures the look and feel of the Original Trilogy and introduces one of the Star Wars Expanded Universe's coolest characters.