Bounty Star Review – IGN

Do you remember the worst day of your life? That's okay; you don't have to answer. I do. I was doing something I loved, I made a mistake, and I almost lost everything due to the stories other people told me for their own purposes. People I thought were friends disappeared from my life, doors were slammed in my face, and everything I had worked for was gone. Because I refused to answer the phone, my family could only communicate via postcards, and I spent the next two years contemplating suicide before finally finding some semblance of peace. Nearly a decade later, those moments, that mistake—a small thing, really—have impacted every aspect of my life. I spent a lot of time grappling with this, wondering if I could ever be the same person I was before that moment. I don't know the answer.

Clementine McKinney The Worst Day of My Life reminded me a lot of myself, even though it happened in the cockpit of a Raptor rather than behind a keyboard. She made a decision, one rooted in trying to do the right thing and defend those she loved, but it cost her everything. Clementine McKinney died that day, and Cemetery Clem was born from her ashes. Bounty Star is about who you are after the worst day of your life, about what you do when your only option is to crawl back into the machine that put you there in the first place. I had no choice; neither did Climb. We don't know what else to do.

Clem is a bounty hunter. All she knows is building and flying raptors, and that's what I mostly did for the roughly 15 to 20 hours it took me to complete Bounty Star's story (although there's plenty of replayability if you're so inclined). After her world collapses, her friend Jake Triminy, the local marshal of a post-plague future that caused the collapse of human civilization and the return of the dinosaurs, builds her an old workshop with enough space to double as a farm. After what happened, no one trusted her anymore, so the bounties she got were all on punks: local bandits and the like. You spend her money buying food and cooking in her kitchen to increase stats before heading out on a mission. The first time she entered the Bird of Prey after she made a decision that ruined her life, she spent a long time staring at the old girl, her heart beating so fast. Then she closed her eyes, exhaled, and got to work. Clem sees the irony, but this may be her only way out. She and I were both sitting in that cockpit, but we were not in the same place.

Clem takes her battle to heart. She had severe burns on one side of her neck, a deep scar on the right side of her face and a scar on the other cheek. She's not getting any younger; if you leave her alone long enough, she'll stretch and complain that her body is letting her down, even though her physique tells the story of a woman who built Raptors and welded steel. Her clothes were stained with engine grease and stained with sweat. Her accent has a southern American accent. She drinks, smokes, plays guitar, and curses like it's outdated—yet when she encounters a problem, she whips out a stuffed dinosaur named Jeremy and talks to him until she finds a solution. After completing her bounty, Clem sat on her raptor and wrote down her thoughts in a small journal, a warrior-poet hoping she would find herself in the words she arranged on the paper. She was a human being, messy, flawed and glorious, and I loved her like a kindred soul, someone whose flaws you understood and whose strengths you admired.

Once you've completed your mission, it's time to equip your Raptor and get to work. Raptors are relatively small mechs – think armored coreAC, but smaller, less equipped, but faster. They have melee and ranged weapons, from chainswords and giant hammers to assault rifles and grenade launchers. You can customize them to further suit your play style, adding things like boosters for quick dodges, burst repairers for on-the-spot healing, or thermal computers for returning the raptor to base temperature faster.

There's a lot to consider: each weapon has one of three types (blade, club, blast), working in a rock, paper, scissors fashion against different types of armor. Weapons and systems also generate or reduce heat. Too much or too little and your raptor shuts down until it regains control, leaving you vulnerable. But there are benefits. High heat will speed up the swing of your melee weapon, while cooler raptors will fire faster.

Some bounties are only available in the morning, afternoon or evening. It's cooler in the evening, so heat-generating weapons are more feasible than in the afternoon, when you'll need the system to keep your Raptor running cool. The right build takes into account your goals, time of day, and calories, and it's a joy to get into Clem's mind, dig in, and build a device that runs smoothly.

