Playthrough 003: Dark Forces

Third game for this project will be Star Wars: Dark Forces.

Dark Forces is a first-person shooter set in the Star Wars universe before the first movie where you play as a mercenary named Kyle Katarn hired by the Rebel Alliance to steal the Death Star plans from the Empire, then the story goes into extra-canon territory with Kyle investigating rumors of a bionically-enhanced Stormtrooper experiment called the Dark Trooper project, eventually confronting the Imperial Admiral behind the project.

Originally released for DOS on February 28th, 1995 it was re-released on Steam on September 9th, 2009. The game engine is very similar to the original DOOM, with all of the in-game art made up of 2D sprites that are oriented normally to the player’s perspective. Dark Forces however had a much more robust mapping system that allowed for finer planes and curves, as well as multiple overlapping layers in the level designs. It also was able to have minimal tilting of the camera up and down, but not yet free mouse-look, along with crouching and jumping.

I bought Dark Forces on Steam as part of the Lucasarts Jedi Knight Bundle on February 11th, 2012 along with the rest of the sequels that make up the Jedi Knight series. Though I’ve owned a disc copy of Dark Forces since 1997 when my uncle gave me the Lucasarts Archives Vol. 3 for Christmas that year. He also gave me a copy of Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, which I played much more of since that was in true 3D with full-motion video cutscenes and had lightsabers.

I’m very excited to play this game again. Back when I was 15 I didn’t really get into the story of Dark Forces, so I don’t remember much of the early part of the game. I think I mostly ran around with God Mode turned on and infinite ammo, shooting everything that moved. This time I will be playing with no cheats and trying to get as far through the story as I can in my three hours.