It makes a lot of sense that Star Wars Zero Company is the result of a collaboration between developers of XCOM 2 (now at Bitreactor) and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (at Respawn). Those two excellent games couldn’t be much more different from each other, but their strengths come together here to create a great-looking, clever tactics game that also tells one of the better Star Wars stories we’ve seen since Rogue One. Excellent characters, writing, music, and cinematic flair give context and weight to a campaign that centers around a diverse group of mercenaries, with Force powers and lightsabers refreshingly taking a back seat to blasters and thermal detonators. And while its turn-based gameplay is instantly familiar to XCOM veterans like me, its more aggressive playstyle and flexible characters make it far more than a simple Star Wars reskin.
The opening cutscene shows the Republic and Separatist fleets blasting away in orbit as the camera zooms in to Clone Troopers fighting battle droids on the ground, but then veers off to the side to focus on a smaller scuffle. That effectively establishes that this story takes place around the periphery of the Clone Wars rather than on its front lines. Our customizable main character, Hawks, is a former military commander who suffered a defeat and went into business for himself (or herself) with a crew of misfits. (If that sounds familiar, it may be because it’s also a perfect description of Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly, and Hawks’ voice even takes on a slight space cowboy drawl at times – but that’s only fair, given how much Mal owes to Han Solo in the first place.)
Hawks and company immediately come into conflict with a Separatist-aligned cult known as the Infinite Coil led by the enigmatic Fathom, who is bent on spreading a mind-altering plague across the galaxy with creepy bugs. While it’s hinted that this disease may be Force-adjacent, it’s a welcome change of pace to be up against something at least a bit more original than yet another Sith-like villain. Fortunately, Fathom is largely allowed to remain mysterious during her chilling performance, and her relationship with her henchman son prevents her from becoming a two-dimensional villain. And even though it’s not playable, she eventually orchestrates a climactic space battle unlike anything we’ve seen in Star Wars before.
Your main crewmembers all have compelling stories to follow as well, drawing to mind comparisons to Knights of the Old Republic (even though this isn’t that kind of RPG and you only rarely make dialogue decisions). What they lack in novelty, they make up for with strong writing and acting: big blue brawler Kabb fills the obligatory role of the alien who talks funny, Jae is a scion of a mining family driven from her home by Coil, Trick is a medically discharged clone with plenty of brothers to help, Cly is the Mandalorian out for revenge, Tel-Rea is an AWOL padawan investigating Coil, and Luco is a sharpshooter who hates the Republic but hates Fathom more. Each of them has their own chain of story missions to complete that include a decent number of twists and cameos from other Clone Wars-era characters.
Your main crewmembers all have compelling stories to follow.
The personalities that stand out most to me, though, are non-combatants you interact with only at your base, a docked freighter called The Den. Runa is your personnel manager/bookkeeper, and her Separatist background sets her apart from the rest of the crew, who are more aligned with the Republic. She’s also the most consistently funny, thanks to her endearing vanity and high level of sass. Her banter with the young, by-the-book Republic Intelligence officer Bennic is always entertaining while you’re choosing missions at the holotable display, and she makes him a more sympathetic character as his loyalties are tested by the events of the war. Special mentions for medical droid M-3VO and Neesh, an oversized Lasat arms dealer, both of whom have some good lines.
The other thing you’ll do before heading into combat is run Operations, where you’ll spend your limited Intel points to pick which off-screen text adventures to dispatch your team on, unlocking more missions and earning cash and loot prizes. A lot of those do feel like blindly rolling the dice because you’re asked to pick which team members to send without any indication of who might be better suited for, say, extracting hostages or hacking into a Separatist facility – so when things go wrong and people get injured it feels like, well, missing a 90% shot. But I always had a few bodies to spare on my roster, so that never tripped me up. And some of these are interesting dilemmas that give you a preview breaking down which of your team will be angry if you, for example, sell someone out to a Hutt for a few extra credits.
Always Tell Me The Odds
After you pick a mission and watch the repetitive, unskippable transit cutscene (which tends to hitch on both PC and PS5 Pro) as your team hyperspace-jumps into action, the tactical combat is easy to pick up if you’ve played anything in the XCOM vein. But while the fundamentals of controlling your team of four, taking cover, lining up attacks, and crossing your fingers that the RNG gods rule in your favor on a percentage to hit are similar, Zero Company is a vastly different game that encourages you to dive into the fray and push the enemy around. You’ll routinely knock them into each other, off of ledges, into an ally’s overwatch zone, or line them up for an area-of-effect attack. (Just remember to always have a backup plan, because you’re still going to miss those 90% shots 10% of the time.)
A big part of why I felt encouraged to do that is because, even though permadeath is on by default, your troops are pretty hard to kill. A character has to be downed three times (without being healed between missions) before they’re gone for good. There also aren’t that many surprise attacks, because the maps are usually pretty small and there’s no fog of war, meaning you’ll never be ambushed by an enemy you couldn’t see. On top of that, there are no lasting consequences for taking damage until someone’s downed for the first time and becomes injured, so I felt safe to take troops out of cover and into the open to absorb some punishment if it gave me a clear shot or got me close enough to an extraction zone that I could make it out the next turn. Despite that arrogance, in my first 35-hour playthrough on Normal difficulty, I didn’t come close to losing anybody (though I come to this with a few thousand hours of XCOM under my belt, so your mileage may vary).
