With id Software’s DOOM sucking up so much of the oxygen in the first-person shooter space in the early to mid 1990s, it’s a wonder that any game not affiliated to that now legendary franchise would be able to gain any traction at all – and yet, that’s precisely what Star Wars: Dark Forces managed to do in 1995. Taking the very concept of the first-person shooter to the sort of new heights and places that seemed to be impossible in the mid-nineties, with Star Wars: Dark Forces developer LucasArts managed to mesh together the visceral nature of the then fledgling first-person shooter genre with the epic and breadth and scope of the Star Wars universe to create something that felt both warmly familiar and yet fresh at the same time.
Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster PS5 Review
A Simply Fantastic Remaster Of A Star Wars Shooter That Hasn’t Been Available For Nearly Thirty Years On PlayStation
With nearly thirty years now on the clock since the original PC and somewhat compromised PSOne versions and with no real way to play Star Wars: Dark Forces on contemporary gaming console hardware, it’s more than fortunate that those talented wizards over at Nightdive Studios have continued their long (please, don’t stop) tradition of bringing classic games kicking and screaming into the present day with Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster.
In Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster players take control of Kyle Katarn, a grizzled and roguish figure employed by the Rebel Alliance to steal the Death Star plans ahead of its construction. Of course, things don’t exactly proceed as planned and instead Katarn stumbles upon another threat to the galaxy that’s almost equally as grave, and it’s actually this which immediately gives Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster its largest point of distinction from other genre efforts of the time.
Put simply, Star Wars: Dark Forces had a story – a proper narrative that amounted to more than just blasting your way through loosely connected levels with a wall of text bookending each chapter and one which had a cast of (recognisable) characters, a sequence of events to follow and a satisfying conclusion to boot. Certainly, while this story is largely stitched together with text briefings and in-game cutscenes and might now seem quite as robustly told as we would expect from our games today, it’s also important to remember that in 1995 nobody was doing this in a first-person shooter and so, even today, it’s difficult to not be impressed what the original developers achieved here.
Functionally as a first-person shooter, Star Wars: Dark Forces also impresses though it’s clear that some aspects of its design haven’t translated quite so well into the present day. First though, the good stuff. Star Wars: Dark Forces does a superb job of bringing Star Wars into the first-person shooter genre with aplomb. Though the developers were understandably limited by the technology of the time and with their opus exhibiting similar sprite work to comparable entries of the time, Star Wars: Dark Forces was also technically step above what other developers were doing in the genre at the time, thanks to its use of multi-tiered level designs and the sort of particle effects that just weren’t possible in titles such as DOOM.
Perhaps more important is the fact that in spite of its limitations, Star Wars: Dark Forces grandly evokes the source material it’s based upon, with everything from the various Stormtroopers, Imperial Officers and so on all fitting in perfectly to settings like Star Destroyer interiors, planetary bases and more which all look like they’ve been pulled straight from the big screen. There’s nothing quite like shooting an Imperial Officer in the chest with a blaster, only to see a faint wisp of smoke rise up from the point of impact as he tumbles onto the ground. Certainly in 1995, Star Wars: Dark Forces was able to fully immerse players in the Star Wars universe with a sort of rich fidelity that wasn’t available before then, and even now Dark Forces’ myriad sprites and ungainly angular environments still do a fantastic job of generously dunking wannabe rebels into an evocatively realised Star Wars setting.
Speaking of immersion, Star Wars: Dark Forces also excels with the audioscape that it crafts – not least because of the surprising ways that the original developers leveraged audio to meaningfully enhance the overall experience. For a start, sound effects are absolutely on point with blasters sounding exactly as they do in the Star Wars movies, a generous number of accurate voice samples from Stormtroopers and Imperial Officers alike (“stop, Rebel scum!” never gets old) and some surprisingly decent voice acting during the various pre-rendered cutscenes which link up one campaign mission to the next.
