STAR WARS - Dark Forces

Playstation first-person perspective adventure game.

Review by Jonathan Hicks

It would be very easy to sit back and simply say that the Dark Forces game, the Playstation version, is nothing but a lazy PC ‘port using a very rough-edged Doom-style game engine.

And that would be entirely accurate.

You play the role of Kyle Katarn, an ex-Imperial working freelance for the Rebellion and basically adept at kicking butt. He is hired to do several dangerous missions over several planets and try to find the secret of the Dark Trooper.

After the initial opening and the ‘long time ago’ stuff, the words Star Wars flash across the screen, accompanied by what sounds like a poor attempt to reproduce the film score on a small portable electric keyboard. Although the tempo is correct and the music is well put together you can’t get the image out of your head of John Williams at a kindergarten and saying ‘this is what I wrote for a film, children’ and playing it out on a small electronic piano. Poor marks for that, then.

Then the first film starts, and what you get is a very jerky animation (its difficult to class it as FMV because of the poor quality) of a ship blasting through the void. The animations are simple frame cartoons that are laid out to present the story as it unfolds. This isn’t too bad, with decent enough voice actors, but when you get to the starship and other animations the flow of the picture is jerky and stop-and-start, making you think the animators got bored half way through and consoled themselves with the fact that they were producing a Star Wars product and that it would sell well, anyway.

Now to the game. The game engine is old, so it can be forgiven for jerky movement and poor frame rate, but it still strikes you as a little rough. The atmospheric sounds are good enough - especially on the worlds where there’s high winds or even machinery on the go - but even this gets a little unrealistic when you simply walk down a corridor and the noise vanishes because your out of the area where the noise is supposed to happen and the game console shuts it off. Not too realistic.

Visually there is nothing special to entertain. The backgrounds are good enough to convey the reality of the location but don’t really catch the eye and just serve as a conduit to keep the player heading in the right direction. There’s a lot of detail about which surprisingly doesn’t slow the gameplay down that much. There can be blasting and explosions going off all over and still the console keeps the game going at a decent speed. That, at least, is impressive.

The plot unfolds slowly. There are some missions, which just seem to be stopgap games to make the experience longer. There are some very intriguing puzzles (especially the sewer puzzle and the Coruscant Imperial Vault puzzle) but on the whole it’s a simple case of finding the hidden switch or door to progress. Fun the first time, boring the thirty-first time.

In conclusion - buy carefully. It’s a good game to play for the initial thrill of running around with an arsenal of weapons and zapping the bad guys. The replay value is, sadly, a little lacking. If you’ve played the PC version on a high spec and are expecting the same detail on the Playstation then forget it. What you’ll get is a lazy attempt to transfer a PC game to a console, with all the niggles and annoying details that takes with it. It saddens the heart when you think that something with such a huge market as computer games is swamped with this kind of stuff simply because of the two words in the title.