My brain always likes to tell me that Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is worse than it is. Despite its overcompensatory warnings, I find myself returning to it occasionally, because it’s a fine representation of the optimistic early days of the N64. It’s when Nintendo was telling everyone that their console was like a top-of-the-line graphics processing computer without adding that they kneecapped it with its cartridges.

Shadows of the Empire fit in extremely well with their marketing; it was a huge boon. The game itself was part of a big marketing push by Lucasfilm, as they tried to dial the excitement around Star Wars back up in advance of the prequel trilogy. Shadows of the Empire was, essentially, a big blockbuster movie event without the blockbuster. It was all the toys, the comics, the novelizations, the licensed tie-ins, but nothing to tie them to. I’ve said before that marketing is the most powerful force on Earth, and here’s proof: marketing without the product.

So, a big push for relevance landing alongside a console vying for the same. Quite the force.

A MARKETING DEPARTMENT FAR, FAR AWAY

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire represents a chapter that takes place between Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Han Solo is still on ice, leaving the rest of the principal cast searching for him. Weirdly, Shadows begins with the Battle of Hoth, which, if you recall, is part of the first act of The Empire Strikes Back.

I try to think about how the game gets from there to the post-credits, and I’m pretty sure it just jumps from Hoth to the search for Han.

You play as Dash Rendar, who looks and sounds like a self-insert fanfiction stand-in for Han Solo. He’s a bit more grizzled, because that’s where the standard of handsome had progressed to since the ‘80s. However, he’s still the same sort of smarmy, morally-flexible smuggler dude. Luke and company could have probably just used him as a Han replacement in their social circle and saved themselves a lot of trouble while losing nothing. Like when Dick Sargent replaced Dick York on Bewitched.

WHAT AN INCREDIBLE SMELL YOU’VE DISCOVERED

Shadows of the Empire is a lot of things. Primarily, it’s an N64 game made when nobody knew what they were doing. The sky seemed to be the limit until it crashed into the bedrock of reality. Like many of the early “Dream Team” developers, LucasArts didn’t actually have an N64 dev kit, they had a Silicon Graphics Onyx. Apparently, this was close enough, because Shadows of the Empire doesn’t have a lot of the hallmark sacrifices other games had to make.

However, they threw everything at the wall. The opening mission has you piloting a Snowspeeder in the Battle of Hoth. The real meat of the game is a first/third-person shooter, which first gets demonstrated as Dash tries to find where he parked in Echo Base. Afterwards, he shoots TIE Fighters while his best Broid pilots through an asteroid field, which I’m pretty sure the Millennium Falcon only did in Empire Strikes Back because its hyperdrive was busted. But, again, this is a marketing game. Gotta harken back to what got people hard in the movie. Later, you ride a speederbike across Tatooine. The whole thing concludes with a big space battle.

Even in the main shooter parts, there’s a lot of variety. The level on Ord Mantell has you jumping between train cars. It’s kind of janky, but it’s also pretty incredible. It’s one long continuous level with huge open spaces, which is extremely impressive on the hardware. The train snakes through trash canyons, past massive set pieces that reference other parts of the Star Wars universe, while gradually sliding obstacles your way. I don’t think a developer who knew what they were doing on the N64 would even attempt it, but there it is.

Later, you jetpack across canyon platforms. And somehow, the platforming feels polished for the most part.

There’s a standard sci-fi interior level, a fucking sewer stage, another sci-fi-ish stage. Then that’s it. It’s, like, five hours long on a generous estimate. Apparently, it was going to be 19 stages, and that got paired down to 10 by the time it was released.

NOT A LIGHTSABER IN SIGHT

I recall Shadows of the Empire being a difficult game, but I didn’t have trouble this time around on Medium difficulty. That might be because this is not my first walk around the block, but the last time I played it had to have been more than a decade ago. Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle.

You have a finite number of lives, but you get additional ones by picking up “challenge tokens,” as well as just straight-up lives. It gives incentives to probe the margins. The lives get stockpiled, and if you feel like you dropped too many on a stage, you can replay the chapter to try and save more for the next level.

But I think part of my success comes from the fact that I’m just inoculated against early-3D jank. Someone who is used to modern games might be thrown by the clumsiness of the controls. It uses strict auto-aim, which was pretty common on consoles at the time, but you can manually aim by holding the Z button. Jumping is affected really strangely by inertia, which can make the train level difficult if you don’t listen to Zeebo when he tells you not to jump while the train is turning.

It’s weird that the default view seems to be third-person, because most of the levels include a bunch of tight corridors. I actually found that even platforming was easier with first-person, which seems counter-intuitive. The only time I think I used the third-person view was when zipping around on the jetpack, and that was probably more because I felt bad for not giving the camera system a fair turn.

There’s also a “cinematic” camera setting, which locks the view in fixed locations. I don’t know why, because that’s absolutely useless in a game like this. I guess it’s so you can take a moment to be impressed by the graphics.

ESCAPE FROM ECHO BASE

Shadows of the Empire is ambitious in some ways, but not in others. There aren’t very many enemies and the boss fights suck. The story is mainly told in 2D cutscenes (3D CG in the PC version), but they’re well drawn and composed to make them interesting. A lot is cut out to make the whole game flow properly, but that, in itself, is well executed.

The levels that aren’t just ground shooting work better than they should. For a game that isn’t centred around vehicular combat, the snowspeeder level works well, and the final space battle feels a lot grander than even a lot of levels featured in 1998’s Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.

The on-foot levels aren’t anything special. The level design is basic, but well put together. There’s enough set dressing to make it recognizably Star Wars. The AI isn’t much more advanced than “shoot at player.” Sometimes, they’ll shoot you from across long distances at a point when they’re little more than tiny smudges on the screen. Typically, though, the auto-aim will know where they are, and if not, you can hold the Z-Button to point more in their direction, and that usually gets your lasers to them.

SINS OF A SHADOWED EMPIRE

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire just works better than it reasonably should. They tried to do a lot, and it somehow all fit together. The worst part about it is that it is very much a product of its time. It’s blurry, the camera system is weird, the controls still have a clumsy feel to them, and the story is rushed through.

Actually, no, the worst thing I can say about Shadows of the Empire, is that it bolstered the license enough to make way for the prequel trilogy, which is a sin I have a hard time forgiving. At least Shadows feels like old Star Wars than the polluted waters that came after Phantom Menace.

I don’t really regret going back to Shadows of the Empire for another lap. I don’t know why I have somehow internalized that it’s not very good, but that’s not the case. It’s competent, with a sense of grandeur that you don’t get from some of the bottom-tier Star Wars titles of the era. On the other hand, it’s the worst Star Wars game on the N64, but with Rogue Squadron, (pod) Racer, and Battle for Naboo being the other three titles, that’s hardly an insult.

7/10

This review was conducted on an N64 using a cartridge copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.