Another major distinction is that it’s easy to chain together actions and give your operators more moves in a turn than their default three action points would normally allow. Advantage points are built up every time you damage an enemy (or use some specific abilities), and then you can spend them on extra abilities from any character, such as Trick’s rocket launcher or Hawks’ ability to grant an extra action point to a squad member. There are plenty of these, and that gives you a great reason to equip at least some people with blaster pistols: they’re lower damage and shorter range than rifles, repeaters, or sniper rifles, but they can fire off three (or more) shots per turn to rack up Advantage quickly.
One of the trickier systems to master is the Backup ability that randomly rotates around your squad every turn. The character who has it can designate a teammate within range to assist them, and on their next attack that teammate will take a followup shot that always hits, even if the first shot misses wildly. It’s incredibly valuable to have an opportunity to score guaranteed damage on every turn. But you have to be thoughtful about this because it’s easy to waste if your backup guy doesn’t actually have line of sight on the enemy, or if you land a critical hit and end up killing your target solo.
As much fun as it is to mow down dozens of hapless battle droids and watch them satisfyingly fall to pieces, Zero Company could have done with a bit more enemy variety. To be fair, there are quite a few types, including Coil soldiers who make you consider who’s closest when one of them dies because their allies may absorb some of their power. There are melee guys, sniper guys, and everything in between, but pretty much the only non-humanoids you encounter are the rolling, shielded Droidekas. Those are memorable fights, but after a while everything else starts to blend together a bit even if you do have to adapt your tactics.
I saw a fair number of graphical bugs, but nothing that noticeably messed me up.
Many of the story missions stand out at least, partly because they’ll do things like force you to move ahead by blowing up the area behind you or have you hold two locations at once and then extract while enemies constantly spawn in. For some of those you’ll do a string of battles in a single location, and Zero Company has a cool trick to tie them together: the camera zooms in to third person and you run from one to the next, controlling Hawks directly until you walk into the combat zone. It gives you a much better sense that you’re fighting in a real place than in the side missions where, more often than not, you’re dropped directly and jarringly into a battle. I do wish there were more to do from that perspective than walk up to a person or thing and push a button to trigger some dialogue, because the levels you walk through look great.
That said, you’ll probably see a fair number of graphical bugs during missions, particularly when enemies are air-dropped in, and the camera can get a bit wonky when it zooms in for what’s supposed to be a flashy animation and shows you a close-up of a wall instead. A few times after a slow-motion overwatch reaction shot, I thought I might have to force-quit because everything hung for a good 20 seconds before resuming. But I haven’t seen anything that noticeably messed me up – I never once had to reload a mission because I felt something hadn’t gone according to plan thanks to a glitch. So it’s safe to say that Zero Company is substantially less buggy than XCOM 2 when it first came out (and maybe even today).
Character progression is a little strange in that you’re given almost complete freedom to remake most of your team at will. Hawks, for instance, can be changed from a Medic one mission to a Sniper the next, and any of the other six specialities after that. You can respec all his skill points and swap his gun out (in a wonderfully nerdy touch, each of the four weapon types has multiple different looks to pick from with their own sound effects) to further customize how you want them to play. The same goes for a lot of minor recruitable characters – excluding the incredibly handy astromech droids, which are purpose-built for handing out action points to teammates and lobbing grenades and healing items like crazy. That level of flexibility certainly encourages experimentation, even if it does make your choices matter a bit less when it comes to building out your team in the long term.
The only real restrictions are on your main crewmates, who can still be respecced but each have a defining class and a unique ability that give you a reason to keep them alive (on top of being able to complete their story missions). Jae’s Last Shot triggers a fantastically helpful execution when an enemy’s HP falls below a certain threshold, Kabb’s melee attack refunds your action points if it kills the target, Cly has a Mandalorian jetpack that sets people on fire as she lands, Trick can resurrect himself once per mission, etc. Tel-Rea, naturally, has her own unique Jedi skill system.
One thing that can’t be redone at will is the bond bonuses. When two teammates care about each other very much, they level up their bond and you get to choose between three randomly selected bonuses that apply to both of them, such as increasing ranged damage by one or going a bit farther on their first move. These are pretty small boosts on their own, but they add up over time and will significantly increase some crucial stats if you’re consistent with your choices.
Things get doubly complex when you unlock the ability to give each character a secondary class, which lets you split their skill points between two class trees or concentrate on one. That opens up a whole new layer of opportunity for synergizing abilities, weapon mods, and utility items. I feel like I only scratched the surface of this potential on my first playthrough, and I’ve already started another on Hard to see how much I’ll need to fine-tune my builds to survive.
I’m a few hours into that run, and I can already feel that the replayability of Zero Company is a bit limited relative to XCOM 2 because it’s more story-focused and lacks the procedurally generated maps and randomized upgrade unlocks that make that game so dynamic. That’s a sky-high bar to meet, though, so I’m not holding that against it – and I definitely missed some missions that can expire before you’re able to get to them on my first playthrough, so I expect there will be a fair amount of new things to do this time.
