Star Wars: Bounty Hunter's remaster is above-average, but be prepared to face the original's rough edges

You might be looking at Star Wars Outlaws as your next stop in a galaxy far, far away, but Star Wars: Bounty Hunter's Aspyr-developed remaster is a more than welcome return to the PS2/GC-era Star Wars underworld.

I vividly remember the original PS2 release of Bounty Hunter becoming a personal favorite back in 2002, mostly because my most-liked character walking out of Attack of the Clones was Jango Fett. He was a guy sporting Mandalorian armor who actually did cool stuff on-screen and had two awesome laser pistols, so of course he was my fav. That was sound 10-year-old logic. The game itself I actually didn't get until Christmas Eve, but you can bet I was glued to it for months after that. Long story short: Warts and all, I'm very fond of this one, so I had very high expectations for Aspyr's latest Star Wars remaster.

Earlier this year, the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection launched to mostly negative reviews for a variety of reasons. While I thought the core experience was preserved quite well (and with previously platform-exclusive content added back in!), the online side of the games was a bit of a mess, and the bloated install size on most platforms was baffling to say the least. Most issues have been ironed out by now, yet I can't blame veteran Star Wars gamers for acting cautious when Bounty Hunter's remaster was announced a while back.

After replaying through a half of the game surprisingly fast, given all the time that's passed since my last proper playthrough, I'm quite happy to report the Bounty Hunter remaster lands close to Aspyr's best Star Wars efforts and washed the bad post-Battlefront taste off my mouth (even if that Collection is perfectly okay now). Jango Fett's armor has never looked shinier, and the locales are more vibrant than ever before, yet Bounty Hunter remains one of the moodiest and most unique Star Wars games ever thanks to the preservation of the original art direction in spite of the texture upscales we've come to expect from these plus some nice touches of dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion, and motion blur (all can be toggled off).

More importantly, the game plays much better than its original PS2 (later brought to PS3/4) and GameCube counterparts thanks to an optional (but default) control scheme that makes it actually behave like you'd expect a third-person shooter to. The untouched release had some odd bindings that made certain actions a bit more cumbersome than they needed to be, and this might be the single biggest QoL change in the entire remaster. On PC, however, I experienced some trigger sensitivity-related oddities that led to Jango going in and out of aiming at random. Such issue wasn't present on the Steam Deck, yet the Xbox controller I used behaved completely fine in other games, so I'm quite convinced it was a problem with deadzones in this specific game which may or may not have been fixed already.

Performance is also a concern when it comes to these remasters, and it shouldn't be that way. Of course, anyone with a beefy modern PC or a PS5 or Series X mustn't be concerned, yet many remasters are strangely demanding in below-average hardware. I can't speak about other platforms, but the PC version was completely locked at 120 FPS (which seems to be the maximum framerate) maxed out at 2K on a 4070Ti + 7800X3D build, which... was to be expected. There was, however, a bit of an issue at the start which took a while to figure out: Bounty Hunter defaulted time and again to using the CPU graphics instead of that awesome dedicated Nvidia GPU. The result? Sub-30 FPS no matter my settings. It took a bit of investigation inside the task manager to notice the dedicated GPU wasn't being used at all. The devs were notified, and a fix might've been dropped already, but it's something to keep in mind if you experience bizarre framerate drops.

Eventually, I switched to Steam Deck because retro games tend to shine on Valve's big handheld PC-console, and I was pleasantly surprised, as Bounty Hunter just won't move down from 60 FPS maxed out at the native resolution. For all I know, later levels could bring the already-high GPU load past the threshold which leads to performance drops, but it's otherwise a fantastic portable experience with juiced-up visuals.

Bounty Hunter also continues to be one of the toughest Star Wars games around once you get past its first third or so, with the four remaining acts raising the overall combat difficulty quite a bit and twisting the platforming-like sections (you have a jetpack for most of the game) into pretty memorable levels that often feel huge for a linear game even by today's standards. It's a very good reminder of how big LucasArts used to dream back in the early 2000s, given the hardware limitations. A few other aspects related to the many Star Wars settings you visit, such as the high variety of NPCs in certain levels or the fantastic sound design, highlight all the attention to detail that went into these games during the company's greenest and most ambitious era.

On the other hand, most boss fights haven't aged very well, as they can be beaten by strafing and boosting around while holding the triggers on your dual Westar-34 pistols. Elsewhere, however, there are plenty of good chances to make the most out of Jango's varied arsenal, and latter levels demand some degree of planning and playing things safer in order to make it out alive. Curiosity is also rewarded this time around with the unlockable Boba Fett skin and a generous set of achievements tailored to the most dedicated players. Yes, getting 100% on all secondary bounties will take a while.

By and large, Aspyr has nailed this one without falling face first into a mud puddle, and you can only criticize the fact it's faithful and conservative to a fault if you're the kind of player looking for remasters that are actually light remakes. Star Wars: Bounty Hunter's newest iteration isn't that, and instead continues Aspyr's largely inspiring tradition of preserving and polishing classics from a position of respect and reverence. At around $20, you can't ask for much more. Also: it's still a pretty awesome (Legends) prequel to Attack of the Clones with a far meatier narrative than you'd expect at first.