Star Wars video games have been considered at the forefront of the industry for decades, and “Doom clone” Dark Forces was one of the first first-person shooters ever made. Despite the “Doom clone” label that would have a less-than-favorable implication today, Dark Forces introduced a variety of mechanics and functionality absent from the original Doom that modern gamers could likely not fathom to be without, notably the ability to move on a vertical axis, crouch, and jump. However, built using the Jedi Engine Dark Forces released in 1995 and remains difficult to play using modern hardware due to the lack of any official remaster or remake. An endeavor titled The Force Engine seeks to rectify this and has been in development for the past three years.
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Documentation for The Force Engine, designed to “reverse engineer and rebuild the Jedi Engine for modern systems,” details that the goal is for the project to “act as a viable replacement for DosBox,” the current emulator used by players which “only supports resolutions up to 320x200.” The Force Engine “replaces the executable, not the game,” meaning that a copy of Dark Forces will be required for those interested. Although many attempts to update Dark Forces have been showcased, The Force Engine is by far the most promising to date.
The glory days of Dark Forces, Knights of the Old Republic, and Republic Commando ironically began to fade at a time of freshly instilled hope for the franchise when new IP owner Disney signed an exclusive contract with Electronic Arts. A promising third-person action game Star Wars: 1313 was canceled, and fans would have to wait years before Star Wars: Battlefront. EA took years to find its stride with the sequel, which was lambasted for egregious monetization at launch, and fans believe Battlefront 2 was abandoned after so much had been done to salvage its reputation.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was Respawn Entertainment’s diamond in the rough, and a sequel titled Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is due to release on March 17 next year. The original offered a competent and fun action adventure that happened to be one of the best Star Wars games released in nearly a decade. Now that EA’s exclusivity period has come to a close, and with several Star Wars projects in the works, it is a good time to be a fan of the galaxy far, far away.
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Source: GameSpot, The Force Engine
