22 years since its original release in 2022, Aspyr has released a remaster of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, the action game starring the iconic bounty hunter Jango Fett from Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Despite improved graphics and performance, as well as some welcome control scheme updates, the core experience of the 2002 original is preserved in this release, warts and all. While there is certainly some fun to be had, it is buried in clunky mechanics, absurd difficulty spikes and generally repetitive gameplay which ultimately make the game a tough sell to anyone but the biggest Star Wars fans or aficionados of early 2000s action games.

Set in between the events of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter follows the adventures of the legendary bounty hunter, Jango Fett. Hired by Count Dooku to assassinate Komari Vosa, a Dark Jedi and head of the Bando Gora cult, the game goes some way towards filling in his backstory, such as explaining where he obtained his iconic Slave 1 starship, how he met fellow bounty hunter Zam Wesell as well as exploring his motivation to establish a legacy and eventually take on his clone son Boba Fett as a protégé. Throughout the various leads Jango follows in the game’s six chapters, he competes against Montross, an antagonistic hunter after the same target.

The game certainly nails the Star Wars aesthetic, from excerpts from John Williams’ legendary score to familiar sound effects, such as blaster bolts flying or the odd Wilhelm Scream when enemies fall off ledges. Temuera Morrison reprises his role from the film, which is nice to hear despite the character’s generally stoic nature minimising the amount you actually hear from him. Clancy Brown also stands out in his voice role as Montross, giving the rival bounty hunter a sense of intimidating menace in his encounters with Jango.

In terms of what Aspyr has added to the experience in this version, the game is a rather faithful port of the 2002 original with some tweaks to make the game palatable for a modern audience. In addition to a fresh coat of graphical paint which smooths out some of the polygonal edges and improves the resolution, the control scheme has been greatly overhauled. Aiming and shooting are now bound to the trigger buttons on controllers rather than the face buttons, which overall feels quite a bit more intuitive. If you prefer the original controls for whatever reason, you can toggle them in the options menu. The keyboard and mouse controls are also fairly easy to get to grips with.

Each level in Star Wars: Bounty Hunter sees Jango Fett running and gunning through waves of enemy guards, wildlife, Tusken Raiders and Bando Gora cultists as well as engaging in occasional platforming challenges. While his exact arsenal is sometimes reduced or expanded depending on the levels, most times you will have access to dual blasters, a flamethrower, a bounty scanner, a limited number of instant-kill poison darts and what amounts to a lasso to restrain targets. Later levels also introduce thermal charges, rockets and grenade launchers, among others.

Jango also acquires a jetpack quite early on, and words can scarcely express how much fun the jetpack is. While it does have limited fuel (which recharges quickly once you land on solid ground again), being able to simply soar above your opponents and carpet bomb them from the sky or escape enemies by flying away is simply a delight. Similarly to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel’s low gravity and oz-kit mechanic, the jetpack gave Star Wars: Bounty Hunter’s gunfights a fun sense of verticality and dynamism.

That’s right, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter has a lives system: you can only die 5 times in a level before you need to take the whole thing from the top. The lives mechanic ripples throughout the rest of the game and makes what would otherwise be minor annoyances unbearably frustrating. Enemy ambushes that you would need clairvoyance to anticipate, canyons filled with bottomless pits and your own explosive weapons being more likely to damage yourself than your foes all steadily tick your stock of lives down to zero and having to replay a huge chunk of the level all over again.

The fact that the levels are rather long, taking generally around 20-30 minutes each depending on how well you know the layout, also doesn’t help as it adds to the amount of your time that is wasted when you fail a certain number of times and have to take it from the top. The game lacks the Star Wars equivalent of a 1-Up Mushroom to gain back lost lives, or a Crash Bandicoot 4-esque option to disable the mechanic entirely, which feels like a missed opportunity among Aspyr’s other modernisations.

The game is also somewhat buggy, with one level in particular ending up incompletable due to Jango falling through the floor instead of the ending cutscene playing. Fortunately, the cheat codes that let you unlock new levels still work on this version, ensuring I was still able to reach the end credits. Despite a decent variety of locations and enemy types, the fact that Jango’s arsenal barely changes or expands is a disappointment and leads to the experience overall feeling somewhat repetitive.

To begin, in order to confirm if someone has a bounty on their head, you need to put your weapon away and take out your scanner. Needless to say, this is very risky to do in a pitched gunfight. If they do have a bounty on their head, you can tag them and either shoot them down or restrain them to take them alive. Some bounties have higher rewards for bringing them in alive or dead, incentivising different approaches. The problem is that there is often nothing differentiating an enemy with a bounty on their head compared to a normal NPC, necessitating risking your safety to scan every enemy that comes your way in case there is a price on their head. It also isn’t enough to shoot someone down and collect the bounty on their corpse after the fact; if you didn’t scan and mark them beforehand, it doesn’t count.

And what can you do with these credits from bounty hunting? You can unlock concept art in the main menu. This is nice and all, but not exactly a fitting incentive to go out of my way to painstakingly scan every NPC in the hopes that they are one of the 5 enemies in the level with bounties.  If the game wanted to encourage the player to go out of their way to find these hidden foes, being able to use the credits for new skins or weapon upgrades would have been a more enticing reward. Some sort of cosmetic variation to distinguish bounty targets from normal enemies would also have gone some way toward mitigating the trial and error of scanning everyone just to make sure.