It's not often that a game comes out that seems almost tailored to my personal interests. I'm a huge fan of tactics games like XCOM and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, and Star Wars is my all-time favorite fictional universe. Imagine my surprise and delight when Star Wars Zero Company was announced. My banshee-like shrieks of excitement reached such a high tenor and frequency that all of the windows in my home exploded outward, showering my yard in broken shards of glass. Zero Company sold me on its premise long before I even put my hands on the game. Trailers and pre-release coverage showed off a surprisingly AAA-looking tactical gaming experience from former XCOM developers, and an immediately compelling Star Wars setting and story that spoke to exactly the kind of adventures I love from that universe. Needless to say, I've been counting down the days till I could finally play Star Wars Zero Company.
That time finally came, after what felt like an eternity. Zero Company is here and I've been completely blown away by this game's masterful design across the board. The development team, Bit Reactor, has crafted rich and refined tactical gameplay that feels cinematic and strategically satisfying. That XCOM-honed talent was made clear right out of the gate. Perhaps even more noteworthy than the impressive gameplay though, is the brilliant writing at the heart of this game. As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I could immediately tell that the narrative was written by someone with a great deal of knowledge and admiration for the franchise. Star Wars "ball knowledge" aside, I was genuinely surprised by how effortlessly funny and heartfelt some of the lines and performances were. I found myself laughing aloud quite often, and feeling legitimately endeared to the characters and rooting for them.
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As usual in my reviews, I'm not going to delve too deeply into the plot, so I can hopefully avoid spoilers. Star Wars Zero Company centers around the titular crew of mercenaries as they work alongside Republic Intelligence to thwart the nefarious plans of a Separatist-aligned cult known as The Infinite Coil. The player controls Hawks, the leader of Zero Company. Your crew is comprised of a ragtag gang of soldiers from diverse backgrounds, and I really appreciated how distinct each character felt from the last. I loved taking the time to speak to each of the crew members during our downtime and learning more about them and their aspirations and motivations. Kabb, the blue-skinned, ex-boxer who converses in an adorable rhyming pattern was an instant favorite. There are also characters like a Clone Trooper, a Mandalorian and a Jedi, each with their own compelling back stories and reasons for being a part of Zero Company. If for whatever reason you aren't interested in using the pre-existing characters, you can also make your own operators. The character creation is quite robust. You can choose between several distinct species (most of them being a bit too humanoid for my tastes), and extensively edit their appearance to your liking.
Beyond appearance, every character can have their class swapped and augmented to help you build exactly the team that suits your gameplay style. Their weapons can be swapped and modified, and you can select from a wide array of "Utility" items, like grenades or Medpacs. My version of Hawks was a Scoundrel, which I felt thematically fit his character quite nicely. Scoundrels are essentially a support role, offering generous "Assists" (an Assist is when an operator follows-up their teammate who just attacked with an additional attack against the same target) to the team, as well as buffing the amount of damage their individual "Assists" do against enemies. He could also de-buff a chosen enemy, causing it to receive extra damage. The rest of my team was typically filled out by a Medic (my sweet angel, Kabb), a Soldier and an Assault class. As you'd expect, the Soldier and the Assault were my two offense-focused operators, and Hawks and Kabb largely functioned as support to those two and their lethal damage output.
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| Image Credit: CGM |
I'm sure Star Wars Zero Company has some sort of a "meta," where specific characters have ideal builds and there's probably a foolproof crew layout, but I enjoyed playing it my way, and really didn't struggle too much through the campaign, which I think speaks to the balancing that went into the game's mechanics. Speaking of that attention to balancing, I never tried any gimmick-themed crews, but apparently you can clear entire missions with just a squad full of astromech droids, which sounds like a hilarious and fun experiment.
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| Image Credit: All Things How |
There's a neat feature in Zero Company called the "Bonds" system, where repeated pairing of teammates together has them unlocking combat bonuses, like increased chance to land critical hits or increased max health. I enjoyed the passive storytelling element that this added to the gameplay. Also, as a final tidbit about the characters, this game does feature permadeath, (which can be turned off, but I recommend leaving it on for the proper experience) so you have to protect your characters and heal them up in between battles, lest you lose them forever if some mission goes awry.
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| Image Credit: IGN |
After you've built out your team, you can explore The Den, which is the incredible-looking home base for Zero Company, or you can select a mission and fly down to a planet to get into some tactical action. The game features several instances where you can just run around and explore, which I thought were welcome additions and added some variety to the gameplay beyond the core tactical combat. Once a battle begins, you control your squad from an isometric perspective, and you're tasked with moving them across the map, finding suitable cover and trying to line up the perfect angles for each of your operators to be able to clear out the enemies, hopefully without receiving any return fire. You have to plan your attacks around both distance and the likelihood for a shot to land, as well as factoring in the potential for critical hits. Also, if you're trying to utilize Assists (which I highly recommend), you'll need to make sure your teammates also have line of sight on your intended target. Hopefully you've established a solid balance of abilities and strengths in your team, because this game will absolutely challenge you during some missions. At the outset, you're just facing off against relatively straightforward foes like battle droids or random pirates and outlaws, but those foes can still be challenging if you're ill prepared.
That cult I mentioned, the Infinite Coil, they serve as a common enemy faction that you'll be facing, and their bizarre, supernatural abilities totally change up the gameplay and force you to really plan out a strategy. It seems like the first mission in which you encounter the Infinite Coil enemies served as a real skill check for a lot of players, myself included. I was suddenly confronted with a foe that didn't behave quite like the others, and I had to quickly adapt. If you've played a tactics game, Star Wars Zero Company should feel familiar and mechanically intuitive. If you're totally new to tactics games, I found this game to be quite forgiving, even with its difficulty, so it may very well be a great entry point to the genre.
Star Wars Zero Company is really a wonderful game. If you're a fan of either Star Wars or the tactics genre, I think this would be the first game I'd recommend to you. The storytelling and world-building here is superb, and paired with such brilliant and satisfying gameplay. I think the folks over at Bit Reactor have raised the bar on what we should expect from AAA tactics games going forward. I did encounter some sporadic bouts of poor performance on PC, including one instance of the game fully freezing, which required closing the game and fully restarting that mission, so please take that into consideration. Overall, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Zero Company, and I really genuinely hope that Bit Reactor gets to craft either some post-release expansions or a full-fledged sequel.
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