Bounty Star, Shallow Shooter Runs Properly on Steam Deck

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The Third-person mech shooter Bounty Star has simply launched on Steam. This one intrigued me once I noticed it at a sport present a couple of months in the past, so I used to be to dive in and take a look at how the sport ran on the Steam Deck. It guarantees a combination of mech fight, farming, and base-building, and I wished to search out out if it lived as much as the promise.

Bounty Star – Gameplay Impressions

Bounty Star is an attention-grabbing sport. After a brief prologue, which basically units up our protagonist, Clem’s backstory for the remainder of the sport, you end up in a rundown ranch taking over the career of a bounty hunter. From this level on, you are accepting contracts that are available in, customizing your mech, and increasing your base of operations.

Most of your gametime will likely be spent in fight, doing bounties in comparatively small areas the place the target is to defeat or seize your goal, whereas additionally coping with different threats. The fight feels superb. I did really feel like issues could possibly be a bit extra “weighty” with this being a mech sport, nevertheless it leans extra into the arcade fashion of mech shooters, the place you might have sprint boosts and your gun feels largely like a peashooter; there isn’t any “kick” to something, actually. Dodging not often appears to evade enemy assaults both.

I did discover the motion a little bit awkward; you may’t simply rotate on the spot, and your mech has a “turning circle”, very like a automotive would. It feels unusual for a bipedal mech to require that, when it is normally not a constraint in most mech video games. The on-foot motion, as Clem herself controls equally, requiring her to first stroll ahead and switch round when you’re attempting to stroll backward, feels fairly bizarre.

In the end, Bounty Star has a pleasant vibe to it, the aesthetics are respectable, and I benefit from the soundtrack, which could be very “wild western”, however I felt the sport grew to become fairly repetitive fairly quick. The gameplay loop is “do a bounty, go house, cook dinner a meal (meals can provide you stat boosts), purchase/craft any new tools that turns into obtainable, do a bounty, and repeat”. The entire duties really feel routine, and the base-related duties really feel like they had been tacked onto the sport to interrupt up the fixed combating, however every part feels a bit flat and shallow. I would not describe this as a base-building or farming sport; it is a shooter via and thru, with some very gentle parts of these two.

Bounty Star – Steam Deck Efficiency

Bounty Star has good controller assist and helps 16:10 facet ratio resolutions, so the Steam Deck doesn’t have black bars.

Apparently, Bounty Star has no graphics choices past decision and movement blur. I believed it was a Steam Deck-specific difficulty and developer-recommended preset choices had been in place, however because it seems, the sport simply lacks them fully. Thankfully, the sport nonetheless runs and appears OK on the Steam Deck.

I like to recommend locking the body fee to 40 FPS within the SteamOS settings, and you will get a principally secure expertise. Nonetheless, I did get stutters in intense fight, significantly when many explosions or visible results had been firing off; it may drop all the way down to round 30, however the sport stays very playable.

With this setup, the facility draw was round 13W-16W. So anticipate a battery lifetime of round 3.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and round 2.5 hours on a Steam Deck LCD.

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