When I took my first glimpse at Bounty Star, I was fairly intrigued. I love mech action games, and seeing one set in the American South firmly landed the game on my radar. But then I saw that it was also a farming sim with base building and, despite my reluctance due to how overstuffed it made the game sound, I still wanted to check it out. In reality, the game is mostly a narrative action game with a bunch of optional features thrown on top. There isn’t any base building at all, and the farming is completely unnecessary, as I had earned enough money from missions by the end of the game to afford absolutely everything without issue.
Bounty Star has you play as Clem, a woman who stupidly lets a murderous lunatic free at the start of the game, only to be shocked when said murderous lunatic destroys the town she’s protecting. Some time later, her old friend gets her set up elsewhere if she agrees to work as a bounty hunter. She gets a new mech and sets out on various short missions to both make money and progress the story. You do upgrade the building’s amenities as part of the game’s progression, but you don’t decide on placement or anything of the sort, so it’s more of a crafting angle than anything else.
The meat of the experience is mostly just fine. You choose melee and ranged weapons for your mech, as well as various other equipment that suits the needs of each mission, and then set out on one. The vast majority of these just require you to kill everything in the area and then exfiltrate, but there’s a fair amount of extra detail in various ways. Bounty Star is fully voice-acted (and capably at that) with a story that’s decently written, albeit not anything that will bowl anyone over. The character models are poor across the board, though, with Clem herself looking especially rough due to her strange, all-red eyes and how her badly modelled scars don’t mix with the cartoony art style.
There are multiple characters that get a fair amount of screen time, and there’s lip-syncing to accompany the voice acting, but everything looks stiff and incredibly dated, no doubt due to the game’s budget. Clem only gets a single mech (called a Raptor) and its actual parts can’t be swapped out like in Armored Core or anything, so don’t expect anywhere near that level of customisation. After a bit, you do get a second loadout that helps you deal with a host of situations. In terms of actually looking at your mech, all you can really do is change its paint job.
Bounty Star makes use of a day system. There’s morning, afternoon, and evening, and you can do one mission at each time of day (if there are enough missions that day, at least.) Missions are divided into story missions and regular ones, which will repeat if you decide to just grind them instead of moving the next story forward. You get enough money from just progressing as soon as you can, so you absolutely won’t need to bother doing this, but it’s an option if you so choose. Some missions can only be done at certain times of day, so Clem will awkwardly have to take a nap (complete with two cutscenes that need to be skipped each time) to change the time, as adding a wait feature was a bridge too far.
Weirdly, some days don’t have missions at all, and so you just wake up in the morning and then sleep until the next morning when this happens. Both GameScout’s editor-in-chief and I wish we had this superpower, but maybe driving a mech is just that exhausting. Missions tend to have three optional objectives that reward you with a bit of extra money, plus areas have chests that contain lore to read or collectables. One interesting feature is that going out in the afternoon will increase your mech’s base temperature, while going out at night will lower it. There are accessories that can also affect your base temperature, too.
Both melee and ranged weapons tend to heat up or cool your mech, and pushing it too far in one direction will see you entering a thermal overload state, which forces you to reboot, leaving you vulnerable to enemies. These enemies come in multiple varieties, including on-foot humans, mechs, various drones, flying bugs, and multiple types of dinosaurs (who you can scare off with fireworks in lieu of killing them.) All enemies can be captured with your chainbinder upon reducing their health enough, granting a small monetary bonus as well.
The mech gameplay itself is pretty okay, but it’s not great. Most melee attacks are slow and clunky, with the actual good melee weapons not showing up until later in the game. Early melee weapons are so weak that they’re not even worth using. Conversely, the second weapon you get is a shotgun that’s so strong that it kills most enemies in just a couple of shots. And this is on top of the game only giving the weapon two stars out of five to describe its power. The weapons are very poorly balanced this way. They do different types of damage, and enemies have different resistances, but the shotgun is still more than enough to get the job done in nearly every situation.
You can’t reload your firearms while aiming unless you empty your clip, and enemies can’t be staggered by melee attacks unless their stability bar is depleted. I have to commend the surprising variety of techniques and mechanics at your disposal in Bounty Star, though. You can equip a shield that has a parry (although it can’t cancel animations and is kind of a chore to use,) plus you have dash and air attacks too. The equipment that lets you dash either generates heat or cools your mech, so you’ll want to pick these based on which weapon you’re using or if you’re in a field that’s being warmed or cooled by a special forcefield generator.
However, these considerations, again, just aren’t all that necessary, as Bounty Star is quite easy. The vast majority of enemies pose very little threat, save for the drill Raptor that is completely broken and incredibly obnoxious. It has way more health than nearly every other enemy (even the combat Raptors) and is able to easily stunlock you. Getting hit causes the screen to glitch out, so it’s hard to see when this happens. Even the game’s final boss is easier to deal with than a single drill Raptor, it’s bizarre. But you can literally just get through the entire game with the weapons you get in the first hour or so, as many of the later ones are about as useless as the majority of the melee weapons.
Many of the optional objectives in missions are poorly balanced, too. They like to ask you to beat them within unreasonable (or borderline impossible) time limits, or to beat the level without taking damage. The reward for doing these is usually so small that there’s not really any reason to bother unless you’re going for a specific achievement. And then there are all the farming sim-related mechanics. You can grow crops which you can use to make food (which gives you temporary buffs and is wholly unnecessary), or you can sell them for an, again, wholly unnecessary profit. You can even have chickens and dinosaurs, whom you’ll need to give water and food.
Chickens are good for eggs, but since there’s not really any real reason to cook, they’re mostly pointless (especially considering that an enemy can just swoop in and steal them while you’re away,) and dinos are good for, well, just selling them. You can also make fuel or ammo so that you don’t need to have money for either taken out of your post-mission fees. Again, I had more money than I’d ever need to spend by the end, so this is another thing that just doesn’t matter overall. There are a lot of options and ideas in Bounty Star, but most of it doesn’t add much. More time should have been spent on the character models or mech gameplay.
The game’s progression often forces you to set all of these features up, too. For instance, the game will tell you to get a chicken set up before it’ll let you progress the story, but you can sell it immediately afterward with zero negative repercussions. In terms of the “base building,” all you really do is upgrade your workbench as part of the story or craft new gizmos and batteries to power them. It’s all just pointless fluff for a checklist.
I finished the game after about a dozen hours. Continuing your save takes you back to before the (incredibly easy) last level, and the other missions run out around this time, so there’s not really any endgame here, but you can keep playing indefinitely if you want to keep growing crops and cooking for some reason. I did mostly enjoy the game’s missions and its story, but there’s just a lot of needless mechanics here.
On the other hand, it’s very clear just how much effort and heart the devs put into the game, so I absolutely don’t regret my time with it. If you want a shortish, easy mech game, you could certainly do a lot worse.
Bounty Star: Bounty Star is enjoyable enough for what it is, but its host of superfluous systems are quite questionable all the same. – Andrew Farrell
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