Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Review (PC)
Summary: Even with a new coat of paint, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter wasn't a particularly amazing game to begin with, with odd controls and a woefully underutilised and fiddly bounty-hunting system that really should have been its USP.
2.5
More Bounty choccy-bar than bounty hunter.
In the 2000s, Star Wars games were on what many would consider an all-time high. We had genre-defining FPS games in Republic Commando and the original Star Wars Battlefront series, critically-acclaimed RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic, even retellings of the movies in LEGO format. Some of these games have since received re-releases on modern platforms – for better and worse, as my review of the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection shows. This July saw the perhaps lesser-known Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, the subject of this review, getting a turn in the remastering chair courtesy of Aspyr Media. A third-person action game taking place between the events of Star Wars Episodes I and II, Bounty Hunter provides a backstory for the, well, bounty hunter Jango Fett, who is tasked with wiping out the Bando Gora criminal gang. It actually technically predates a lot of the aforementioned Star Wars tie-ins, being originally released for PS2 and GameCube in 2002, to mixed reviews – and having played the remaster I can sort of see why.
Death from above.
Starting with the good, I’m rather impressed with how the game now runs on modern PCs. The game as a whole seems to have been updated nicely under the hood, with proper graphics options, widescreen support and keyboard-and-mouse controls. While Steam recommends using a controller for this game, I genuinely preferred these KBM controls; they feel quite nice, if occasionally a little wobbly. The graphics and area designs look pretty good as well, even for a game from 2002. That having been said, the controls are unfortunately not rebindable, which is a pity to see. Equally so is the fact that Aspyr seemingly didn’t think to implement a weapon wheel or keyboard weapon switching. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, except the game has a LOT of weapons which you thus have to rotate through one at a time, while just trying to remember where everything is. It makes it rather hard to swap to what you need in the midst of a firefight, especially considering that you need to do so with some frequency to engage with the bounty hunting system.
Oh, boy, the bounty hunting system.
I mean, in a game called Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, it does make sense to be able to hunt secondary bounties alongside the story, so credit to the original developers at LucasArts for that much. It’s just that the way it’s implemented feels so slapdash that it makes me wonder why they bothered. The way the system works is that you can scan enemies to determine if they have a bounty on their heads, and if you do, you can either bring them in or take them out, earning yourself some credits in the process. To do this though, you need to manually switch to your scan visor, hover over an enemy, and then if they are marked as a bounty target, either kill them or coil ’em up with your whipcord to bring them in alive, then walk up to them and interact with them to claim the bounty.
Pew! Pew pew!
It doesn’t sound too bad in theory… except that the bounty targets could be literally any enemy you come across. They’re genuinely indistinguishable from the regular mooks you’re fighting, there’s no distinguishing marks or identifiers at all, and they can even appear amidst crowds of regular enemies, all of whom are trying to kill you at that very moment. You also have to scan and mark them before killing them, because the game doesn’t let you scan anyone who’s already dead. As such, it’s very easy to kill a bounty target entirely by accident but neither know it or be able to claim their bounty if they are. The logical conclusion of this is that if you actually want to engage with the bounty hunting system at all, you have to scan literally every enemy you encounter before you start shooting. As you can imagine, this is a pain in the be-hind. What’s ironic as well is that the Credits you get from hunting secondary bounties can only be used to unlock concept art. That’s right. In a game about a bounty hunter, the actual bounty hunting only gets you tiny unlockable extras. Go figure.
#You’re flying without wings…#
So if you ignore the bounty hunting side of things, what’s the gameplay like? Well, it’s alright is all I can say. Played from a third-person perspective, you play as Jango Fett as he blasts his way through the galaxy on the hunt for the Bando Gora and their leader, Komari Vosa. Fett is equipped with his iconic jetpack, blasters and flamethrower as well as the toxic saberdarts he used in Episode II and his good ol’ fists, with which to beat up scruffy-looking nerf herders wherever he finds himself. And they all feel… meh, to be honest. The blasters and flamethrower feel rather stiff and unsatisfying, even when bouncing around using Fett’s jetpack and acrobatic abilities, which in themselves are actually quite fun to use. There’s also some minor Prince of Persia-esque platforming to do, which is also nothing to write home about, so all in all I found it all pretty unremarkable.
FINAL THOUGHTS
“Pretty unremarkable” is probably the best word I could come up with for Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, remastered or not. I’m inclined to agree with the middling critical reception the game got at launch – the gunplay feels a bit damp and, in a game not only about a bounty hunter but literally named Bounty Hunter, the actual bounty hunting is woefully underutilised and poorly implemented. That said, it is from 2002, so maybe if you have nostalgia for that era, or for this particular game, you might be able to cut it a bit more slack than I did.
About the Author
Edward Gosling Ed has been playing games since he was in primary school, and now has a Steam library of over 2000 games, only a fraction of which he has actually played!
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