Long before Kyle Katarn discovered the ways of the Force, he was a gun for hire, a dissilusioned former Imperial soldier ready to throw a wrench in the machine if anyone dangled enough credits in front of him. After a prologue mission that serves as an Establishing Character Moment for our yet beardless protagonist, you ‘infiltrate’ an Imperial base by mowing down every stormtrooper and white collar space fascist you come across, because stealth wasn’t really a thing in 90s shooters, and end up stealing the Death Star Plans and kicking off the events depicted in A New Hope.

You soon graduate from the blaster pistol to the trusty and iconic E-11 Blaster Rifle, and as the story takes you across 14 locations, mostly of the gritty and industrial variety that blends ROTJ-era Star Wars stories and the ‘feel’ of classic shooters in a deliciously nostalgic experience that reeks of golden-era LucasArts. You’ll traverse ice planets, sewers, a famous city-planet from the Star Wars and all manners of Imperial bases encased in classic retro shooter layouts. You’ll kill A LOT of Imperials (this cannot be understated, Kyle Katarn shows a level of murder glee that gives Lara Croft a run for her money) and gain increasingly powerful weapons to help you kill even more of them. You’ll even solve a few puzzles on your way to uncovering the titular Imperial experimental soldiers, but truth be told Dark Forces offers a pretty linear and straightforward sprint, with only a couple of maps stretching outside of what you would see in the game’s main progression route.

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Two years after the release of DOOM, the original Dark Forces took the template laid by its predecessor and built upon it. A full year before the release of Duke Nukem 3D, you had jumping, utility items and a flashlight in your inventory. A lesser known fact is that Dark Forces had been well in development by the time the first DOOM game released, and as such many of its technical breakthroughs were achieved independently of what the sci-fi horror game had presented to the world.

The experience isn’t all that different though: a mixture of platforming and combat will take you through a maze of corridors, exploring a storyline that occasionally features familiar characters but focuses on the adventures of Katarn and a secret imperial supersoldier project. You get to increasingly powerful weapons and much like in any genre game of the era you can think of, you’re going to grab a couple of color-coded keys in every map if you want to finish it.

One difference that is immediately apparent is the save system: there is none. Instead, you get a limited number of lives (which you can increase through pick-ups) at the start of each level, and losing them all means restarting a level (in terms of raw gametime, you only lose about 15 minutes of progress at worst, and that’s if you’re really slow). The system creates moments of tension if you’re near the end and out of lives, but is otherwise not very consequential considering that your second run through a level is exponentially faster and somewhat rewarding once you understand the layout and routes.

There’s a really nice structure to the arrangement of the soundtrack in Dark Forces: the beginning levels in the game feature new works and sounds and are more about the mystery and setting a tonal canvas for the story, and as you unravel the mystery and proceed to the explosive action of the final act, the familiar melodies and themes that made John Williams a household name start blasting as you do the exact same through hordes of special troopers. Overall, it’s a great audio journey that only gets occasionally undermined by drumlines that will make your ears bleed (in most aspects, the sound design is fantastic and well modernized, and you probably will finish most maps before having the background arrangement drilled into you).

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In terms of what the remastered version did for the game, there’s A LOT to unpack: the framerate and resolution upgrade is absolutely jawdropping: you can get up to 120 FPS @ 4K (not to mention 16:9 aspect ratio), the visuals are a lot cleaner with crisp upscaled textures, corrected animations and much better lighting. Even the cinematics were remade shot for shot, but in crisp, modern resolution. Furthermore, if you want to compare, the game has that feature that I think all remastered games should have: you can toggle between what it looks like today and what it looked like originally and, well, let’s just say I felt old enough as it was without doing that.

This tech and visual leap highlighted the game’s perhaps only noticeable flaw: the level design, in parts, hasn’t aged all that well. While it did all it could at the time, the “blockiness”, texture repetition and sometimes layout of areas you go through feels a little closed in and bland. All in all, however, there’s a lot of fun to be had and if you think of every map as a labyrinth that probably won’t even bother you all that much.

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While technically no longer canon, Star Wars: Dark Forces remains an iconic first person shooter with plenty to offer to fans of either the franchise or the genre. I see it as a nice little self-contained throwback to a simpler time: the stark landscapes, lack of props, somewhat minimalistic level design and restrained enemy variety might not appeal to everyone, it will be enough for those who know what they’re buying: an excellently-done remaster for a cornerstone LucasArts title. Is it worth $30? I’m inclined to say no, but when compared to every other remastered game i’ve played this year, once its price gets slashed by about a third, it’s worth every penny.

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