Bounty Star Review

So much missed potential

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Title: Bounty Star

Release: October 23, 2025

Platform: PS5 PC Xbox X|S

Developer: DINOGOD

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Genre: Action

ESRB: M

Reviewed on: PC

Time Played: 11 Hours

Out in the desert, a second chance can look a lot like punishment. Bounty Star drops you into dusty canyons, broken dreams, and a mech that’s barely holding together — just like the person piloting it. I’ll start by breaking down what you can expect from the game mechanics, or you can skip ahead to my final thoughts and ratings. But if you’ve ever wondered what redemption looks like under a sun that never sets, this one might have an answer — even if it’s not the one you expect.

Where it starts

Clem is a soldier and expert mech pilot in charge of a small team with the difficult task of defending a small town from militants. Her skills helped push back the enemy, but a small lapse in judgment allowed the city and most of her team to be destroyed. Broken, depressed, and unable to forgive herself, Clem moves on to stay alone and drink her days away. Eventually, a friend reaches out and offers her an old abandoned mech and garage to take care of, along with plenty of jobs around the area collecting bounties on the riff raff, in the hopes it may pull her out of her funk.

The Garage

When you’re not out hunting bandits, you’ll spend your time in the Garage. However, it’s so much more than just a garage. There, you’ll have access to a store through a computer, a kitchen for preparing food, a bed to sleep in, and some land that can be farmed and used to house animals. At first, the homestead may seem plain, but as you progress through the story, you can craft new equipment and turn it into something special and much more efficient.

Workbench & Kitchen

To make your home the best it can be, you’ll need to craft equipment for various tasks. At the workbench, you can view any blueprints you have and see the materials needed to craft them. If you’re missing anything, you can buy what’s needed right there at the bench. Once crafted, the new equipment will automatically be placed where it belongs. The same applies in the kitchen: once you learn a recipe, you can cook a meal to boost certain stats for a mission. If you’re missing ingredients, you can buy them from the kitchen or save money by growing everything yourself.

Mission Prep

At the start of a new day, depending on how much you’ve added to your garage, you’ll have some chores to complete, such as watering plants and electrolyzers, caring for the animals, and making some ammo boxes. After completing chores, you check the bounty board to pick a mission. Before heading out, you can review a checklist on the wall for recommended actions. Eating before a mission, talking to a visitor, and so on. When you’re ready, double-check the equipment on the mech and head out.

Mech Combat

After finishing everything at home, it’s time to get into the Raptor MKII and take on some enemies. In combat, you can carry one ranged and one melee weapon, along with extra items for healing, zooming around, or general stat buffs. While fighting, you need to watch your temperature; if it goes all the way down or up, you’ll experience a thermal shutdown and be vulnerable for a few seconds while it restarts. Once you’ve defeated your enemies, you can leave the area and start the process all over again.

Can the kids watch (check settings)

Visually, there isn’t much to worry about—mainly lots of explosive battles between mechs, insects, and occasionally dinosaurs. The main issues would come from the language used. Nearly every character has a wide vocabulary of curse words and isn’t afraid to use them frequently. They didn’t have inappropriate conversations, just some naughty words you might want to watch out for.

Final Thoughts

I would love to hear any thoughts or questions you have about the game or my review, so leave me a message in the comments below. While you do that, let’s move on to my final thoughts and ratings.

Bounty Star is a small game packed with a lot. It features mech customization and combat, the mechanics of a farming sim, and even dinosaurs—yeah, freaking dinosaurs in the middle of the desert. However, despite all the awesome possibilities this mix offers, the game fell short on delivery. The first few hours were slow, but that can be expected with some games, so I pushed through. It was a slow burn until I unlocked the ability to fight with two sets of gear for my mech, which added more flexibility during hunts. I was excited to see what else I could unlock. That excitement faded a few hours later as I advanced further in the story and didn’t find anything particularly cool. The slow burn eventually fizzled out.

The best part of this game was the writing. Clem was a compelling character, and I enjoyed her interactions with everyone. It wasn’t all serious either; the humor sprinkled throughout the story was great, and I thoroughly enjoyed it all. It may have been the typical hero loses faith in themselves and accepts who they are to become a hero again story, but Clem was amazing. I’d listen to her talk about food in her diary any day.

The environments, mechs, and monsters in the game looked great, but I couldn’t get past the human designs. It was mostly the bugged-out eyes. I didn’t notice the eyes of most people, but Clem’s always seemed like they were about to pop right out of her face, and she was most definitely not always surprised. It might have been the decision to make her eyes red, but I never got over that.

Going out in a fully equipped mech to fight bandits was initially kind of fun, but it quickly became repetitive with little to shake things up. Every mission had sub-objectives that would reward extra money if completed, but there were simpler ways than engaging in fights with specific loadouts or hunting for hidden caches. There were plenty of activities I could spend time on, like watering crops, caring for animals, and crafting. But very few of these felt worth the effort. The best way I found to make money was to replay a mission repeatedly, taking about three minutes each run—much faster than the daily routine of caring for the homestead.

It took me eleven hours to finish the main story, and it felt like an hour of that was just the cut scenes in between sleeping, cooking, and going out on a hunt. I got pretty good at skipping the nonsense, but it still took up a lot of time. Another problem I faced was the game locking me out of the bounty board at certain points in the story until I crafted a specific item that I didn’t have enough money to make. I don’t mind story elements being locked behind certain tasks, but being locked out of most of the game while I figured out how to earn some money was frustrating.

And now we’ve come to the point where I like to convert everything into number and place this game on a shelf.

The visuals were good for the most part, Clem’s eyes were very hard to like, I’m giving it a 2

The story was surprising well written, great characters and humor, I’m handing out a 4

The gameplay was extremely repetitive, and most of the activities hardly felt worth the effort, it’s getting a 2.

No replayability, I had to do some missions over and over again for money, but I do not want to revisit this game now that I’ve beat it, that’s a 0.

It started fun and felt like it could grow into something awesome, but fell short, I’m handing out a 2.

Giving Bounty Star an average score of 2 out of 5. Earning it a spot on my Bottom Shelf. It seemed like it could have been great given all of the different genres pulled it pulled from. Sadly the rewards for farming were to low, the combat was extremely repetitive and short. The writing was great, but not quite good enough to offset playing the game. I wouldn’t recommend checking this one out, however I would recommend keeping an eye on the developers, DINOGOD, their writing is on par, and if they can learn from what didn’t work here, I’d expect great things in the future.