Star Wars Zero Company wants you to have a great time. Developers Bit Reactor pull up to the table with the toybox fully open, confident that a Star Wars-draped XCOM doesn’t need to worry about ultra difficulty for its turn-based gameplay to succeed. Painstaking tactical decisions are replaced with character, warmth, and a charming group of outsiders who provide a shot of life into a franchise that has begun to grate through oversaturation.
Those characters make up the titular Zero Company, a rag-tag bunch of exiles who fight for redemption – both personal and collectively – through the sweeping Clone Wars-era story. Playable character Hawks is fully customisable, and brimming with the positivity to prop up a cast that includes popular Star Wars archetypes. Through the story alone, you’ll recruit a Padawan, Mandalorian, and Umbaran whose place in the battle between the Republic and Separatists is rather complicated.
Hawks has plenty of baggage to deal with after leading their previous army to slaughter. Not to be deterred, the former military commander turns to work-for-hire jobs alongside straight-laced trooper Trick, and a little blue fellow named Kabb, whose endearingly odd way of speaking earns him an extra strike or two in the ‘Must Protect At All Costs’ ledger.
Before long, Hawks’ core group are thrust into a planet-trotting fight against the Infinite Coil, a cultish paramilitary operation dictated by Fathom, the big bad who aims to release a kill-or-convert plague across the galaxy.
This triggers the arrival of Jae Mordant, a playable ore baroness displaced by the horrors of Shu-Torun aristocracy, and Bennic, a Republic intelligence officer who acts as the sensible one amongst the various flavours of personality in The Den, the freighter which acts as your homestead.
Jae is indispensable once she’s with your crew. While each character can be specced to your liking, including their class, weapons, and utility items, her Final Shot ability is a powerful execution tool that simply can’t be overlooked in battle. This deals automatic damage to enemies after another party member gets their life down to a certain point, teeing Jae up to take the glory with a well-placed shot if she has a line of sight. It doesn’t eat up an action point, serving as a free hit if you can funnel enemies within her range.
Finding this type of synergy is pretty simple in Zero Company, which eventually allows you to add a secondary class to all. An astromech soon joins the fray, opening up the possibility of scanning the battlefield and upping the percentage that you will successfully hit a droid or Coil follower. The beepy bot also flaunts an array of grenade slots, self-healing, and the power to distribute additional action points to your team, meaning turns don’t need to end when each of your pals has initially run out of moves.
Such generosity makes this a much easier time than XCOM. The threat of permadeath never really materialises. Your squad can sustain injuries before succumbing, but with so many options to deal with that during a skirmish, there’s little need to worry. Even if someone gets hurt, there’s a good chance the medibay can clear them for duty without a day’s work passing by.
This charity trickles through the rest of Zero Company, which gives you fair warning against some of its biggest dangers. Environmental hazards, such as gunships laying down a barrage of missiles on designated points of the map, are marked clearly before they unload. Groups of enemy reinforcements enter through the same opening, telegraphed one turn before they appear, allowing you to quickly change your setup before the impending threat has even arrived.
Almost everything is skewed towards chaining together attacks, accumulating advantage points through damage output, and then hitting as hard as possible. Zero Company wants you to send battle droid fodder flying through the air with a cheeky concussion grenade. It’s begging for you to use the force, flinging useless cult members against cover, or even better, straight off the map. Bit Reactor knows lightsabers are cool and allow the whirring sword to essentially break the game in some missions. The sense of power is palpable after years of abuse at the hands of XCOM.
Less satisfying is the PC performance, which comes packed with the familiar issues of an unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 game. Even on a high-end rig there’s stuttering in The Den, and in the fun third-person sections that sometimes precede conflict. It can be worse out in the field, which has a habit of freezing for a good 10 seconds or so after you decide your action. While the issues tend to sort themselves, I had one moment where it completely froze and forced me to hard quit, restarting an entire mission.
This stunting of progress isn’t in keeping with the rest of the game, which is designed for you to push forwards at all times, whether you’re on a mission or back at base.
Your squad quickly builds in power and influence, conquering different zones to unlock new weapon attachments, additional item slots and more. Text-based operations happen before each mission, often forcing you to choose between multiple outcomes – such as which character to send to a shooting contest – in order to earn rewards. While nicely written, there’s no consistent indicator to determine how different choices would lead to a vastly different result.
That said, Zero Company’s bond system is a really smart inclusion that adds to the sense of a burgeoning family. Duos who work together will both receive an uptick in their bond, which quickly turns to small stat improvements. This could be +1 to ranged attack damage, extra health, or a greater chance of a critical shot. Each operator develops with anyone else they fight alongside, so it plays a key role in the group’s galvanisation by the end of the campaign.
Most players will have a formidable troop soon into the 30-35 hour playthrough. Despite the lack of challenge, even on hard difficulty, I found myself wanting to take on as many side missions as possible the first time around. The script is superb, and genuinely funny, providing vital context to battles that veer towards becoming slightly repetitive due to the small selection of enemies.
Backstories also come to the fore. Hawks’ unflustered nature ensures they have the right response whether you’re helping Kabb find a mysterious object so he can listen to his beloved opera, or learning about the awful marriage situation Jae escaped back home. They’ll joke with Neesh, the black market dealer whose supply of rations taste a little off, and snap back at Runa, the ship’s feisty advisor.
That sense of heart beats through everything Zero Company does well. The Disneyfication of XCOM works tremendously, but it’s important to head into this knowing it’s not XCOM 3. Instead, we have an easier to manage spiritual successor that doesn’t just want the force to be with you, it wants you to cackle, and celebrate, as you cause one-sided destruction with it.
