So I Tried... Star Wars - Dark Forces

In each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never tried before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time I went for the 1995 classic Star Wars: Dark Forces.

What I thought it was

I had no idea what to expect from this game that is legitimately - and sorry to make some of you feel old - older than I am, except that is the precursor to the Jedi Knight games. I actually got this as a Christmas present from a fellow writer, and since it was legitimately 71MB I installed it right away and gave it a go.

What it actually is

It’s a first person shooter from the nineties! It boots up with a fantastic 8bit version of the Star Wars theme, complete with title crawl, and then you’re playing as Kyle Katarn shooting your way through an Empire base to retrieve the Death Star plans. Since this is a game that came out before the wide adoption of Windows, the game installs with DOSbox and I did use a few community guides to fix the controls and make it play fullscreen but this didn’t take very long and I’m very glad I did it.

Will I keep playing?

I was a super impressed with how well this game has stood up in time: the graphics may be dated but the gameplay with modernised controls is super fun and the soundtrack is superb. I think you can expect a Game Over pretty soon!