STAR WARS™: Bounty Hunter™

My honest first reaction to this remaster was relief. After Aspyr's stumbles with the Battlefront Classic Collection, the bar had genuinely been lowered to the floor, so finding a product that runs cleanly and doesn't embarrass itself was already a small victory. What you actually get here is a light but competent touch-up of a 22-year-old third-person action game that was always more interesting for what it let you be than for how it played. You're Jango Fett, taking a contract from Darth Tyranus to hunt down the Dark Jedi Komari Vosa, and that premise pulls the story through some genuinely entertaining corners of Star Wars lore, including how Jango acquired Slave I and why he was selected as the template for the entire Clone Army. Temuera Morrison voices Jango himself, and Corey Burton brings Count Dooku to life with the same measured menace he carried into the Clone Wars animated series. The audio is untouched and, frankly, holds up. The core loop is linear third-person shooting stretched across about eight hours of levels. Jango's dual blasters carry infinite ammo and handle most situations via a lock-on system that lets him dodge-roll and stay mobile. Supporting that you get poison darts, a flamethrower that behaves like an uncontrollable garden hose, a whipcord for hauling in live bounties, grenades, and heavier rifles picked up from fallen enemies. The real highlight is the jetpack, which you unlock partway into the first chapter, flying across elevated platforms while exchanging blaster fire is the game at its best, and the level design is built with vertical movement in mind throughout. Scanning enemies to identify optional bounties theoretically adds a second layer of play, but the mechanic requires you to constantly swap to a visor that shares equipment slots with your weapons, turning what should feel like Mandalorian craft into an annoying toggle exercise mid-firefight. The remaster's improvements are real but modest. Resolution and texture sharpness are noticeably cleaner, dynamic lighting has replaced the original's notorious dark-room problem, and a new flashlight gives Jango something to do in the few spots that still need it. Aspyr also slowed down the scanning process so it pauses the chaos around you slightly, which makes bounty collection far less maddening than it was in 2002. The control scheme now aligns with standard third-person shooter conventions, and that alone does more for playability than any graphical pass. The old anachronistic lives system is still here though, five lives per level, game over, restart from scratch, and Aspyr left it in without explanation. The lock-on targeting also misfires in busy rooms, spinning the camera 180 degrees looking for a target that's standing right in front of you. These are 2002 problems wearing 2024 clothes. Who should actually consider this? Star Wars fans with an appetite for prequel-era lore and anyone who loved The Mandalorian and wants to spend eight hours in that same grimy, credits-first headspace will get genuine value out of it. The included Jango Fett: Open Seasons comic miniseries, unlocked by collecting in-mission bounties, is a nice bonus for lore enthusiasts. Newcomers coming in cold without the IP attachment will find the combat repetitive by the halfway mark and the level design sparse. The platforming and jetpack traversal are charming in a way that aged better than the gunplay did, but neither is a system deep enough to carry the experience on its own. Take the rose-tinted glasses off and this is a functional, affectionate cleanup of a mid-tier PS2 action game that had a great premise and only partially lived up to it, the same verdict critics offered in 2002.

Alex · Scout Team

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