Having heard about the Force Engine’s full release and having played and beaten Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight as a kid years ago I decided to finally give Dark Forces 1 a try. While I never played the original Dark Forces before I can tell that the devs put a lot of great work into the Force Engine to have this run so smoothly on modern OSes. It was straight up download and play once I bought Dark Forces on Steam. The game looked real nice at 1920X1080 and it ran without a hitch. It also adds a bunch of QoL stuff like quicksaving and full mouselook. The game itself is mostly good, though some of the level design and puzzles really suck, like real strong examples of what’s considered to be bad classic shooter level design with obtuse puzzles and one of the later stages just shoves in mines everywhere in annoying trial and error ways. Though hey, it’s not nearly as terrible as that one puzzle in Marathon that made me drop the game. The game does a quality job bringing Star Wars to life within in its limits. The atmosphere evokes that kind of sci-fi cheesiness of the OG movies had that later Star Wars games didn’t really invoke as much. They also pull a whole bunch of sound effects and voice lines from the movies which is charming. The weapons are of a decent variety and I mostly used them all on the regular, though the thermal detonators are kind of janky to use. Overall Dark Forces has aged a bit poorly compared to its contemporaries but the Force Engine has breathed new life into it and I would recommend it for boomer shooter and Star Wars fans. Definitely should revisit Jedi Knight now because my memories of it is that was it was a big improvement over this game.