Introduction

Lets Play: Dark Forces

So here we are, 3 games later, finally we have returned to where it all began. My first LP was of Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, the much more played of the "Dark forces" series, and the pre-curser to the fantastic "Jedi Knight" series. However That is not where the story actually began. The story begins with Kyle Katarn before he becomes a Jedi and deals with the whole Valley incidents. Here he is just a mercenary for hire, looking to make a quick credit or two.

Unlike with the Outcast and Academy threads, Stabbey_the_Clown will not be joining me and doing a playthrough. This is mostly because the game simply does not have enough variations in the levels to make two seperate playthroughs of each level worth having in the LP.

Dark Forces was released way back in 1995 and was one of the early First Person Shooters along with Doom. It was created with the Jedi Engine developed in house by Lucas Arts and like all good games of the time contained only single player, was released on CD for the DOS operating system.

I will talk about this more in the videos but I will be comparing this game to Doom and Doom 2 for the first few levels purely because those games were so influential and Dark Forces was a contemporary of those. I'll try to be as objective as possible but I have never really loved Doom, whilst this game is one of my favourite, along with the rest of the series.

I won't tell you too much about Kyle's background at this point, mostly because it is left deliberately ambiguous as they had no idea where they were going when they made this game, and also because he only becomes really fleshed out in the next two games. However I will tell you that he is a former Imperial officer who has left them to become a mercenary, as it says in the Intro Video he now has a partial alliance with the rebels.

However In the future his father will be killed and he will be attacked leading him to the discovery of the Valley of the Jedi and allowing him the power of the force to become a Jedi Knight. He will then abandon the force after a slight fall, and become a straight mercenary for hire. However after an unfortunate "accident" he will return to the Valley to fight a new Dark Jedi as an Outcast. When this Dark Jedi's apprentice arrives, and game developers decide they need to milk a franchise more, along with ghosts of the past it's up to Kyle's Student "Jaden Korr" to defeat this new threat under Kyle's expert tuition, this tells the story of the Jedi Academy.

The Let's Play Archive

Dark Forces

by Next Tangent

Introduction

Table of Contents