Star Wars: Dark Forces (FPS, 1995)
This is undoubtedly the oldest shooter in my entire gaming experience. When I launched Dark Forces, I felt like I had unearthed someone's grave – trying out a twenty-year-old game was a very bold decision.
The presence of real levels (and not simplistic corridors) this time left me with mixed feelings. The "puzzles" in terms of having to figure out how to solve a particular task (or simply determine what to do) in order to progress further – as it was in the distant past – caused pleasant irritation. Overall, it’s an engaging but good element of gameplay.
However, I absolutely didn't enjoy bumping face-first into textures. Not at all. There are tons of buttons and other things on the walls of the levels, which aren't always easy to distinguish from actual switches, so very often I had to press the activate button on everything. The same can be said about the ugly textures themselves; several times I ran back and forth for tens of minutes of real time until I discovered that I just hadn't noticed a passage because the walls were paper-thin, and I simply couldn't see it or something like that.
The level design varied from frankly terrible (sewers) to decent (Arc Hammer); shooting was fun, and the plot was normal (which is what you could expect from such a game). In general, I liked it more than I disliked it.
6/10
Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 (FPS, 1997)
In essence, it's the same as the game above, only better and bigger. The brain work remained, and the texture problem disappeared. My only complaint is that in the first part, the enemies looked more stylish (and the dark troopers were downright creepy), but this is already a problem with the new engine (early 3D) and not so important.
The main changes besides this:
- There’s now the ability to save. This wasn't possible in the first part, and there were no checkpoints either, so it became easier in this regard (casualness level of '97).
- The ability to freely rotate the camera with the mouse: this was a breath of fresh air for me because in the previous game, I found it very annoying to have to raise and lower the camera using the keyboard.
- Lightsaber battles. You can also call this "boss fights" – they are very bad, especially when compared to future games in the series.
Separately, it is worth mentioning the live-action cutscenes. At first, I laughed at this moment; everything seemed too staged and ridiculous to me, but later my attitude changed: I liked it, and I even felt a presence of soul in all of this. And if you think about it even more, what kind of cutscenes could there be without this? Static pictures with moving mouths like in the first part or based on the game engine with ugly triangular models?
Otherwise, I got from this game everything I could have wished for when I started playing it.
7.9/10
Ah yes, one more small addition regarding the characters. Kyle Katarn (the main character of both games) seemed cool to me before, but his partner Jan Ors remained in the shadows in the future game (Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast). Well, how does she appear there? She gets kidnapped, and you save her. That's all, and that’s where her participation in the plot ends. But with the first two games, I developed a very pleasant attitude towards her. Both as a character in general and separately these heartwarming relationships between partners who trust each other with their lives.
A slightly absurd fact: in all three parts, the main character has to save her. I could call this a bad move on the part of the scriptwriters, but then I made another observation: during the game, she herself helped Kyle no less times, or even more, only this was not given any attention because the narrative went from a different angle.
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith (FPS, 1998)
An add-on to the previous game. It would seem that the gameplay hasn't changed much, but at the same time, I finished this game with great reluctance.
In short: there are more battles using a lightsaber (remember, implemented terribly), the level design became much worse, and the plot is not so much non-existent as frankly bad. And what I talked about earlier happened – soulful live-action scenes were replaced by absolutely terrible animations on the game engine.
4/10
Blue Estate (Rail shooter, 2014)
First of all, an unimportant but interesting observation: it turns out that the gameplay of a rail shooter doesn't differ too much from a modern "traditional" shooter. As for the game itself... The gameplay is simple but not annoying and can be used to kill some amount of time without delving deeply into the intricacies of the gameplay or plot; well, the stripper is cool, and there are a couple of funny moments, but I don’t know, what next? This school humor deprives me of all my mercy.
3/10
