Bounty Star is a Shallow Shooter that Plays Well on Steam Deck

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Bounty Star was provided by Annapurna Interactive. Thank you!

The 3rd-person mech shooter Bounty Star has just launched on Steam. This one intrigued me when I saw it at a game show a few months ago, so I was interested to dive in and check out how the game ran on the Steam Deck. It promises a mixture of mech combat, farming, and base-building, and I wanted to find out if it lived up to the promise.

Bounty Star - Gameplay Impressions

Bounty Star is an interesting game. After a short prologue, which essentially sets up our protagonist, Clem's backstory for the rest of the game, you find yourself in a rundown ranch taking up the profession of a bounty hunter. From this point on, you're accepting contracts that come in, customizing your mech, and expanding your base of operations.

Most of your gametime will be spent in combat, doing bounties in relatively small areas where the objective is to defeat or capture your target, while also dealing with other threats. The combat feels fine. I did feel like things could be a bit more "weighty" with this being a mech game, but it leans more into the arcade style of mech shooters, where you have dash boosts and your gun feels largely like a peashooter; there's no "kick" to anything, really. Dodging rarely seems to evade enemy attacks either.

I did find the movement a little awkward; you can't just rotate on the spot, and your mech has a "turning circle", much like a car would. It feels strange for a bipedal mech to require that, when it's usually not a constraint in most mech games. The on-foot movement, as Clem herself controls similarly, requiring her to first walk forward and turn around if you're trying to walk backward, feels pretty weird.

Ultimately, Bounty Star has a nice vibe to it, the aesthetics are decent, and I enjoy the soundtrack, which is very "wild western", but I felt the game became pretty repetitive pretty fast. The gameplay loop is "do a bounty, go home, cook a meal (meals can give you stat boosts), buy/craft any new equipment that becomes available, do a bounty, and repeat". All of the tasks feel routine, and the base-related tasks feel like they were tacked onto the game to break up the constant fighting, but everything feels a bit flat and shallow. I wouldn't describe this as a base-building or farming game; it's a shooter through and through, with some very light elements of those two.

Bounty Star - Steam Deck Performance

Bounty Star has good controller support and supports 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions, so the Steam Deck does not have black bars.

Interestingly, Bounty Star has no graphics options beyond resolution and motion blur. I thought it was a Steam Deck-specific issue and developer-recommended preset options were in place, but as it turns out, the game just lacks them entirely. Fortunately, the game still runs and looks OK on the Steam Deck.

I recommend locking the frame rate to 40 FPS in the SteamOS settings, and you'll get a mostly stable experience. However, I did get stutters in intense combat, particularly when many explosions or visual effects were firing off; it could drop down to around 30, but the game remains very playable.

With this setup, the power draw was around 13W-16W. So expect a battery life of around 3.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 2.5 hours on a Steam Deck LCD.

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