A faithful remaster that still holds up, J.J. explains why Star Wars: Bounty Hunter‘s newest version is a good fit for Force fans.
I have to start this review by going all the way back, back, back to the era of the PS2 and the GameCube when Star Wars: Bounty Hunter initially came out. It’s a third-person action game that takes place before Attack of the Clones and gives us the backstory of Jango and his adventures leading up to him being chosen for the clone program. For Star Wars fans especially the game even gives us in-universe origins of specific lore, like where the Slave One ship came from.
This is a weird game from an era when IP-based games were in a bad place. Since the NES, IP games have just always been in a weird money-grabby spot, where for every 15 that released we maybe got one that was decent. The idea was just to get things out on the market while the name and brand were hot, and Star Wars was no different. There were a lot of really good Star Wars games, and there were a lot of horseshit Star Wars games. (Let’s all try and forget that Masters of Teräs Käsi ever existed.)
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter could have been another one of those IP grabs, but it wasn’t. It pushed through, focusing on third person action with Star Wars characters and Star Wars settings and Star Wars lore. Even back in the day this was a very solid game. Heck, this is a top contender for one of our SideQuesting “Perfect Seven” panels at PAX, to be honest. It succeeded in an era where being good was rare and being Star Wars was fine.
This latest edition is the remastered version handled by Aspyr. Aspyr has been remastering pretty much all of the old Star Wars games, including both Knights of the Old Republic games and The Force Unleashed for the Switch, and even a Battlefront collection, all with pretty good levels of success.
And now we’ve got this. Bounty Hunter is a third-person shooter. It’s just a third-person shooter, except that we can do bounties. We have tools like a helmet scanner that we can use on the characters we run across to see if there’s bounty on their heads. We have what’s essentially a space bolo, which lets us then tie them up so that we can claim the bounty. But things don’t always go well, and a simple bounty can lead to an intense firefight. It’s simple in premise and clean in execution, working well back then and holing up today. And there’s stuff that goes with all of that from a completionist level. It’s not necessary in a lot of cases to complete the story but will pad out the missions if we want to.
With this remaster everything looks better, especially on modern systems. It still looks like the GameCube code, which is the right call since that version played way better in terms of performance and visuals and writing. However the dev team took the time to fix a lot of issues and even add some new aspects. For instance we have a flashlight now, which is needed for some of the really dark areas in the game. I’m old enough to remember that back in the day running games under 480i, through dark spaces, we just couldn’t see. We had to adjust the contrast on our TV if we wanted to see. So having a flashlight may seem like a weird addition but it goes really far in improving our experience.
There’s bump-mapping to give depth, but for the most part it just looks like high res versions of the assets from the GameCube game. I almost wish that I received the code for the PlayStation 5 version because of the added DualSense support to the game which does not come across on the Steam version that I’m playing, barring an update for the latest Dual Sense compatibility.
There is the addition of one very neat thing. There was an Easter egg in the original game, so to speak, where it hinted that if you caught all the bounties you would unlock Boba Fett, which was not true. Boba Fett was not an unlockable character in the original. But in this game, if you complete it, you DO unlock a skin so that you can play through the game again as Boba Fett. I mean, you’re still Jango, you’re just wearing the Boba Fett armor. But that’s neat.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunters was always good. This latest remaster is a great way to experience it again, and really the best way for a fan to experience it for the first time. I really like it. I’ve always liked this game, so it’s nice that it just gets a second shot at making it completely accessible.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live! for August 7, 2024. Images and video courtesy Aspyr.
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