Zero Company advances the Star Wars game genre in a meaningful way

Star Wars has inspired video games almost as long as video games have existed, yet the franchise has usually followed trends rather than set them. We've seen Star Wars takes on first-person shooters, racers, and plenty more. Those games were fun, but they're best described as "a genre, with Star Wars attached." Every so often, though, a Star Wars game pushes its genre forward through fresh ideas and strong execution. Star Wars Zero Company is one of those cases.

At a glance, Zero Company is easy to underestimate. It looks like XCOM with a Star Wars skin: an overhead view, a small squad of commandos in turn-based combat, taking cover, flanking, maneuvering, and teaming up to bring down larger forces. That shorthand isn't wrong, but it undersells the game. By drawing on the depth of Star Wars itself, Zero Company finds ways to build on XCOM rather than just copy it.

Setting the table

Zero Company takes place during the Clone Wars, the turbulent era from the prequel trilogy when the Republic stood on the brink of becoming the Galactic Empire. You play as Hawks, a washed-up former Republic commander who founded a mercenary outfit after a disastrous mission wrecked their military career. The mercs, known as Zero Company, are short on money and work when a young Republic officer named Bennic offers steady, not-technically-Republic wet work in exchange for clearing your debts.

Bennic could easily have been written as a sinister figure dangling cash in front of desperate mercenaries, but this is where Zero Company shines. The characters feel rounded and human. Bennic is an honest broker for the Republic, a true believer who quickly becomes part of Zero Company and serves as the Republic's emissary. He initially seems like an assigned minder, but his friendship with Hawks grows and shifts in believable ways. The same goes for other members of Zero Company, like the decommissioned clone Trick or the grizzled old boxer Kabb Uppercut.

The one slight exception is Cly, a Mandalorian bounty hunter who appears out of nowhere and presents herself as an asset Zero Company can't afford to turn down. Her story is the thinnest among the named characters, and while it does get mildly more interesting later, her inclusion feels perfunctory. Mandalorians are a beloved part of Star Wars, and her abilities make her a strong fit for tactical combat, so representing the Mando clan makes sense. Her personal story and characterization just aren't as strong as the rest.

A threat flying under the radar

As the adventure unfolds, Zero Company confronts a crisis flying just below the Republic's radar: a strange cult called the Coil that recruits members with superhuman abilities, all united under a leader named Fathom. Bennic helps the team prioritize this threat, which feels appropriately scaled. In this era of Star Wars, the danger needs to stay small enough to avoid drawing attention from the Jedi or the Grand Army of the Republic, yet frightening enough to snowball if left alone. Zero Company is punching above its weight against a galactic threat, which gives the story real stakes while keeping it grounded in the Star Wars universe.

For me, the named characters were the stars of Zero Company, and I used them almost exclusively. Like an XCOM game, you can also recruit randomized soldiers and develop them on their own, modeling them after friends or favorite Star Wars OCs. As the story progresses, you gradually unlock new operator types, eventually gaining the ability to recruit droids and clones with their own specializations. Those specializations, especially the ones for the named Zero Company characters, are the secret sauce that sets Zero Company apart from other tactics games.

Star Wars happens to be fertile ground for differentiated power sets, so you aren't limited to the usual soldiers, heavies, and medics. By the time you finish Zero Company, you'll have access to clones, droids, a Mandalorian, a Jedi, an Umbaran, and whatever the heck a Kabb is. Each has their own attributes, and most have abilities tailored to their unique place in Star Wars lore.

A diverse cast

Take Cly. She has the Mando's signature jet pack, making her an exceptionally nimble operator who crosses long distances easily and ignores many height restrictions. Landing in the middle of a group of enemies knocks them back and inflicts burn damage, and her default weapon is a pistol with three shots. Rocket-dropping into a cluster of weakened enemies and picking them off with three quick blaster bolts feels perfectly Mandalorian.

Your Jedi, meanwhile, excels at close-range melee, dealing heavy damage with her lightsaber, pushing and pulling enemies with the Force, and then dropping into a defensive stance that blocks many blaster bolts. True to their Star Wars identity, droids are incredibly useful support tools, granting teammates extra moves and carrying more equipment than anyone else. They're all so fun to play. I often wished squads were bigger so I could bring more of them along, and choosing my core crew was difficult.

