Star Wars: Darkish Forces, the primary Star Wars FPS and predecessor to the Jedi Knight sequence, has lastly gotten the ZDoom (opens in new tab) therapy. Builders luciusDXL, winterheart, and gilmorem560 have launched the 1.0 construct of the Power Engine (opens in new tab), an open supply reverse engineering of Darkish Forces (and shortly, its lesser identified cousin, Outlaws) that allows you to play it with fashionable conveniences and at excessive decision.
Launched in 1995, Darkish Forces is firmly of the “Doom Clone” period of first-person shooters. It has that slippery, speedy boomer shooter motion, a terrific weapon choice, and sprawling, mazelike ranges, however it actually innovates in its presentation. Darkish Forces nails the music, sound results, and look of Star Wars whereas additionally telling a reasonably in-depth story about Han Solo-alike Kyle Katarn doing battle with the Imperial Remnant.
Today, Darkish Forces is considerably overshadowed by its sequels within the Jedi Knight sequence, which see Kyle change into a Jedi and interact in what remains to be the best-feeling lightsaber fight anybody’s ever finished in a recreation. Outlaws (opens in new tab), in the meantime, is a western-themed Lucasarts FPS that reuses Darkish Forces’ authentic Jedi Engine. This shared DNA will let the less-fondly remembered Outlaws journey Darkish Forces’ coattails into the twenty first century with solely a bit of additional effort from the Power Engine staff.
In its 1.0 launch, the Power Engine allows you to play Darkish Forces to completion with a extremely customizable collection of quality-of-life options like mouse look and excessive decision assist. The Power Engine additionally now helps GPU rendering versus the unique’s archaic software program renderer, and encompasses a mod loader for previous and future user-made creations. The Power Engine staff has indicated that full Outlaws assist will come at a later date within the challenge’s 2.0 replace.
Set up of each the Power Engine itself and mods is a snap. You will nonetheless want a duplicate of Darkish Forces to begin—it is not freely out there and included with the supply port like Bungie’s Marathon is with Aleph One—and yow will discover it on Steam (opens in new tab) or GOG (opens in new tab) for $6 normally (on the time of writing it is on sale for $2 on GOG!) After downloading the mod, operating the Power Engine executable will robotically detect your set up path for the sport.
You’ll be able to simply drop any user-made maps or tweaks within the “Mods” listing of the Power Engine, and choose which of them to load from an possibility on the Power Engine’s startup display. I grabbed the fan mission Among the many Shadows: Fortress Quadrigon from the DF-21 (opens in new tab) repository of Darkish Forces mods and had it up and operating in seconds. Like with GZDoom (opens in new tab) or Aleph One (opens in new tab), the Power Engine opens up an entire world of free FPS ranges along with letting you extra comfortably and conveniently play an previous basic.