On the battlefield, the Raptor is agile but purposeful, possessing rage and steely strength. It can duck and run to avoid fire, but when you swing the chainsword, you're bearing its weight and momentum. An assault rifle can kill a man with one shot, but it's less effective against a heavy drill mech built for mining and repurposed for combat by outlaws. The double-barreled shotgun can penetrate the unmanned siege, but you'll need to be more precise against the other mech. Heavier enemies—drillers like you, raptors—have to lose stability before your melee weapons can bog them down, but once that's lost, a hammer, chain sword, or flaming gauntlet shakes them to the frame, steel against steel until something breaks. But beware of counterattacks, which may stall your attack and leave your raptor in trouble. To compensate, you have your own melee and sprinting skills. Cancel swinging the hammer for a dodge move while jumping backwards and firing your shotgun, or dash forward to swing a mecha baseball bat. Fighting another Raptor is like a tango, with the two gunners circling until one of them finds an opening.

It's satisfying, although repetition does occur when you see the same raptors, the same siege attackers, the same group of enemies over and over again, especially during low-priority repeatable bounties played between high-priority story missions. The environments Clem navigates, clearly a loving homage to the American Southwest, are stunning to say the least. Although you'll see some maps multiple times, many of them never lose their beauty, especially at night. Optional objectives vary, providing extra cash and challenging you to take no damage, use specific builds, complete bounties quickly, destroy objects scattered around the environment, find hidden items, and more. It's always worth searching an area for secret chests to gain additional rewards such as world lore, resources, or even blueprints for new weapons or recipes for Clem to craft in the kitchen.

During the bounty, you'll use the money Clem earns to build her new home and improve her raptor. It starts small. But soon, you'll be able to craft new weapons, unlock additional slots or loadouts, produce your own fuel, craft your own ammo, grow crops and raise chickens. As she rebuilds herself, the place she never wanted to be becomes home. These chores are small—feeding the chickens, watering the plants, sowing new seeds, making sure the fuel production system has enough water, cooking before departure—but I find joy in repeating life outside the cockpit and seeing the real, tangible progress Clem and I make on our healing journey.

AI puts more time and money into the farm, and I am able to do the work faster and more efficiently. Transporting water to each factory will complete the task. But it's much more fun to build a gun-powered irrigation system and watch the empty space slowly, bit by bit, be filled in by the work you do. Isn't this a life? My raptors also became more ferocious, and the bounties grew larger. In the beginning, one person feeds the other person. Raptor. farm. Over time, they intertwine and it's hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

In one of her journal entries, Clem reflected on her relationship with the Raptors, wondering if she should loathe them as war machines on principle, or rely on the strength and joy she felt while piloting the Raptors. It’s not just her problem, it’s our problem as players. She chooses the latter, partly because she has no choice and partly because she feels that by eliminating the bad guys, the world becomes a better place. Thankfully, you can capture your bounty alive, or scare off the dinosaurs with fireworks instead of killing them (sometimes you get paid more for this), but either way, you'll amass a lot of corpses. The house she built was the opposite. At first, she was dissatisfied with this and hoped to find a way out as soon as possible. But she came to see its potential. Soon I was making as much money from farming as I was from bounty hunting. What was a chore turned into a way of life.

As she builds her new life, other characters take up residence as well. She befriends a reformed gangster who offers her a way to relive past battles, which is useful for completing optional objectives in past story missions; Identity sells meat; a miner trapped in a hazmat suit works to build an ethical mine for other miners; an arms dealer who becomes a confidant; a giant insect driven out of his nest, becomes a friend (and, when fed and watered, becomes a weapon mounted on a raptor).

Each one is a mirror, giving Clem a chance to reflect on her life and her choices, showing us who she was and who she still might be. Will she become a woman at war with herself, reliving the battles that brought her here? There are many types of prisons. Some you take with you. Clem's raptor could be a cell. But it could also be armor, a key to something else. Something better. The past is prologue, but it doesn't have to define us. We choose who we are every day.

Bounty Star is a simple game. While the writing and voice acting are excellent, you'd never be mistaken for thinking there was a ton of money behind it. It frustrated me at times, like when it locked story progression behind building an engine I couldn't afford. (Fortunately, I had a fairly large farm at the time and eggs and corn prices were high.) It broke me several times. It may be a duplicate. I'm not sure I care about most of it, but it's part of my experience. But I do care about Clem, her story, the people she loves and the people who love her. This town accommodates all kinds of people. I wanted her to be able to rebuild her life and that helped me get through it.