Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster review

What is it? A remaster of the iconic 1995 LucasArts FPS, Star Wars: Dark Forces.
Expect to pay: TBA
Developer: Nightdive Studios, LucasArts
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Reviewed on: Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti, 32GB RAM (DDR4), AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, ASRock B450M Pro4
Multiplayer? No
Steam Deck? Yes
Link: Steam

A long time ago, in a PC gaming age that now feels far, far away… there was the mid-1990's rush of Doom clones. And, truth be told, most of them were pretty poor imitations that brought nothing new to the genre. But, where these derivative FPSes failed, LucasArts' 1995 Star Wars: Dark Forces succeeded, and not just in terms of its own quality, but also in terms of how it evolved the FPS genre in a large number of ways. This was a truly pioneering game.

So it's been puzzling that a game which, as we've chronicled before, largely introduced cinematic narrative storytelling to FPS games, established a new standard for realistic level design theory, and gave us graphics and audio that outstripped what Doom delivered comfortably, has never been officially remastered. Enter Nightdive Studios.

For those who have missed Nightdive's recent activities, they're the talented team behind the high-scoring System Shock remake, as well as a wide range of remasters of classic games including Quake 2, Turok 3, and Blade Runner, all of which have been well received. I think it's fair to say that Nightdive is the foremost remastering studio in business today.

And that's great news here, as the quick take away from this Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster review is that this is a great remaster, with the classic LucasArts game not only brought back to modern systems, but brought back with many enhancements and extras that make it the definitive version to play.

Thanks to Nightdive's KEX Engine, which for this remaster has been fed the game's original Jedi Engine code, the remaster offers vast improvements to resolution and framerate, with up to 4K 120fps supported. Widescreen and ultra-widescreen aspect