Why a game featuring Jango Fett didn't deliver that well, I might never know...
Starting off here, the events that take place in Bounty Hunter happen before Star Wars Episode 2. It tells of a few of Jango's adventures before everything from the movie starts moving. What does he do? He's hunting for bounties. Along the way, you'll be runing around shooting bad guys and nailing anyone with a price on their head. This doesn't sound too bad, right?
Well, it certainly has a cool style to it, but when applying the action, it's not really all that. Your main weapon will consist of your dual pistols. They work fine. Basically, you just rapidly tap the A button to start firing off shots. You can lock onto your targets or hold a button to manually aim, but either way it's... well, how can I say this? Button mashing? That's right. It's basically just rapidly pressing the A button to deliver a very rapid stream of shots from your dual pistols. Just keep tapping and locking on until your enemies fall flat on their faces.
Something I actually didn't notice until later is that if you don't lock on or aim (but instead just press the A button rapidly), you'll attack two targets at once having each hand point your pistol at a different target. Now that's pretty cool considering the totally badass Jango Fett you're playing as. There's plenty of other weapons at your disposal as well. There are darts that are an instant kill, you can punch down your enemies (this is seriously overpowered), and you even get a flamethrower. That's not really all the weapons you get, but there are some you can pick up which have a limited amount of ammo. They're quite unnecessary seeing that your pistols can take care of most problems considering how fast you can shoot.
There's just really not too much to the combat. It's just lock on, then rapidly tap the A button until your foe goes down. You might be faced with uneven odds, but otherwise you'll stand your ground for the most part. There's really no strategy to it and it will eventually get old sooner or later.
A somewhat big part of the gameplay is searching for bounties. To do this, you must switch to your visor or something. Once you do that, you can hold a button to zoom into a first person mode. From there, you can scan people to see if there's a bounty on any of them. There's even differences on how much they're worth depending on if you catch them dead or alive.
One complaint about this is that sometimes you'll be constantly scanning around until you find one. This can include from a seemingly innocent civilian to an enemy pointing a gun at your face. Sometimes you'll just have to scan people in the middle of combat just to see if any of the guys shooting at you are worth anything. It'll get rather tedious along the way. You know what else? They're not really necessary in order to complete the game. Maybe some extras and stuff will be unlocked, but otherwise there really isn't too much of a point to it especially since it gets tedious and annoying later on when you have swarms of people around trying to kill you and it just turns out that someone out of that large group is worth some dough. Good luck surviving. You can't use weapons when you equip it.
That makes up for the bulk of the gameplay. You'll be faced with plenty of platforming challenges, but even then it's not shining. Obviously, you'll get a jetpack. It handles fine, though what bothers me a bit is that its fuel doesn't last very long. Even though it regenerates fast, it obviously doesn't regenerate in midair. Consider the jetpack more of a hovering device or something. It's pretty cool shooting your foes down while laughing in the air with your jetpack, but in five seconds you'll plummet back down. At least it's used well in some of the platforming.
That aspect of the game is actually done pretty well. The sensation of jumping and jetpacking your way through ledges and stuff flows smoothly. Unfortunately I found the camera not too much to my liking. It's not a total pain, but for a game like this the way the camera works itself isn't exactly the best in a third person game.
The technical aspects of Bounty Hunter are, however, great. I'd say that the graphics are pretty decent. No complaints there. The voice work is good, too. Jango is done well along with the key characters. But I wouldn't exactly say that the game used the best tracks from the various Star Wars music pieces there are to offer.
The game itself is decent. The biggest Star Wars fans might not list this game as one of their favorites, but it wouldn't really disappoint. A game with the player playing as Jango Fett is undoubtedly cool. This game might not have much left after beating the game once, but considering how cheap it must be today, i don't think the best fans of the series should call this a miss.