Author: TheAleosha

As I mentioned, the storyline is pretty solid. Empire develops a new kind of troopers, called Dark Troopers, which resemble T-800 Terminators the most.

Those are unleashed on a Rebel base, and we are sent to investigate.

We find a weapon, so we look for a weapon inventor that hides in sewers.

He tells us about a research base, so we go there a find a strange metal. We then fly to a planet where that metal is mined to thwart Dark Troopers production, and fight our first Dark Trooper there as well.

In the meantime, Empire officer that was providing intel to us is captured, so we go and rescue him from an Empire prison.
There is some in-game dialogues, which doesn’t have captions. Since I mostly played pirated versions in the past, I wasn’t even aware of that.
You then get captured by Jabba the Hutt that is smuggling stuff for the Empire. Not sure why Empire needs anything smuggled. They are the government! There must be better, more efficient ways to do this.

As a kid I was terrified of that episode. You get stripped of all your weapons, and have to fight that huge lizard you’ve never seen before with your bare hands. Hell, I still died once in that episode even as an adult.

What I didn’t remember is that there are two lizards (they are called kell dragons) on that level. I was wondering about that, because I looked at the game sources, and there is handling of explosions for kell dragon. I thought that there are some grenades laying around in the arena, but no. It’s for the second encounter.

It’s no secret that some games from the 1990s are easier nowadays to play on an PSX emulator. Emulators allow key remapping (and proper gamepad support!), higher resolutions, and also there are some nice shaders available that emulate what the game was supposed to look like.

But in case of Dark Forces, this isn’t the best way to play this game. Raising internal resolution doesn’t improve the visuals much, and running this even on my top-of-the-line CPU is very taxing. There is a better solution though. Someone has been working on a complete engine rewrite for Dark Forces, and it’s still actively developed and works really well: https://theforceengine.github.io


I’ve almost finished the game some 20 years ago, but for some reason lost all of my progress. So I do remember it, but quite vaguely.

The game requires you to be quite intentional in what you do. At one point you need to pick up codes, and read them in your inventory to get the combination.

There is actually a quite good story to the game. And that’s from the age when storylines weren’t common in shooters at all. You don’t just shoot everyone. There are characters, like an Empire officer that gives away information to the Rebels, and you may need to rescue that character at some point, for example.

There are some quite challenging acrobatics, even with WASD. That’s taking into account that there’s no save/load system in this game.

Was surprised to see ricochetes from walls.

I also didn’t remember there were powerups. There’s one akin to quad damage from Quake that supercharges your weapons, making them fire twice as fast, and another that supercharges your shield.
In the prison level, I vaguely remember the ingenious elevator puzzle (the one where you have to align the elevators to jump on their roofs), so it wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to figure out that a blinking force field means that it’s active, while a still forcefield means that you can pass through it. I bumped into a blinking one a few times, and thought that I need to find a way to disable it, because on another floor there was a force field that you had to disable (for no good reason, that is, beside a few pickups).