Star Wars: Hunters is – in more ways than one – a project that intrigues me. First, it has been in development for more than five years. Yes, you read that right. A mobile game developed over almost six years, based on the entire Star Wars universe, of course, and offering full and free access to all the mythology, side stories, characters, and associated aesthetics/music. Furthermore, Hunters was developed by a studio called Natural Motion (and its subsidiary Boss Alien), which has set a new standard in the use of ragdoll physics and intelligence in both games and film animation in a relatively short period of time. Natural Motion’s proprietary Euphoria animation engine is not only at the heart of how characters move and react to physical objects in games like GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2, Star Wars Force Unleashed, and the upcoming Indiana Jones game, it also powers a large portion of the effects work on films like The Little Mermaid (2023), Transformers: Dawn of the Beasts, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Natural Motion hasn’t developed many games themselves, but their technology is naturally proven and objectively pretty phenomenal, leading their ownership group Zynga (now owned by Take Two) to task them with developing a multiplayer-oriented Star Wars game with the potential to last a long time and attract millions of trigger-happy team players.
Star Wars: Hunters is an arena-based action game where two teams of four players each compete for victory in gorgeous Star Wars environments inspired by various locations and planets from George Lucas’ beloved space opera. Hunters is told from the traditional third-person perspective and is free to download and play on Android and iPhone. Your bounty hunter is controlled via simple touch controls, and the weapon fires automatically when the scope is aimed at an enemy. In addition, each character has special skills and specialties. In other words, Hunters is a bit like a mobile mix of Overwatch and Star Wars: Battlefront.
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I enjoy gaming on my iPhone 14 Pro Max and have always enjoyed gaming on my phone in my moped car. I’ve found the rhetoric here on the site among those of you who read about the mobile market to be abhorrent to say the least, and the last five years of ever-greedy macro transactions and the focus that’s been put on them has naturally sparked this opposing feeling in many gamers. I understand it, of course. I myself have reviewed over 100 iPhone games in the last three years, almost all of which turned out to be subpar. But sometimes, of course, true gems come out that in many ways redefine what a small free-to-play mobile game can and maybe even should be. Hunters is one of those projects.
It’s clear from the introduction that 99% of everything released for Android and iPhone is cheaper, less ambitious, uglier and worse made. Natural Motion has used ingenuity, money and most importantly time to create a truly life-sized Star Wars experience, wrapped up in a very successful design. Hunters is beautiful. Really beautiful. The design is a mix of Rebels, Clone Wars and Battlefront II and really gets the feel right. It doesn’t look too childish, but it doesn’t try to resemble Force Unleashed or all the more recent films either, with the environments and characters being more cartoony and bathed in bright, beautiful colors.
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It flows really well, too. You can tell the developers took nearly two years (!) to tweak, refine, and streamline everything, from the little details of the menus, the fonts, the buttons, the loading screens, to the way everything on-screen flows and works when things get hot. Being in a small, tan, dirty alley in southwest Mos Eisley, with three teammates spraying laser shots by the thousands at the attacking enemy team, without the screen refreshing noticeably slowing down, and without the low-res explosions looking boring to bread, it’s certainly a joy to play, and, as I said, an obvious testament to how well polished this product is.
The matches are short, intense and fast-paced without being too chaotic or difficult to understand. Of course, if you want to play an agile and nimble character who can flank enemies with ease and escape fire at full speed, it is equally possible for the tank player to put a real slow machine gun blur behind his team while providing massive fire support, but cannot escape an attack from four players from the opposing team with the same ease. This all works very well and it feels like the balance between classes, characters and different levels of enhancement works very well. Sometimes the skill-based matchmaking makes me match up with players who don’t have a single upgrade to their character, which means massive carnage, but I think this has more to do with the fact that Hunters has not been officially released yet and won’t be until next week.
After all these years of development and polishing, there’s no doubt that Natural Motion has produced one of the best mobile games I’ve played in years. Sure, sometimes the game mechanics and touch controls feel a bit too automated and I miss more ways to use the verticality of the environments and learn different parts of the game’s movement, but on the other hand, it’s well adapted and intelligently scales to all players on all mobile phones.