Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
As Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance struggle to defeat Darth Vader and the Empire, a new threat arises. Dark Prince Xizor aspires to take Darth Vader's place at the Emperor's side. As Dash Rendar, it's up to you to protect Luke and help the Alliance. May the Force be with you!
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- Released
- 1996
- Developer
- Lucasfilm Games
- Platforms
- 1 systems
- Critics
- Not scored
- Steam Deck
- playable
- Download
- 0.32 GB
What is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire?
As Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance struggle to defeat Darth Vader and the Empire, a new threat arises. Dark Prince Xizor aspires to take Darth Vader's place at the Emperor's side. As Dash Rendar, it's up to you to protect Luke and help the Alliance. May the Force be with you!
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 3 December 1996 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Lucasfilm Games |
| Publisher | Nintendo |
| Platforms | Nintendo 64 |
| Genres | action game |
| Languages | 1 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q55263, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
None declared
Hearing
None declared
Input
- Partial Controller Support
Difficulty
None declared
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | partial support |
| Cloud saves | No |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Single-player only |
| In-game purchases | No |
| Steam Deck | playable |
| Download size | 0.32 GB |
| Add-on content | None listed |
| Age gate | None |
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire worth it?
74% of 871 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Mostly Positive. It costs $5.99 on Steam.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire? How long to beat it
Total play time for Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is about 12.4 hours to do everything, and around 5 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 5h | 68 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 6.9h | 34 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 12.4h | 6 |
At its current price of $5.99, beating the main story works out to about $1.20 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire system requirements
The minimum requirements from Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire's Steam page. These are what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings.
| Memory | 1 GB RAM (other games at this level) |
|---|---|
| Processor | 1.8 GHz Processor |
| Graphics | DirectX 9.0c Compatible Video Card w/ 256 MB RAM · runs on a low-end GPU |
| Storage | 0.32 GB (more games this size) |
Where Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire sits on the grid
Compare the whole catalogueStar Wars: Shadows of the Empire plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- Nintendo
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
These are estimates, not reported figures. Lucasfilm Games has not published unit sales for Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 871 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $5.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Lucasfilm Games publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $5.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
What readers say about Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 183 most recent negative Steam reviews of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Performance and stutter12 of 183 (7%)
Just getting the game to run requires some kind of old video card emulator and then you have to cap the FPS because it wants to run at 2000.
Steam review, 17 December 2017 · 4 hours played · 32 readers marked it helpfulThis will lead to a lot of situations where your character will "stutter" while moving, leading to many frustrating deaths, mostly due to falling.
Steam review, 4 May 2017 · 5 hours played · 28 readers marked it helpful - Controller and input7 of 183 (4%)
There are some guides here and elsewhere as to fixing some of the issues, mostly regarding the framerate and controller issues.
Steam review, 4 April 2020 · 0 hours played · 9 readers marked it helpfulThe keybinding screen seems totally broken.
Steam review, 21 May 2023 · 1 hours played · 8 readers marked it helpful - Crashes and freezes6 of 183 (3%)
I'm lead to believe that the developers took a ROM, slapped the VERY BARE minimum amount of effort needed to keep the game from crashing at runtime, and released this into the wild.
Steam review, 18 May 2017 · 1 hours played · 11 readers marked it helpfulNo its not because game would be crashing or bugging really, but because it cant handle itself in otherways, like how you can go flying off platforms because game thinks you are falling even when u stand still and fly you over the edge Story: 2/10.
Steam review, 6 June 2020 · 10 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful
A further 17 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
24 games overlap with Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are STAR WARS Battlefront (Classic, 2004), STAR WARS Battlefront II (Classic, 2005) and Mass Effect 2 (2010 Edition).
Part of the Star Wars series
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is one of 24 Star Wars games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire head to head
See Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire comparisons: vs Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, vs Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, vs Star Wars: Battlefront II, vs Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, vs STAR WARS Republic Commando, vs STAR WARS Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy, vs STAR WARS - The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition, vs STAR WARS Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, vs Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, vs Star Wars: The Old Republic, vs Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, vs STAR WARS: Squadrons, vs STAR WARS Battlefront, vs Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, vs Star Wars Outlaws, vs STAR WARS: Galactic Racer™
Common questions about Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
What platforms is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on?
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is available on Nintendo 64. It first released in 1996.
How much does Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire cost?
$5.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire?
74% of 871 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Mostly Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
Does Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire as playable on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.
How big is the Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire download?
0.32 GB on PC, from the storage requirement on its Steam listing. Console versions differ.
Who made Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire?
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was developed by Lucasfilm Games and published by Nintendo.
Is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire worth it in 2026?
74% of 871 Steam reviews are positive (Mostly Positive), and it is $5.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on sale?
Not at the moment. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is at its $5.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
What are the system requirements for Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire?
At minimum, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire needs 1 GB RAM, a 1.8 GHz Processor, a DirectX 9.0c Compatible Video Card w/ 256 MB RAM, 0.32 GB of storage, from its Steam listing. That is what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings. Check it against your own PC on the can-I-run page.
How long does it take to beat Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire?
about 5 hours for the main story, 6.9 hours with the main extras, 12.4 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.