STAR WARS Zero Company Review

Turn-based tactics games are everywhere, but STAR WARS Zero Company marks a long-overdue first for the galaxy far, far away. Developed by veterans formerly of Firaxis, it carries the DNA of both XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, yet carves out its own distinct identity. Whether you want a smooth narrative ride or a brutal campaign where you barely crawl away from victory, its flexible difficulty accommodates all play styles. Backed by a standout story that outshines many of its contemporaries, STAR WARS Zero Company isn’t just a great game, it’s a triumph for the genre.

You play as Hawks, a former Republic officer and completely customizable avatar for this adventure. From their first name to gender to race, you get to make the Star Wars character of your dreams (or nightmares). Hawks can be the default human, twi’lek, or zabrak to name a few. There’s also a plethora of clothing options to make them have a full clone trooper set, or more outlandish options you might not expect to be available. Set sometime during The Clone Wars, Hawks and the titular Zero Company are recruited to help stop a cult named The Infinite Coil, who carry a plague with them, infecting those around them. While interesting, it’s a threat we didn’t really need given The Clone Wars themselves is an interesting enough backdrop. That said, the encounters with The Infinite Coil in battle really bring distinct combat encounters each time, and you have to adapt to how you deal with them. There’s some genuine surprises during the campaign, which will run you around 30 hours to complete its linear set of missions. Along the way there are variables that get introduced, such as having to resolve dilemmas and deciding which missions to take, and which ones you’ll have to skip out on. Upon completing the campaign, there is a New Game+, but it’s paltry at best. Starting New Game+ wipes everything except cosmetics and the ability to recruit clone troopers from the start. Zero Company‘s story is absolutely worth the price of admission alone, but the turn-based tactics are top-tier.

While Hawks is the main character, he’s not the only one. There’s a whole crew here, with authored members you’ll meet and recruit to join you on your journeys. You start the game with Trick, a battle-hardened and visibly damaged clone trooper that’s loyal to a fault. Later on you’ll come across Tel-Rea, a Jedi Padawan with no master, Cly, a Mandalorian without a clan, and M-3VO, an astromech open to work. Each of the authored members of your crew are interesting, have backstories, and bonds waiting to be formed as they look to find a home with Zero Company. You get to choose classes for every character, with eight of them in total: Assault, Gunslinger, Heavy, Medic, Scoundrel, Scout, Sharpshooter, and Soldier. A lot of them sound like there’s overlap, and while partially true. The game truly shines several hours in when you get access to a second class, that allows you to create polar opposites or synergistic ones combining the Scout and Sharpshooter to work in tandem. This really opens up the character customization across the entire squad to utilize all classes at once.

The way Zero Company handles when combat starts is probably my favorite thing. Instead of shuttling you from fight to fight, you actually have time to walk around in the third-person perspective, and take in environments, conduct investigations, and really get immersed into the location. Then, at a certain point you will have to engage in combat, and the transition is super-smooth. My only complaint here is that there’s no way to ambush enemies. There are moments and even cutscenes where you’ll clearly have the advantage on an enemy, but it always starts with them seeing or reacting to your presence. Once things begin, and you’re paused, I really love the fact that not all action is paused. There’s ambient shooting from both sides that will always miss wildly, but keeps things from feeling frozen in place that so many other games do. Every character has a pool of action points (AP) that they can draw from to move, shoot, and support. Some movements depending on character’s build and distance will consume more AP, character abilities can consume action points as well. If you’ve played a recent XCOM game, you’ll be right at home. Whenever a character can’t move or shoot, overwatch is always a powerful final act, allowing you to shoot any enemy that moves within your cone of vision. While they weren’t my favorite in XCOM 2, Zero Company uses timed missions sparingly, allowing the tension to crescendo as you feverishly and carefully make your way to the person or object in time. Resurrect the memes: you can still miss a point-blank shot with a 95% chance to hit. It’s as hilarious as ever. I think all the great turn-based tactics games are at their best when you think about them when you’re not playing, or rethinking your strategy during a mission and how you could’ve done that better, or even avoided that death you realized was an unnecessary sacrifice. So yes, you can absolutely save scum your way through this game, and should.

Contrasting that methodology, the game impresses upon you to play the game with permadeath enabled. It’s on by default, but is a game where your decisions may have consequences, and characters can die for good. During a mission, if a character sustains three injuries, they die. Now, if you don’t want that option at all, you can disable permadeath to no penalty. To avoid deaths, you can heal your party members out of missions to remove injuries either in a medical bed to work over time, or consume more resources for a full heal in one cycle using a bacta tank. There’s a memory wall that you can visit and I just want #justiceforaurelio, Aurelio is a predetermined character death at the beginning of the game that had so much potential. There’s also a mode called Beskar, that distills your entire campaign into a single save file. This is a game for just about everyone to enjoy, and the accommodations are there if you want them.

The Den is a permanently docked ship is your base of operations. At first, it isn’t much, but you’ll quickly be adding onto it like expanding the med bay, adding a droid bay to recruit astromechs, and so on. The game doesn’t switch to a side view and let you build rooms like you would in other games, it’s much more subdued and minimal. It’s here where you’ll work to assign skill points to characters who’ve acquired them, perform cross training opportunities that allows improves abilities but also bonds, and more. Bonds can never be truly equal, so there will be some bonds that decrease as a result. You can also recruit party members, and if you want you could make a full droid or clone army, but that’s not advised, but you can. The main thing you’ll do here is pick what missions to partake in. You’ll gather intel, a resource used to investigate leads, perform text-based missions to accrue gear and items. Sometimes you’ll have to choose to take on a mission, but by doing it may lock you out of engaging in another because it will expire soon. For as much as the game is accessible in its difficulty, you’ll still be presented with dilemmas that you have to deal with the outcomes of.

Thankfully, there’s no custodial relationship like everything that you had to do in Midnight Suns, but the aforementioned bonds do have to be maintained through your choices. Being able to walk around in third-person to talk to members of your crew when you’re not in a mission. If you find the navigation a bit tedious, you can open up the map and teleport around the ship to quickly do the things you want to. For being a Star Wars game, it’s great to have any level of immersion and time to just soak things in, and let things feel more lived in.

I wish I could say this game runs well, but it’s very demanding overall. I played through the majority of the game on Linux, but due to some performance concerns, I did play an hour or so on Windows for comparison using all of the same settings (highest setting, DLSS set to Quality, Frame Generation enabled, Low Latency + Boost was ON). I was getting an average of 90fps on Windows and about 80fps on Linux. Unreal Engine 5 is a hive of scum and villainy, but there’s just a general weightiness when playing a game on this engine I can’t explain. Even on my system, DLSS is definitely doing a lot of the heavy lifting. This was more than playable, but it always felt like it should be running better than this. Hopefully there can be updates that focus on optimization across PC and console.

While comparisons to XCOM are inevitable, STAR WARS Zero Company is far more than a mod or total conversion. It might be the closest we ever get to XCOM 3, but Bit Reactor’s debut holds its own. Minor performance hiccups and a light New Game+ mode do little to dull its shine. With deeply satisfying turn-based combat, meaningful base management, and a narrative worth paying attention to – it’s a great confluence of all these systems to be a worthwhile successor for the genre. STAR WARS Zero Company is full of depth and consequence that earns its place in the pantheon of the great turn-based tactics games.