The Force Engine is a three-year project from fans that is finally ready for release, allowing players to fire up LucasArts classic Dark Forces with several quality-of-life and performance features for modern PC hardware. High resolution support, ultrawide, GPU rendering with perspective correct presentation, mouse and keyboard support, controller support, and even a new save system.

Star Wars: Dark Forces first released in 1995 for MS-DOS, where at the time it was seen as another Doom clone except this time - Star Wars. And yeah, the premise alone was brilliant, and thankfully the game too was a great showcase for the emerging first-person shooter genre. Its Jedi Engine is dated and being limited to a software renderer the 300x200 resolution is a far cry from the 1080p, 1440p, and 4K displays of today. And with that here's a look at the remastered Dark Forces.

The Force Engine (TFE)

Full Dark Forces support, including mods. Outlaws support is coming in version 2.0.

Mod Loader - simply place your mods in the Mods/ directory as zip files or directories.

High Resolution and Widescreen support - when using 320x200 you get the original software renderer. TFE also includes a floating-point software renderer which supports widescreen, including ultrawide, and much higher resolutions.
GPU Renderer with perspective correct pitch - play at much higher resolutions with improved performance.

Extended Limits - TFE, by default, will support much higher limits than the original game which removes most of the HOM (Hall of Mirrors) issues in advanced mods.

Full input binding, mouse sensitivity adjustment, and controller support. Note, however, that menus currently require the mouse.

Optional Quality of Life improvements, such as full mouselook, aiming reticle, improved Boba Fett AI, autorun, and more.

A new save system that works seamlessly with the existing checkpoint and lives system. You can ignore it entirely, use it just as an exit save so you don’t have to play long user levels in one sitting, or full save and load with quicksaves like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D.

Optional and quality of life features, even mouselook, can be disabled if you want the original experience. Play in 320x200, turn the mouse mode (Input menu) to Menus only or horizontal, and enable the Classic (software) renderer - and it will look and play just like DOS, but with a higher framerate and without needing to adjust cycles in DosBox.

This makes the arrival of The Force Engine very cool, because it also supports mods and Version 2 is set to add support for LucasArts' western FPS - Outlaws. You'll need a copy of Dark Forces to be able to run it in the new engine, so thankfully the game is still available via GOG and Steam. For full details on the mod, documentation, and download links - head to The Force Engine page on GitHub.