Star Wars: Dark Forces

Star Wars: Dark Forces is an old friend of mine, unfortunately it is a friendship long past it's prime. Although it was first released in 1995, I initially played this game a year or two later on the PS1 It remained among my favourites for years, however it is now dated, so very, very, dated.

The easiest way to describe this game would be Doom in the Star Wars universe: an FPS where you go through levels, set as labyrinths modelled after Star Wars set pieces. You shoot stormtroopers, and a wide array of other bad guys, with the goal to stop yet another fiendish Imperial plan. The game offers a wide array of guns and grenades and a great difficulty curve for getting to know their power and uses.

You think the Stormtrooper "Armour" is meant to be an ironic term?

Although the game was updated for sale on Steam a couple years ago all they did was integrate DOSBox into the exe so the original game will run on modern systems with very little fuss; personally, I think they could have saved themselves the efforts. Even if you ignore the graphics, searching and rerunning levels to find keys and switches is not a great use of your time.

10 years ago I would have highly recommended this game: it was fun, it was well built, and it added to the universe canon. Today, the game is a hotbed of archaic styles controlling, horrible graphics (this was actually built for pre Windows systems), and an ear-splitting soundtrack; don't even get me started on the motion sickness aspect via the switchable "head-bob" feature.

If this game was remastered with HD graphics and an updated control scheme I'd play it again and give it an easy 10/10. In its current form I'd give this maybe 3/10, and it's getting nostalgia points to get that high. If you have time to waste and a burning need to see a little remembered corner of the Star Wars universe, it'll do, but that's about it. The Force is weak in this one!