Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Review – Review
Listen, the old EU wasn’t all bangers.
Note: This review is being posted later than the original video version due to a backend site issue at original embargo. The content is the same as the original review.
Listen, at this point my metric for Aspyr’s Star Wars releases is pretty low. Battlefront really broke me, but there had been a long line of fascinating choices leading up to that point. So imagine my surprise when I start up the Switch version of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter and find a game that is running at 60fps with a maxed out resolution and some decent anti-aliasing. The cutscenes are all where they’re supposed to be. Graphical effects from the original releases aren’t just present but new ones have been added. Heck, even Jango Fett himself has a nicely updated model. Now there is one odd technical hiccup along the way but all in all, this is one of Aspyr’s better efforts.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter originally released on PS2 and GameCube back in 2002. It serves as a direct prequel to Jango Fett’s role in Star Wars Episode II. The story follows Jango as he takes on a mission that will ultimately lead him to where we find him in Attack of the Clones. The game itself is generally remembered as a lesser, though not outright bad, entry in the Star Wars video game pantheon. My older sister got the GameCube version when we were kids and after playing it for a while, we ultimately wound up trading it out for Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. So I went into this release having not touched Star Wars: Bounty Hunter in a little over two decades.
The game is separated into six chapters. Each of these chapters contains three levels, with the final level ending in a boss fight of some sort. Most levels amount to moving through a large, mostly linear environment and killing absolutely everything. Civilian in the way? No worries, the game doesn’t really care who you shoot as long as you’re shooting. In fact, if you play on a system other than the Switch, you’ll get an achievement for that. Now and then you’ll encounter some extremely light navigational puzzles. These amount to finding a switch for a door or bridge, or perhaps finding a grate to cut your way through. If you can restrain your craving for violence momentarily, each level also contains a set number of side bounties. By scanning enemies or other NPCs, you can check to see if there is an active bounty on them. Once scanned you can mark them and (hopefully) capture them alive. The only problem with this system is that Bounty Hunter doesn’t really have a stealth mechanic. Enemies seemingly detect you at random. Sometimes you can walk right up to an enemy and stand there for several seconds before they realize you are in fact famed bounty hunter Jango Fett. Others meanwhile will sense a disturbance in the force and start yelling threats at you from two rooms over. So getting a chance to scan a room for bounties can be easy or exceedingly difficult with seemingly no regard for how you’re actually playing.
Enemy AI in general is probably where this game has aged the worst. One level sees you breaking into a prison to find one of the prisoners. A riot eventually breaks out, which one would think might serve as a good cover. However, prisoners and guards alike seemingly have no interest in fighting each other, but rather have eyes only for Jango. It feels like a level that was set up for the guards and prisoners to fight each other, but then that part of the AI was never actually implemented.
All that being said, the actual moment to moment running and gunning feels pretty good for a 2002 action game. Jango’s blasters have a fairly generous auto aim and each one can target independently. You also have a lock on function, but it targets based on where Jango is looking, not where the camera is looking. This means you always have to turn directly into oncoming fire to get a lock. But the best mechanic by far is your jetpack. You unlock it halfway through the first chapter and it makes the combat, and level design so much more fun to engage with. Your control over Jango with the jetpack feels surprisingly agile for a third-person-shooter from 2002. Flying across elevated platforms all while dodging blaster fire and dishing out plenty of your own is still a lot of fun.
The Switch version itself looks to be built off of the GameCube version of Bounty Hunter, which featured improved model quality, textures, real-time shadows, and double the framerate compared to the PlayStation 2 version. That being said, all of these elements have been enhanced beyond their original versions as well. The in-game model for Jango Fett looks to have been completely remade and more closely matches the pre-rendered cutscenes. However, I didn’t notice similar changes anywhere else. Textures are all higher resolution and look quite sharp. A flashlight has been added which helps with some darker areas. From what I can tell, the Switch version gets all the updated graphics of the PC version of this remaster with the exception of ambient occlusion. This includes motion blur, which is pretty light and unobtrusive. Even if you’re someone who would rather not have the effect, it cannot currently be turned off.
But as I played I did have one nagging feeling looking at Jango Fett. Aren’t you a little short for a Bounty Hunter? A quick comparison with the original release proved my suspicion true. This new version of Bounty Hunter runs in 16:9 widescreen vs the 4:3 fullscreen of the original. However somewhere along the line the image got squashed and stretched slightly. Now, it isn’t the case that the 4:3 frame has simply been stretched to 16:9 as there is indeed more of the environment visible during gameplay on the left and right; lining up the two versions does reveal an inconsistency in aspect ratio. Most players likely won’t notice, but if you’re like me and are constantly aware of these things, it may stand out to you.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is simultaneously a fairly mediocre Star Wars game, while also being one of Aspyr’s best efforts. It still isn’t perfect, but it is largely an improvement on the original release, which I cannot always say for their ports and remasters. The Switch version specifically gets nearly all the new graphical features while maintaining 60 frames-per-second. While you may have forgotten just how repetitive Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is over the last twenty years, this is a pretty solid way to play it, so long as you can put up with a slightly shorter version of Jango Fett than you’re used to.
