Nightdive hits it out of the park once again! The last time I beat this game, I had just come home from getting my wisdom teeth pulled and I was all doped up with a mouthful of bloody cotton. It was nice to get the chance to beat it again in full command of my faculties.

I was pretty impressed this time around at how well the game holds up. It's impossible not to compare it to Doom, and in that regard I think it makes an admirable showing. The enemy and weapon variety and design are pretty weak. Bad guys are basically all hitscanners with various levels of health, and several of the weapons don't really have a very well defined role. The thermal detonators and land mines in particular seem undercooked to the point of being missed opportunities.

Where the game really shines is in the level design. Here it is enormously helped by the setting and lore. The levels aren't naturalistic, but Star Wars movie sets themselves are rarely naturalistic, opting instead for a strong, unifying aesthetic that's instantly recognizable. It's that aesthetic that the game nails so well and made it feel like a genuinely authentic Star Wars experience.

Dark Forces came out at a really awkward time in the franchise's history. The Extended Universe existed, and there was a fanbase, but LucasArts wasn't really putting the series to work in any meaningful way. I liked the movies and had a bunch of the guys, but I was the only one I knew who was into it at all; the kids at my school thought of it as "old." It was far from a given that a AAA Doom clone in the Star Wars universe would sell, much less start a whole spin-off franchise. My memory is that this was the first 3-D Star Wars experience, and it delivered on that in spades. The authentic sound effects, extremely detailed sprites and beautiful interiors made it more immersive than anything I had seen from this franchise before.

The technical improvements over Doom are very impressive and do a lot to really open up the maps. Moving walls, conveyer belts, rooms over rooms and a handful of true 3-D objects really expand the desingers' toolsets and make for a lot of really great little surprises and help keep things fresh. This time around I did notice a bit more jank than I remember the first time; in particular a few instances of really badly misaligned textures that I thought were pretty disappointing in what was otherwise such a polished experience.

I'm mostly reviewing the original game here because as always Nightdive just nailed the remaster. The uprezzed (?) textures look great, controller play feels fantastic, the new look for the cutscenes is spot on, and the extras are all really interesting. Geezers like myself (and anyone interested in games preservation really) truly are blessed to have these guys doing such diligent, skillful work keeping these old classics alive, and I can't wait to see what they have coming next.

I really liked the art of this one and the general outlandishness of the designs. Like you can play as a knife-wielding mummy in trousers or a baby piloting a mech suit. All while moving through colorful environments of escalating wackiness. And it has vehicles which I always like in games like this, even if these are pretty clunky.

I wish there was a super power, though; it’s just attack, grab and jump which while they have nice animations and a few interesting combos, just don’t offer enough variety for my taste. There are weapons, but those all feel pretty overpowered and are balanced around only lasting a few seconds. The core combat just felt simplistic compared to other beat-em-ups I’ve played. It really makes me appreciate the more expressive move sets of the newer ones like Shredder’s Revenge.

Fortunately it’s short, and has infinite continues in the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up bundle, which was enough motivation to see it through to the end in one sitting. Overall not particularly interesting combat-wise but a goofy and eye catching diversion.

To be fair, I did not play this very long. I was expecting it to be extremely corporate and predatory, which it is. What I did not expect was for it to be very poorly made, which it also is. It crashed within the first 30 minutes. Character models are unreadable, homogenous blobs. Action animations look incredibly stiff and artificial. Environments are drab gray smears. The cutscenes... oh my god the cutscenes are SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. The characters are so torpid they make Geralt of Riviera look like Sonic the Hedgehog. It's like they inserted a 5 second pause before every line to give it dramatic weight. The actual result is that this action game simply has no energy; the whole thing seems like it's on the verge of a heroin overdose. Combine that with all the on-screen movement consisting of these blobby characters shuffling randomly back and forth, and the writing and voice acting being bottom of the barrel bad, and this whole package looks incredibly amateurish.

Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.

I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.