It’s a bit of an open secret that Star Wars: Bounty Hunter isn’t exactly a great game. Originally developed for the Nintendo GameCube by LucasArts as a loose prequel to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, you could tell the game was destined to be a fan favourite from the cover art alone. Jango Fett, the chrome and blue Mandalorian precursor to the iconic Boba Fett, blasting across the box with dual pistols firing and jetpack sparking against a rusted Mandalorian sigil. It was, and remains, cool as fuck. Throw in a lengthy, cutscene filled campaign about the seedy underworld of bounty hunting and a dark lord for good measure and you’ve got the exact kind of game to make an early 2000s Star Wars fan very happy. The only issue being it was kinda jank.
And hey, speaking of Star Wars and jank, Aspyr Media’s had a rough run of it lately. Coming off what felt like a string of successful ports of classic games set in the galaxy far, far away, Aspyr’s relationship with Star Wars soured rapidly around the confounding development of the Knights of the Old Republic remake and subsequent return to ports with the crunchy Battlefront Classic Collection. This was, to my mind, always a tremendous shame as the preservation of older titles is crucially important work for any franchise but especially one as storied as Star Wars. It’s a surprise to be sure but a welcome one then that Bounty Hunter is a return to form for a studio that feels at its best reminding us why we loved these games in the first place.
Relegated to the wonderful, messy halls of Legends now (the pantheon of stories and lore that Disney no longer considers canon to the Star Wars universe), Bounty Hunter weaves its tale with the exact kind of joyful, reckless abandon you could have only found during its particular era of franchise tie-in materials. Across its six chapters and twenty-odd missions, we follow the eventful life of Jango Fett as he finds himself in the employ of Count Dooku in the waning years of the Republic’s era of peace, war bubbling just below the surface as Fett is tasked with tracking down a rogue Dark Jedi. God, remember when we could call someone a “Dark Jedi” and it wasn’t a whole thing? Jango remembers, and following his journey from hunter to mentor and eventual father is solid pulpy fun.
Bounty Hunter always had an eye for aesthetics and tone, one of the few things that survived its jump to modern hardware back in 2016, but as we come up on a decade since then, the game’s signature jank is rapidly aging. Working with the original GameCube source code, Aspyr has managed to divine an honest-to-goodness port, allowing a pretty staggering level of spit and shine to be applied. Bounty Hunter looks good and plays even better, the clumsiness of the original level design and encounters still very present but mitigated greatly by the ground-up work done to bring controls and presentation fully in line with modern expectations.
The sweeping changes to camera and control schemes are the true highlight. The original game’s camera could be generously described as deranged, opting to control itself in an attempt to track and adjust to the player’s movements and choices. Cool in concept, disastrous in practice. Aspyr’s port gives the camera back to the player with contemporary control methods like full 360 angles and the use of the triggers for aiming. The aiming speed is still a little too slow for my liking, especially when you can amp up the camera swivel to satisfying levels, but the use of standardised controls is still a welcome change. On the PS5 version at least you’ll also experience a few nifty haptic sensations associated with individual weapons, cute flourishes if you’re still into that kind of thing.
This frees the game from its cumbersome inputs and allows for a flow of mostly successful changes. Weapons can be cycled with the D-Pad, and Jango’s signature Bounty Scanner (which shifts the game into first person to scan NPCs and mark them for bounties) is quick equipped with triangle now. Though you can’t quick equip out of it for some reason, meaning you’ll need to actively reach for the D-pad again to switch back to weapons in a strange oversight. Still, it has a holistically uplifting effect on the game, the verticality and layered levels no longer a chore to physically navigate as the camera works with you now instead of against. Granted, if the pain points of the original game’s enemy health balancing were an issue for you that won’t have changed, but giving players a better toolset to engage these issues goes a long way.
These updates are adorned by Bounty Hunter’s glorious shift to widescreen HD. The original game was no slouch in its presentation, squeezing the most out of the GameCube to craft a visual identity adjacent to the shine of the Prequel films, and in tapping right into that source code, Aspyr has juiced this port. Playing the PS4 re-release and this latest effort side by side it really is a marvel how well-realised the visual upgrades feel, from textures to lighting, it’s coherent and relatively polished. There are still visual bugs present, I was able to recreate some across both versions, but nothing game-breaking or particularly noteworthy that I saw during my mad dash across missions.
The package also houses the additional content found in the PS4 version alongside a smattering of new unlockable goodies including a comic and some digital trading cards. You can even grab a Boba Fett skin if you’re looking to fully break the timeline and play as the iconic hunter. It all comes together to make for not only the definitive way to play Star Wars Bounty Hunter but also a return to form for Aspyr’s remastering efforts. This is the platonic ideal of a port, offering the original controls for posterity but allowing players old and new to experience the best of what the game had to offer while updating it to be not only palatable, but genuinely fun for modern audiences.
