Star Wars Zero Company Review – A New Hope for Tactical Star Wars

Star Wars Zero Company Review

The pairing of Star Wars and video games is not remotely surprising. After all, the two pillars of pop culture are essentially siblings, birthed in the late 1970s and still going strong (understatement of the century). The combination of an XCOM-style tactical strategy game and Star Wars also seems inevitable, but it has been a long time coming. Star Wars Zero Company fills an obvious need. Whether you’re a Star Wars fan hungry for more content or a tactical strategy gamer with a fondness for narrative, Star Wars Zero Company will keep you entertained.

No Spoilers Ahead

One aspect of the co-evolution of Star Wars and video games is narrative. Games like Knights of the Old Republic approached their stories seriously. Taking their cue from the films, KOTOR and its siblings helped create an expectation that action-focused video games could have strong narratives and characters. That expectation has only gotten stronger because games often have the best stories of any entertainment form. Which brings us to Star Wars Zero Company.

Set during the Clone Wars period — a fertile landscape for telling original stories — you play as Hawks, a former captain in the Grand Army of the Republic. Hawks now leads a ragtag, financially struggling band of mercenaries. Your team is barely hanging together, your clients often stiff you and you owe a massive debt to a Hutt named Gorga. Then you get a break. The Republic hires you to take on the Infinite Coil, a cult-like group of separatists. Headed by Kundri Fathom, the Coil are infected with a bio-weapon known as the Shadow Plague. The Plague grants them unnatural physical advantages and supernatural Dark Side abilities.

Star Wars Zero Company’s cast of main Operators — including Hawks — and enemies like Fathom, Visser and Typhon are well conceived. The game’s writing and voice acting are perfectly in tune with what we expect from Star Wars. Political intrigue, conflict and interpersonal drama mix with the usual Star Wars’ brand of humor and seemingly infinite lore. I almost always enjoyed the dialogue, cutscenes and interactions, if only for the Star Wars vibes.

An Infinite Coil of Decisions

Considering that developer Bit Reactor includes a number of XCOM veterans, it isn’t surprising that Star Wars Zero Company starts with a strong foundation of game play mechanics. The game throws in a few variations on familiar ideas and adds several of its own. Still, fans of turn based tactical games will feel at home.

The loop begins at the Den, Zero Company’s base in the Ring of Kafrene. There’s a lot to do at the Den, from upgrading weapons and Operators to building out the Den’s facilities, adding elements like a medbay and droid repair station. You can hire new Operators, change their cosmetics and increase their bonds by pairing them on missions. Literally everything you do in the Den — and there’s a lot — in some way impacts your success in battle. Operator bonds, for example, can add stat increases when positive. You can increase bonds by using specific tactics on the battlefield, completing missions together and even weighing in on non-combat-related choices. The bond system is one example of many deep and engaging systems.

There are several mission types. Operations are non-combat scenarios that involve a number of decisions and potential rewards, but nearly always impact your standing and influence in the Galaxy (which is an entirely different system). Tactical missions are combat encounters. You command your chosen squad through turn-based combat scenarios and complete objectives. Tactical Missions can either be focused on the campaign story, Operator-related stories or resource collection. Generally, the Tactical Mission maps aren’t huge, but they are dense, multi-leveled, and offer multiple paths to success — or failure. Star Wars Zero Company includes a number of difficulty options, but even at the normal setting missions can be very challenging.  I had to repeat missions more times than I’d like to admit.

Permadeath and Permafun

Star Wars Zero Company is obviously trying to find a balance between action/combat, narrative and mechanics at the Den. One of the game’s strengths is getting this generally right. While there’s a lot to do in preparation for combat, the systems make sense and work together well. The story is almost entirely linear, but it’s quite substantial and varied enough that the absence of endless side missions isn’t a problem. The game starts a little slowly, and the first few hours feel a bit basic. But once the story brings you new cast members or you recruit new Operators, build out the Den and upgrade new abilities, the game shows its stripes. Tactical missions do an excellent job of matching increasingly complex demands with your growing repertoire of approaches.

Visually, Star Wars Zero Company nails the Star Wars aesthetic in its locations and characters. I wouldn’t call the graphics bleeding edge but the lighting is effective, the combat effects are impressive and there’s enough environmental detail to be convincing without cluttering the battlefield. My biggest disappointment was the character creator. Considering how much screen time your version of Hawks gets, not being able to fine-tune facial features or other physical details is a missed opportunity. While the cast of NPCs looks uniformly good, Hawks looked horrific no matter how I tweaked them.

By now, the sound of Star Wars — both the music and weapon sounds — is part of our DNA. We know it when we hear it. Composer Gordy Haab fills nearly every moment with Star Wars music, even if it sometimes feels more like sonic wallpaper than closely cued to the action. Voice acting is consistently good, and there are a number of cameos and well-known voices that I won’t spoil.

The Dark Side

Games like Star Wars Zero Company have a lot of built-in replayability. The puzzle-like nature of combat, the permanent death of Operators and endless decisions mean that no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, even if the end goal remains constant. Still, there’s no ability to replay missions, and a focus on a narratively driven campaign might feel restrictive to some players.

Star Wars Zero Company is the overlapping center of a venn diagram with Star Wars in one circle, and XCOM-style tactical combat in the other. It doesn’t take either one in bold, new directions, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is not XCOM in a Star Wars costume, because the mechanics, setting, and narrative are more than surface level. Star Wars Zero Company is a substantial addition to both the Clone Wars canon and the tactical strategy genre.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***