Most abilities cost Action Points, three per character per turn, which are well-tuned to balance movement and attacks. My Hawks was a sniper, so I quickly had to internalize that since her main attack cost 2 AP, her movement was severely limited compared to the rest. She had just enough to reposition slightly, but couldn't cross the map like the others. If I was already in a good position, I could fire a shot and then use her extra-long Overwatch ability to restrict enemy movement. Jae or Cly, meanwhile, could move much more effectively, but were far less accurate and powerful. Successful actions also build a shared pool of Advantage (ADV), which enables extra-powerful moves like Trick's Rocket Strike, dealing massive explosive damage in a concentrated area. I got in the habit of saving that little beauty for when enemy reinforcements showed up and crowded around an entry point. ADV also has plenty of utility, occasionally granting access to moves with specialized uses, like Cly's jetpack.

Your Jedi companion is great at controlling space. Each combat encounter also has a rotating backup ability that alternates between squad members randomly each turn. Choosing your backup before starting an attack lets another member of the squad take a shot too, doubling your effectiveness. But that also means carefully positioning squadmates and considering who has a clear line of sight before picking a backup partner, adding another tactical wrinkle to combat. It also awards Bond XP between operators, more on that shortly.

You use these abilities against a wide range of enemies, from regular humanoids to Clone Wars-era battle droids, including deadly droidekas, to the cultist Coil. The Coil isn't quite a hivemind, since it doesn't share one consciousness. Instead, its fanatical followers work individually but collaboratively toward a goal in perfect unison. (If you've seen the Apple TV show Pluribus, you'll have the general idea.) It's unnerving from a story standpoint and has neat gameplay applications. Since the Coil are all linked, defeating one often empowers the next-closest Coil member with a special ability like extra defense or even cloaking. That adds yet another dynamic element, forcing you to plan carefully which ones to pick off and in what order to maximize your advantage, knowing they'll steadily ramp up in difficulty as you do.

Those Coil advantages are partly influenced by mission briefs, where you're sometimes given a choice of which Coil upgrade to stop. There's no way to prevent both; the Coil abilities will get stronger in some way no matter what. But these decisions let you shape the types of challenges you'll face in tactical missions. Your home base is where you spend mission cash on upgrades for the whole team and black-market gear for individual units. You can also upgrade your team's bonds, which unlock powerful upgrades across both operators at the highest levels, manage ability loadouts with unlimited free refunds to experiment with different builds, adjust equipment and weapon mods, and more.

Choices upon choices

If that description hasn't made it clear, there are choices upon choices upon choices in Zero Company, but it never feels overwhelming or obtuse. Everything is digestible and clear, which is quite a feat for such a dense tactical game with so many options. I always felt fully in control of my decisions and knew exactly what I was doing.

While there was great variety in abilities, enemies, and satisfying tactical choices, some missions did start to feel very familiar over my 30-hour playtime. I attribute this to similar objectives, which made many missions play very similarly. You often have to wipe the battlefield of all enemies, of course, but missions would often then end with reaching an extraction point, usually after a dose of reinforcements. The tactical combat itself is very fun, so it didn't bother me too much, but the lack of variety in mission objectives stood out as a weak spot.

While Zero Company uses cameos sparingly, the ones it does include are effective. Anakin Skywalker shows up briefly, letting you be completely overpowered for a handful of missions, and in the context of the Clone Wars cartoon, this is believably just another mission he was tangentially attached to for a little while before jetting off to other Jedi missions. I wasn't too sorry to see him go, because by that point I was developing such affection for my squad that I wanted to spend more time with them anyway. That's what makes the story so effective. The story of the Coil cult is a somewhat typical sci-fi threat, but I wanted to overcome it with my squad, as I had shaped and gotten to know them. We built bonds as a game mechanic, but I built bonds with them myself too.

Star Wars Zero Company is like XCOM, but it is more than just an XCOM-like. Developer Bit Reactor set higher ambitions than simply slapping a Star Wars skin on a template. Star Wars is a rich playground for games, with loads of differentiated hero and enemy types and powers baked in, and Zero Company takes full advantage of that to make an excellent tactics game in its own right. In doing so, it has made the next great evolution of the genre.

Source: the original publisher