Played with The Force Engine.

When I was a kid, one of the first Star Wars games I played was Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, which I've since beaten like 50 times. I've always thought it was a perfect Star Wars game, and, as I aged, my opinion has only been reaffirmed.

At some point in my childhood I got a DVD anthology of Star Wars games, which featured all the Jedi Knight games, along with KotOR, Galactic Battlegrounds, Force Commander and several other old Star Wars games. I was excited to see what the older Jedi Knight entries were like, but upon playing them was left kinda unimpressed. Not that I disliked them, but they felt quite underwhelming. I remember brushing off Dark Forces as a simple Doom clone, and throughout two decades I continued thinking the same. Not that being a Doom clone is something bad, and I did attempt getting further in the game several times, but the first level always felt very off-putting to me.

I'm glad to acknowledge how wrong I was. In fact, Dark Forces is not only more than a Doom clone, it's actually a very important step in the development of first-person shooters. People often point to Duke Nukem 3D as being the first game to create realistic looking environments in a 3D space (where you could utilize the Y-axis), but I think Dark Forces beat Duke to it. In fact, it kinda beat Unreal and Half-Life to a more story-driven experience with scripted scenes. It was also one of the first shooters to have a secondary fire.

Now, that is a bit of an exaggeration ofc, but the seeds of what Duke, Unreal and Half-Life would bring were already here. The game does a remarkable job recreating the aesthetic of the movies, and most missions start or end with a scripted scene of a 3D model of a spaceship flying in or out of your location. There is also a lot of verticality throughout the levels, not just in elevators, but in straight up platforming sections that require timed jumps or crouching. Also, unlike Doom and its clones, Dark Forces mostly gives you story-related tasks instead of simple key-hunting (although there are instances of that too). Clearly a great amount of effort went into making this a realistic experience, with cutscenes, in-game characters, detailed animations and little touches like projectiles ricocheting off some of the walls and certain objects in the environment being breakable.

Of course the story is nothing to write home about. It's a simple tale of the rebels thwarting yet another sinister plan of the empire. It does its job though and definitely makes the game stand out from nearly storyless shooters of the era. In addition, it conveys really well the scale and danger of the Dark Trooper program. Honestly, having mainly seen them in Battlefront, I never thought of Dark Troopers as that threatening, but this game makes them look almost scary. And when you see one in-game, it's definitely an adrenaline-pumping experience. Not to mention general Mohc in an exoskeleton. The last level of this game is quite a rollercoaster in the best sense of the word.

However, sadly I can't say the same about all levels. The first level is indeed a bit of a slog. Which is then followed by sewers (where you have to swim in rivers of shit) with puzzles that require a lot of backtracking. The levels do get better from there, but the level design in general is pretty confusing. It's true that Doom, Quake, Duke and other such games also had a mazey level-design, but somehow they were able to pull off an organic progression. I don't think Dark Forces does as well in this regard. There were a couple of levels where I'd run around for like 40 minutes not knowing what to do, until giving up on it and resorting to a walkthrough. And even in otherwise normal levels, there'd sometimes be really boring puzzles, like the one where you have to keep running back and forth through the same tunnels, turning on and off switches. Often there's just too much extra stuff, like nearly inaccessible paths that would only lead to secret areas, which you would spend tens of minutes trying to get to only to realize you didn't have to. Not like the secret areas give you anything worthwhile (usually just ammo and health packs). I also really disliked the grenade-throwing three-eyed cow-people (i just looked it up, they're called Gran). In Jedi Outcast and Academy there is a beeping before they throw the thermal detonator, but here there's nothing. So they can just spam you with grenades that are very hard to dodge when there's more than one of them.

That being said, most of the gameplay is still solid. It still has that addictive and exciting projectile-based combat that Doom pioneered, so every shootout is a blast. The game starts really coming into its element in the later levels, when it throws huge crowds of enemies at you and give you powerful weapons to deal with them.

While Dark Forces in my opinion still doesn't reach the highs of Jedi Academy, it is definitely a solid foundation for the series. What really impresses me is how much of its DNA can be seen in the sequels, despite this being a pseudo-3D old school shooter, while the sequels focusing more on the melee combat and Force usage.