The life of a mechanized bounty hunter is neither glamorous nor glorious. You spend the better part of each day tracking down and removing the dregs of society, knowing that full well another gang is going to rise and you’ll have to do it all over again. The pay is decent, but since you are not exactly part of a police force, you are responsible for covering all the fuel and ammunition spent on a mission. So why would anyone do this kind of work? Maybe it’s the only thing some people are good at.
Bounty Star is a third-person mech game with farming and settlement mechanics. Players take control of Clem, a former mech commander turned bounty hunter, as she tries to pick up the pieces after losing everything during a raider attack.
The story centers around Clem, a bounty hunter trying to make a living one day at a time. When she lost everyone she ever cared about during a raider attack, she had resigned herself to being a wanderer. That didn’t last long, however, as she accepted an offer to look over a farm in the middle of nowhere. She now spends most of her day looking after the place, tending to her small plots, the chickens, and most importantly, keeping her “girl” in tip-top shape. As it turns out, Clem couldn’t run away from the thing she’s good at: mechanized destruction.
As a former uniformed soldier, Clem is in her element when she’s maintaining her mech. It’s just about the only thing keeping her stable after everything that has happened. She would tinker with it obsessively, just as much as she wanted to keep her weapons in tip-top shape. Before she got the offer to become a bounty hunter, she was wallowing in her own self-pity for long stretches. Thankfully, there are good people out there who know what she’s capable of and will help her out when the time is right.
Life on the farm is surprisingly wholesome. After spending a few days getting settled in, the conversation to get a farm started begins floating around. And as a vivid fan of simulation games, you know that stuff would pique my curiosity. Unfortunately, the game’s take on farming is somewhat underwhelming. Firstly, the amount of time it takes for the crops to grow feels like ages. I don’t know if it’s because I go on every mission available or it’s by design. All I know is that the crop yield is disproportionally not worth the wait time, especially when most fruit and vegetables aren’t that expensive. On the bright side, you can have more than a dozen plots to work with. So, if you have a specific crop in mind, you sow batches of seeds at a time. Later in the game, you will be able to craft chicken coops to harvest eggs from. And if you think that these are your regular Harvest Moon co-ops, think again. You are able to slaughter the chickens you have for their meat. Just like how a real chicken farm is run.
Now, when you’re not busy culling chickens (or feeding your pet cazador), you will most likely be swapping parts on your mech. You don’t have much to work with at the start, a problem that becomes apparent during missions that reward you for bringing a specific loadout. But with enough successful missions, the local sheriff’s office will see fit to allow you access to their “shiny toys”. Just be careful about how much ammo you burn through. I remember a mission where I brought the minigun as my primary. I had so much fun using it on the field. But when the after-mission report came in, my jaw dropped. I had spend 2,000 credits on bullets for that mission. Then I was reminded of the Heavy from Team Fortress 2. So, this is how it felt firing Sasha for extended periods of time. I don’t worry about ammo these days since I make the bulk of my munitions from the ammo press. The same goes for my makeshift battery chargers. But man, I had no idea being an independent bounty hunter on a backwater farm could be so costly.
Story progression is shown through brief moments of introspection after main story missions. Clem will write in her journal all the events that have happened recently, as well as a few stories from back in the day. It’s almost therapeutic in a way. The moment doesn’t last long, however, as she is expected to report back to the sheriff’s office immediately.
The missions in this game remind me of the old PlayStation 2 classics in a way. I’m talking about medium-sized arena maps with the odd collectible chest lying around. In fact, everything about the mechs reminds me of games like Steambot Chronicles and Dark Cloud 2. The heat system is one of the features in the time-of-day system that deserves mention. Simply put, afternoon missions are the hottest while night missions are the coldest. The cooler your mech is, the better its performance while shooting. The inverse is true when it comes to heating up and melee attacks. The thing is, you need to maintain your temps as best as possible, even if you have a specific temp in mind. If you heat up or cool down too much, your mech will be forced to reboot, leaving you open to enemy counterattacks.
Combat in Bounty Star is probably the best part of the game, save for a few moments of frustration. You have a decent array of weapons and support gear to choose from. You don’t have access to shoulder-mounted weapons at the start. Instead, you get the ability to swap between two sets of gear with a press of a button. This can come in handy as the game enforces a soft rock, paper, scissors counter format when it comes to enemy types. And I really do mean “soft”. In most cases, it’s the difference of dealing slightly higher damage as compared to doing ok damage.
What sets the game apart from the most mech games is the fact that your mech is capable of performing dash cancels and melee cancels, just like a fighting game. Or if we’re strictly in the bounds of mech games, the Gundam vs Gundam series. But as much as I like the combat in this game, there are some things that I found annoying the longer I played this game.
The hard lock-on system worked fine at first. But when you get into a situation where you have to go against multiple enemies from different directions, the whole thing just falls apart. This is especially true against enemies that burrow underground. Not only that, they take such an ungodly amount of time before casually deciding to go above ground. Trust me, you don’t hate the cave missions as much as you should. Another thing that grinds my gears is the fact that the camera gets into weird angles when pinned by enemies. Look, I’m all for classic gameplay but I don’t want to see the backside of wall texture while a driller mech has me pinned to the wall. It gets old really fast.
Bounty Star’s visuals are colorful and vibrant. One need only walk around the farm at night to see what I mean by that. The same goes for all the mission locations, but they do tend to lose their charm after going back there multiple times. Equally colorful are the guests who drop by the farm after certain requirements have been fulfilled. The one guy with the psychedelic combat drugs has got to be the most memorable of the lost, followed closely by the guy in the meat costume. As for the audio, if you like lonely trucker tunes, then you’ve come to the right place.
Bounty Star is a great mech game for those who are nostalgic for mech games from console generations past. It’s not the most flashy of mech games, nor does it tell the story of “War never changes”, it is the quiet reflection of a bounty hunter who is trying to get back on her feet. With the help of a cast of zany characters, of course. If you like classic mech games with a bit of farming and base management with a smidge of cooking, I can’t think of a game better suited than this.
This review is based on a code provided by the developers/publisher.
Bounty Star (PC)
Bounty Star is a great mech game for those who are nostalgic for mech games from console generations past.
The Good
- A throwback to mech games of the past
- Vibrant graphics
- Surprise farming mechanics
The Bad
- Out-of-place character portraits
- Camera issues
- Hard lock-on is annoying to deal after a time
