Compared to the endless onslaught of Star Wars games that used to come out back in the day, a good, solid Star Wars experience is a rarity for gamers nowadays. Looking at the past few years, Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi games have certainly been doing the heavy lifting where single-player narrative games are concerned. The story for both those games was excellent, and it has certainly got us all eagerly anticipating the end to that trilogy. Star Wars Outlaws was another blockbuster title, but it reaped rather mixed reviews for its lack of polish and inconsistent writing quality, owing to Ubisoft’s open-world structure and how that often makes narratives disjointed. As fun as they may be, brimming with fan service and lore for Star Wars fans, none of these games has really deviated from a rather simple shooter or action game model. The IP certainly does a lot for those games, even if they are solid, Respawn’s games specifically. Enter the late Vince Zampella, founder of Respawn, who asked Greg Foertsch and his studio, Bit Reactor, to make a Star Wars tactics game. Foertsch, of course, was formerly of Firaxis Games, known for making the excellent XCOM games and 2022’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns. The latter in particular showcased their talent in taking an IP and crafting an intelligent tactics-based game out of it. Bit Reactor is a studio comprised of many former Firaxis staff, so the dream of a Star Wars XCOM-style game was not too far-fetched. Fast-forward to now, Star Wars Zero Company has been released, and it is everything a Star Wars fan, or a fan of anything in Firaxis‘ repertoire, could ask for. Its cast of characters and story are all sharply written; its gameplay systems are so very XCOM-like, whilst taking full advantage of making everything feel as Star Wars-y as possible. Aside from a lack of polish and some bad optimisation, this is an all-timer Star Wars game and a must for any fan to try.

Zero Company places fans at the end of The Clone Wars in the shoes of a player-created character going by the name of Hawks. Formerly of the Republic military, Hawks was dismissed from action after an operation gone wrong and thus took all the blame. Instead, Hawks leads an independent mercenary outfit named Zero Company, with friends Runa, Neesh, Kabb, and former clone trooper Trick. In mountains of debt to the slimy Hutts, they take whatever jobs they can to get by, often encountering unsavoury figures. One such set of unsavoury figures is a mysterious cult named The Infinite Coil, a group of fanatics all infected with a condition known as the Shadow Plague. Aligned with the Separatists and led by a strange woman named Kundri Fathom, they present a silent but deadly threat to the galaxy. Bennic Halloren of the Republic and Jae Mordant, a Luunatan ore-baroness, offer Zero Company a chance to go debt-free if they help to get rid of the Coil and stop Fathom from spreading her plague. On your journey, you will meet many new faces, such as Jedi Padawan Tel-Rea, Mandalorian bounty hunter Cly Kullervo, and Umbaran guerrilla fighter Luco Bronc. You can recruit new operators to your outfit and equip any of them with lots of modifications and utilities to take the fight to the Coil and the Separatists. Commanding 4-person teams, you must tactically guide your operators through covert missions that offer a fair amount of challenge to even seasoned XCOM fans. In a galaxy-wide adventure that offers different perspectives on key Star Wars events, you will still forge a story of your own, with a great cast of characters and a solid story.

Zero Company‘s gameplay is a flawless example of turn-based tactics gameplay done right; it is so much more than just XCOM with a Star Wars coat of paint. I love the XCOM games, particularly for their great gameplay feel, giving you the impression you are a master tactician on the battlefield. When going up against the large force of the Separatists, this game demands you be nothing less than a master, constantly throwing new enemy types at you and forcing you to adapt your team’s gear and tactics often. The fundamentals are that each character has three action points to spend on their turn, which can be used on movement, firing your weapon, using utilities or special abilities. Attacking is all based on a percentage of chance-to-hit and you have to move your team around to make it so you can get the most out of each turn, getting that perfect angle and an even more perfect shot. There are rare things more satisfying in gaming than landing a less than 20% chance-to-hit in a last-ditch attempt to save your skin, but it is even more satisfying when you coordinate the perfect team attack. I particularly loved the overwatch mechanic, which lets you set a cone of vision up for an operator, and any enemy that moves into it will automatically trigger a reaction shot. Setting up a full team on overwatch over a doorway with reinforcements about to pour through is excellent fun, and you definitely feel like that aforementioned master tactician. A well-placed grenade or droid-popper evokes a quick burst of that same dopamine rush, and it never gets old. Even though your objectives mission to mission do vary, you are pretty much doing the same thing each time, dispatching enemies in cover-filled battlefields, and Bit Reactor really needed to nail it like this to stop it from feeling repetitive. The many abilities that each character has definitely help with this, and combining them together in unique ways is certainly where I found the most enjoyment. Tel force-pushing an enemy into Cly’s path for her to electrocute them to death, Kabb marking an enemy and then assisting the next person who attacks them; there are so many things you can do to keep the variety going and keep the game consistently fun. The characters and their diversity are at the heart of that, offering lots of different ways to fight and synergise with each other, but it also helps that you care a hell of a lot about them, thanks to the writing talent.

