Top 5 Star Wars games of all time

In late January, some of the long-missing Star Wars classics of the LucasArts library made a triumphant debut on GOG. For the first time, TIE Fighter and X-Wing and Rogue Squadron and more were available as digital downloads. Some of them are the best Star Wars games ever made. A few of them are some of the best games ever, period.

1. Dark Forces

   

   I spent most of the ‘90s playing Doom. When Quake arrived, I continued to play Doom. When Unreal Tournament became the new LAN standard, I was still making levels for Doom (at home, by myself). I mention this because Dark Forces, LucasArts’ 1995 foray into the first-person shooter genre, was the only other shooter I really loved, and I hadn’t even seen the Star Wars films.

2. Battlefront 2

   

   Battlefront 2 is a bit of a mess. But what a joyous, silly, damn fun mess of a game it was. Where most Star Wars games cast you as a Jedi or a heroic pilot, Battlefront and Battlefront 2 finally had the good sense to make you just another trooper on the ground, a lowly Stormtrooper or rebel soldier with a good old fashioned blaster at your side. There’s something sublime about that: Battlefront is the rare chance to feel like you’re playing inside the Star Wars universe, rather than carving out a new destiny.

3. Star Wars Galaxies

   

   Star Wars Galaxies should have been one of the most important MMOs ever made. It had the ambition and the credentials for it—one of Ultima Online's lead designers creating a fully-3D persistent world where everything was driven by players. A ground-to-space simulation of the Star Wars universe with player houses, player cities, player ships, player factions. It's the dream that currently powers Star Citizen, and it almost saw the light of day a decade ago. I'm still a little heartbroken that it didn't. SWG sits near the top of the list of my personal games of all time, and I'm still angry about the way it all panned out.

4. Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast



Jedi Knight 2's lightsaber mechanics are important not only to the history of Star Wars games, but to multiplayer gaming on the PC in general. This was the game that established a passionate, competitive community dedicated to the concept of the one-on-one melee duel. Jedi Academy expanded and improved many of these ideas, but Jedi Outcast was there first. Without it, gaming would be much poorer—Blade Symphony wouldn’t exist, for one thing.

5. Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

   

   Jedi Academy grants you far more freedom than its predecessors. There's a bit of BioWare to the way you pick between different identities for your character at the start, the way you move through the campaign by choosing missions from a list of options, the way your alignment to the light or dark sides hangs off a mixture of large and small decisions.