Gamer/Dan

In the 90s, Lucasfilm was pushing Star Wars for a comeback. The films were rereleased ahead of the controversial Special Editions which would follow in 1997 (and of course Phantom Menace was on the horizon). Between these two, a special project was undertaken: to create all the accompanying media and products as if for a film project but without actually making the film. Shadows of the Empire had a novel, a toyline, several comics, and even a soundtrack CD... and of course, a video game. The Nintendo 64 version was out first, followed by a PC port the following year. I have previously experienced all the narrative media associated with this little initiative, but this is my first time with the game (I played both versions), so now I finally have the full story!

There's a gap of one year between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and that's where SotE takes place. Of course, Han Solo spends that whole time as an icy pole, so what shall we do without our dashing rogue archetype? [Well, our *white* dashing rogue anyway... Lando is right there!] Why, just drop in a carbon copy (pardon the pun)! Dash Rendar is the replacement mercenary with a heart of gold working with the Rebels, in his ship that's vaguely similar to the Millennium Falcon. The other media follow different character groups: the movies' heroes feature in the novel, and the original comic arc centres on Boba Fett, while Dash takes up the lead role in the game. He basically goes on various adventures on the periphery of the novel's events, occasionally meeting familiar characters and blasting lots of fools along the way.

The game really does feel like a movie tie-in, not too dissimilar to the Phantom Menace game or other contemporaries. You kind of get whisked from place to place to explore a 3D gauntlet, fight a boss, do a vehicle section, etc. with some brief connecting tissue of cutscenes. In this case, it's not adapting a pre-existing film script but it is portraying an askance perspective on the novel's events, which I get the impression was the "main" piece that the other stuff revolves around. It's the way that it focuses on specific setpieces and swiftly papers over the plot movements that reminds me of licensed games; trying to retell a story through action sequences and doing a lackadaisical job with it.

When playing it I was reminded of Dark Forces, a Star Wars game from the year before in the form of a Doom clone (and not just because the cartridge label is almost identical to that game's box art, with simply a Stormtrooper fronting on you). It seems to revel in its complex 3D environments, whether as a technology showcase or to cater to more of a hardcore gamer crowd. By contrast, SotE is in third person and feels a bit more straightforward and accessible… at least, if you're playing on Easy mode (which I highly recommend). I appreciated that you never lost any progress to mission objectives if you died, and any enemies defeated stayed down. Dash has infinite ammo in his gun (a clone of Han Solo's, much like Dash himself) and later gets a jetpack which is really fun to play around with, when he's not shooting TIE fighters from his ship's turret or driving through Mos Eisley in a speeder bike. The game also begins with the tried and true Hoth battle against Imperial Walkers, which seems tailor-made for video game fodder.

The levels are fun to traverse, and you're rewarded for exploring and finding secret areas with health refills and new ammo types (which just come out of your standard pistol because why not). Also hidden around are challenge points, shiny silver tokens that reward you with extra lives when you complete the level, and cheat codes if you somehow manage to get every single one in the game, by which point you wouldn't need the codes… silly but a typical video game design choice. I just found it fun to find and collect the shiny things, a little dopamine prize for exploring dangerous spots.

The N64 version works quite well, the many functions of Dash Rendar mapped fairly intuitively to the world's worst controller. It doesn't hold up so well technically though; it runs slow, and the large environments are heavily fog-ridden, while I was constantly squinting at the tiny vague blurs that were my enemies. Altering the colour of the fog at least gave some visual variety to the levels, which at their best portray the stark blues and whites of Hoth or vast red canyons, but mainly stick to very grey or brown facilities, space stations, and sewers.

On PC it's a different story. Having access to higher resolutions makes everything crisp and sharp, with much longer draw distances fitting the big levels far better (on startup I ticked the box to render fog, but it just didn't...?). It seemed to run overly fast, perhaps not expecting the speed of modern computing, and the controls were twitchy. Also, nobody had USB gamepads back then, so it uses a plethora of keyboard inputs that were difficult to map to my Steam Deck's buttons (the extra paddles and such helped immensely, but required some setup).

Another benefit of the PC version is full CG FMV cutscenes. The 2D art on N64 is quite nice, but the full animation sets the scenes better, and voice acting helps even though the characters are paper-thin. I recognised Star Wars spinoff veteran Tom Kane as Dash's droid companion Leebo, although here he's a mere exposition machine and not the wisecracking comedian droid he was in his brief appearances in the novel. Dash himself I feel never really establishes himself as a charismatic lead or an effective replacement for the inimitable Harrison Ford, even on PC; the most distinctive thing about him is his shoulder pads.

Playing on Easy in the N64 version made for a nice, breezy time through the story. You get to ride a train, fight IG-88 and some other droid bosses, shoot down Boba Fett who immediately is fine and gets away because he has to be in other parts of the story, and fly around a surprisingly complicated sewer with a jetpack. It's fun! At the end you blow up Prince Xizor's space station (he's the antagonist, sort of, but you only see him in a couple of cutscenes because all his important stuff happens in the novel) and Dash is presumed dead. But what really happened? Play on Medium difficulty to find out!

This cop-out ending prompted me to play the PC version to compare, although with its twitchiness and the brutal difficulty of (checks notes) Medium, the second of four settings, I only got up to level 2 before repeatedly getting game over to an AT-ST boss at the very end of the stage. At my wit's end, I found some Steam guides and discussions that describe how to open your save file in a hex editor and alter your life count. With a stout 256 lives at my disposal (which the game reduced to 99 in the next stage) I did manage to brute force my way through, losing tens of lives per stage to remarkably accurate Stormtroopers, gravity, alien monsters, and the like. By the end I was down to the single digits, so it was a close thing! But you can redo the editing process at any point to top up your starting count. Highly recommended.