Aaron Contreras, writer of the Star Wars Jedi games and now Zero Company, has a true talent for realising what makes Star Wars work, particularly when it comes to crafting a story that feels like its own thing but still quintessentially Star Wars. Here in Zero Company, every single character is handled with a great degree of care, and it makes using them so much more rewarding. Hawks starts off as a rather run-of-the-mill scoundrel protagonist, but delving into his war-scarred backstory makes him so much more interesting. A man desperately trying to get by and be better, riddled with survivor’s guilt from his previous team. Zero Company is a home for him but also a chance for him to be a better leader, and one that has agency in every single action he commands. Part of his struggle is that his failed operation was not his idea, and he even knew it would not work. Clone Wars TV fans will know the name of who instructed him straight away, and realise he definitely had no choice, but I will not spoil that. Still, grappling with that guilt and using it to become a better leader is key to his character, and it never fails to be interesting. It certainly helps that he is often hilarious, full of southern charm, and the way he interacts with his peers just makes you love him even more. The companions in Zero Company are written with just as much bite. It definitely makes the game feel close to Mass Effect in that everybody is interesting and you want to finish their stories rather than just feeling it to be a chore. The bond system with each companion also helps with this, as talking to companions, letting their stories play out and using them in combat helps to make your characters much stronger. Luco Bronco’s story in particular I found to be very well handled, as he is from Umbara where one of the bloodiest battles of the Clone Wars took place. Seeing his immediate disdain for Trick may seem misplaced, but the way he talks of his home as being invaded by a faceless menace, referring to the clones, makes you understand and sympathise with him. Pulling small threads from things like the Umbara arc in Clone Wars may seem like daft fan service, but the way it’s written offers a different, rewarding perspective on events we know, and it is never done clumsily. Fan service is only ever earned in this game, pulling characters from canon only when absolutely necessary for the story they want to tell. There are some nice surprises and mentions for both massive characters and those Glup Shittos only hardcore fans will know. The overall plot itself is nothing special, with Fathom being a bit of an average villain, but she and the Coil serve as a great vessel to tell an ensemble character-driven story that ends up being profoundly moving in multiple instances.

Zero Company is a brilliant game that tells a unique Star Wars story and certainly tells it well. It uses locales and characters you know and love whilst throwing in plenty of new characters that you will learn to love just as much, and in such a long-running franchise, that is no small feat. Its grittier approach to offering new perspectives on Clone Wars landmark moments is excellent, and it never feels like it is throwing too much fan service at you. This is a 30-40 hour-ish game, dependent on how many side missions you do, and a large amount of that is focused on the team, their own stories and the matter at hand. Anything else is a succulent dessert after an already filling and satisfying main course. The tactical gameplay system is a combination of everything great about Firaxis’ signature, with Bit Reactor making their own mark all the same. It is so much fun to play and even more fun to see the story unfold, particularly if you are a massive Star Wars fan like myself. The only reason this does not get a perfect score is due to the overall polish and amount of glitches I experienced. There is a lot of pop-in and texture detail problems throughout the whole game, and I even experienced a couple of crashes. The camera can often be rubbish too, and sometimes it takes a space age to actually perform the action you asked for. But with all this being said, the game is too much fun for it to really impact the game’s overall quality for me. Your mileage may vary, and everybody is different when it comes to how much jank they can handle, but when everything else is designed as well as this, I would hope it is easy to look past. If you are a Star Wars fan or an XCOM fan, I encourage you to give this a go. If you are both, like myself, this is an absolute no-brainer.