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Where the audio side of things really impresses however is in the dynamic music which reacts to the action on screen. Completely unique at the time of its release, having the John Williams inspired music alternate on the fly between slower more considered beats and much more furious, pulse-pounding affairs as soon as the combat kicks off is still an extremely neat aspect of this presentation – though I will say that the use of old style PC MIDI sound will likely sound more than a little jarring to younger ears than my own. Taken as an audiovisual whole then, it’s quite simply great stuff that has aged appropriately well to say the least and for those who don’t quite have the greying or loss of hairs quite yet, Star Wars: Dark Forces easily fills the role of a ‘neat retro Star Wars shooter’, so there’s that too I guess.
In terms of gameplay Star Wars: Dark Forces hews pretty closely to what the genre was doing at the time of its release in 1995 – so expect plenty of exploration, collecting coloured key cards, unlocking secret areas and of course, blasting Imperial fools – but also it does a few other things that help to set it apart from its genre contemporaries of that particular era. While the presence of an actual story that threads together each of the missions is one of the main ways that Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster achieves this, another is how player progression is handled.
Choosing to simultaneously eschew both the traditional manual saves of the shooters of yesteryear and the newer autosave mechanic of more recent genre efforts, Star Wars: Dark Forces instead embraces a much more old-school arcade style lives system. Here, players begin with three lives on the default medium difficulty level and while death respawns you close to your point failure, exhausting your lives completely will force a restart of the entire mission. Brilliantly this mechanic ties directly into the level design of Star Wars: Dark Forces too, because additional lives can be collected by exploring around each level and so this neatly incentivises you to push on and seek out those secret areas – and that’s something that becomes especially keenly felt during the later and more challenging missions. Essentially this approach to player progression also provides Star Wars: Dark Forces with the sort of baked-in risk that just wouldn’t be there if you could manually save every two seconds.
Another aspect of Dark Forces design that makes it distinct from competing titles of its era is the level design and how expansive each mission ends up being as a result. Because the level design of Star Wars: Dark Forces is head and shoulders above what DOOM achieved at the time from a technical perspective, the maps that are in Star Wars: Dark Forces are both much larger and more sophisticated than any shooter that came before it, resulting in multiple complex structures that can sit on top of one another which provide each mission with locations that not only look like they’ve been pulled straight from the source material, but which also feel impressively dense and compelling to explore too. Much more than just a baddie blasting, coloured key collecting shooter with a Star Wars skin, Dark Forces also provides players with a number of additional objectives to complete in each mission such as collecting plans, accessing systems and so on that help to provide some additional variety above and beyond what Dark Forces retro shooter template allows, keeping things a little more fresh than they might otherwise be.
Of course the flipside of Dark Forces boasting such sophisticated, non-linear and sprawling level design, is that folks who are used to the more linearly designed shooters that have been recently typical of the genre could quite easily get lost in its relatively labyrinthe areas that are on show here, resulting in copious amounts of frustration. However, much of the satisfaction of playing Dark Forces is finding all the many hidden nooks and crannies of each mission as you punch your way through the Imperial forces and on to your goal.
It’s also worth mentioning that at fourteen levels long (or fifteen, if you include the previously never released ‘full’ Imperial Star Destroyer level), though Dark Forces isn’t the most exhaustive shooter out there, it’s duration feels perfectly pitched in such a way that a feeling overwhelming repetition or fatigue sets in. A big part of that is rooted in the surprising variety of locales that take you from Star Destroyers and Imperial bases through to planetary cities, cavernous areas and other recognisable areas from the Star Wars universe.
Not enough can be said about the absolute magic that Nightdive Studios has wrought here with Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster, either. A much larger undertaking than it first seems, Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster not only brings neat things like 4K resolution and support for 60 and 120 frames per second displays to the table, but so too does it also boast super high resolution textures, completely re-rendered cutscenes and much improved lighting that will appeal to both fans of the original game and newer gamers that are looking for a decent retro shooter to sink their Wookie teeth into.
Reaffirming the fact that Star Wars: Dark Forces has long earned its place in the pantheon of first-person shooters, this remaster from those wizards at Nightdive Studios not only provides the LucasArts shooter in its very best light with a swathe of modern bells and whistles, but most crucially it allows current audiences to enjoy not just one of the best shooters of the 1990s, but also one of the best Star Wars games ever made.
Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster is out now on PS4 and PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.