Star Wars Bounty Hunter is the closest we're getting to that Mandalorian game

If you’re like me, you watched all three seasons of The Mandalorian and kept thinking to yourself, “Man, this would have made an awesome game.”

I’m thinking something akin to Red Dead Redemption 2 and Starfield, flying from planet to planet in your own ship, hunting down some of the galaxy’s worst criminals and occasionally getting into scrapes with The Empire or The Republic in the process.

Star Wars Outlaws releases later this month. Check out our video preview and see what we thought below.

Well, it turns out we were supposed to be getting a game like that. A Mandalorian game was in the works with EA but earlier this year, but it was killed before it even got started.

Wipe those tears away though people, as there is a Star Wars game you can play that puts you behind the visor of a mandalorian bounty hunter, and it’s actually pretty good. The only caveat is that it’s 22-years-old, but a new remaster has brought it to Xbox, PlayStation and PC.

Aspyr

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is a third-person shooter, a bit similar to the OG Tomb Raider games, that sees players become Jango Fett, the bounty hunter from Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones. The game takes place before the events of the film and directly leads into them, with Jango being tasked by Count Dooku with the assassination of a Dark Jedi.

Players fight through several levels set across multiple Star Wars planets, many of which will be instantly recognisable to fans.

With two trusty blasters by your side, a jetpack and all the other tools fitting a bounty hunter, it’s probably the closest you will ever get to a game about the mandalorians, but it’s a bloody good effort.

Most of the credit goes to Lucasfilms Games but Aspyr has seemingly redeemed itself following the disappointing launch of the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection and delivered a serviceable remaster of the original game.

The majority of work done has been cleaning up the visuals and boosting the framerate. No changes have been made to the art style or graphical quality, the remaster just makes the image clearer and the gameplay smoother. While this is the bare minimum, I don’t think the visuals of the original have aged too badly, and I suffered no input lag or drop in frames so that was all well and good.

Aspyr

What I did have an issue with was the aspect ratio of cutscenes switching to 4:3. It’s jarring, annoying and could have probably been fixed for this remastered version of the game.

As for the gameplay itself, it’s still as fun as I remember it being on the Nintendo GameCube. Jango will fire his blasters at the nearest threat and sometimes, he’ll even shoot two enemies at the same time. You can do the aiming yourself, if you like, but the camera controls can take some time to get used to.

Aside from your blaster, you'll get a jetpack and flamethrower which can be used indefinitely but need to recharge, and you’ll also get poison darts for an easy insta-kill against most enemies, though these are finite so use them sparingly.

Jango’s also equipped with his scope. This can be used to scan civilians and it’s worth scanning as many as you can as some of them will be wanted criminals. It’ll give you the rundown of their name, a bit about them and what crime they committed before telling you how much they’re worth dead and how much they’re worth alive. Once marked as a bounty, you can tie them up with your cable launcher to bring them in warm, or just gun them down to bring them in cold, though you will get less credits for this.

There’s also a variety of unlockable content, like trading cards, outtakes from the voice cast, a full digital comic book and Aspyr added a Boba Fett skin as a reward for beating the game.

Aspyr

Overall, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is a fine game and probably the closest we’re going to get to that Mandalorian game by EA. For a title first released in 2002, it’s held up quite well, and the minor improvements and changes made by Aspyr are commendable.

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is available now for Xbox, PlayStation, PC and Nintendo Switch platforms, and offers the definitive Star Wars bounty hunter experience.