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) remedy. Builders luciusDXL, winterheart, and gilorem560 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 permits you to play it with trendy 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, an excellent weapon choice, and sprawling, mazelike ranges, nevertheless it actually innovates in its presentation. Darkish Forces nails the music, sound results, and look of Star Wars whereas additionally telling a fairly in-depth story about Han Solo-alike Kyle Katarn doing battle with the Imperial Remnant.
Lately, Darkish Forces is considerably overshadowed by its sequels within the Jedi Knight sequence, which see Kyle develop into a Jedi and have interaction in what remains to be the best-feeling lightsaber fight anybody’s ever completed in a sport. Outlaws (opens in new tab), in the meantime, is a western-themed Lucasarts FPS that reuses Darkish Forces’ unique Jedi Engine. This shared DNA will let the less-fondly remembered Outlaws trip Darkish Forces’ coattails into the twenty first century with solely a bit of additional effort from the Power Engine group.
In its 1.0 launch, the Power Engine allows you to play Darkish Forces to completion with a extremely customizable number 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 incorporates a mod loader for previous and future user-made creations. The Power Engine group has indicated that full Outlaws assist will come at a later date within the mission’s 2.0 replace.
Set up of each the Power Engine itself and mods is a snap. You may nonetheless want a replica of Darkish Forces to begin—it is not freely accessible and included with the supply port like Bungie’s Marathon is with Aleph One—and you could find 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, working the Power Engine executable will robotically detect your set up path for the sport.
You possibly can 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 choice on the Power Engine’s startup display screen. 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 working 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 traditional.
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