This is a review of Star Wars Zero Company.

Star Wars Zero Company launched after a development period that saw its staff at Bit Reactor furloughed for about a month before release, and the game bears the marks of that scramble: it feels patched together in places and under-ready in others, like a half-repaired starfighter that took off anyway. Yet the turn-based tactics title, set in the late Clone Wars era roughly parallel to Episode 3, also carries real affection and a distinct design intelligence, largely because many of its developers cut their teeth at Firaxis on the modern XCOM games.

Background: A Studio Under Pressure and a Clone Wars Setting

The crew of Zero Company — short of cash, betrayed by circumstance, scrambling to get the job over the line — mirrors its developers, who were furloughed for about a month before the game was released. That context matters for what follows: the game launched with warning lights flashing, but it launched.

The setting is the late Clone Wars, the prime kids TV era of Obi Wan Kenobi as an action-figure warrior-general and named Trooper dudes like Rex diving around shooting lasers. It is also the era of Andor, the political melodrama about revolution, solidarity, and the banality of evil under fascism — the opposite end of the Star Wars Seriousness Spectrum. Zero Company runs both threads at once, tying light entertainment to timely introspection, and does it quite well.

Development Process: Default Difficulty Aimed at Newcomers

The default difficulty sits on the easy side, pitched at newcomers to turn-based tactics, with hard and ironman-like modes available for the true tacticos. Angling the genre at the casual crowd — aiming for breeziness and satisfaction first — is a novelty, and it makes for a good old-fashioned romp where you play the good guys who ultimately come out on top.

That pairs with a proper beginning-middle-end story rather than XCOM's aggressively replayable campaign with a feather-light narrative layer. The writing is far from Andor's level and relays its themes broadly and a little clunkily, falling into familiar video game traps: characters deliver entire backstories in a couple of throwaway lines that players might never hear, or hear variations of multiple times, and there is a lot of overly breathy voice work. Jae, a kind of ore-baron nepo baby who wants to do good, is a particular culprit of over-earnestness. But the themes are at least there, fully understood and delivered with heartfelt sincerity, and there is a wonderful transition — best left unspoiled — where the crew's story shifts from underdog adventure-romp through Clone Wars action melodrama into something about bigger ideas.

Latest Progress: Three Action Points and the Advantage System

For XCOM fans the big twist is the removal of the two-action limit. Here you get three, and crucially some actions cost one point, some two, some three or all remaining points, introducing a new kind of tension: it matters even more which character shoots first, and at whom.

Trick, a trusty ex-Republic trooper, carries an automatic repeater blaster that consumes all his remaining action points and does more damage the more he has left to spend — so he can only shoot one enemy per turn, but can hit that enemy hard if he stays still, or move two thirds of maximum range and still do a little damage. Each character's passive and active abilities and items deepen this immediately. The player's customisable main character, Hawkes, can be built as a sharpshooter with a sniper rifle and sniper skills: he zeroes in, gaining stacks of lethality — critical chance and accuracy — in exchange for one of his three points, while the rifle takes the remaining two to fire, and all stacks are lost if he moves or is displaced. Named characters also carry unique aspects, such as granting another ally an extra action point or providing passive buffs.

Active abilities spend a resource called Advantage, which builds up as you land hits during an encounter, up to a maximum of 10. At harder difficulties this becomes part of planning: use the ability short of Advantage, or have another character land hits first to build it up? Then synergies kick in. Cly Kullervo has low-cost abilities including a hugely helpful jetpack and an electric dart you ideally stack up en masse before triggering one huge, multiplying explosion — already working nicely with her pistol, which fires three times for three Advantage-building hits, and better with Tel-Rea Vokoss, a Jedi Padawan smartly introduced as a real novice, who can push and pull enemies around repeatedly and into one another, racking up multiple hits or disposing of tougher foes off the edge of the map. Kabb Uppercut, built as an attention-drawing tank, dovetails with both.

Jae, for all her sins, has an extremely useful execution ability that picks off a low-health enemy from almost anywhere on the map, and this works with Assists: each turn one operator can call for another who takes a free shot at the next enemy the first operator attacks. Chains of attack, assist, execution become routine, and Kabb can be built to retaliate after getting a hit, call for an assist, assist the next ally who attacks, and stack extra assist damage.

Outlook: Mission Design and Base Management

Missions are broadly enjoyable enough. Escaping along a long bridge being blown up behind you is good fun, as are a couple of similarly dynamic missions right towards the end of the story, though a few too many follow a rote format of rescuing a temporary extra party member, activating a button, or standing in a zone — these get more enjoyable when the challenge is higher and are typically the more optional missions.

Between missions there is base management, this time in a physical space you run around in third person, a nod to another Firaxis game in Marvel's Midnight Suns. There the largely static NPCs loiter, crewmates waiting to pop out exposition or mission-by-mission character development on request, and at times they are quite lovely — Kabb's strangely endearing cockney-like dialect, which seems to speak entirely in rhymey-timey versions of idioms, is a lasting highlight.

Zero Company is not a tidy game, and the list of nitpicks is longer than this review, but it is also a bit of a gem, with so much love in it. What it means for readers is simple: a tactics game from genre virtuosos that trades two-action simplicity for three-action tension, aimed at newcomers first, and that wears the signs of its own difficult development without being sunk by them.