I’ve been out of the Star Wars game for some time now. Between middling movies and countless TV shows that recycle the same old tropes and character tendencies (barring Andor), I haven’t felt overly compelled to explore the galaxy in any medium outside of games. While I’ve enjoyed my time with the two Jedi titles and Star Wars Outlaws, none of them spurred me on to revisit old classics like The Clone Wars animated series.
I can’t say that sentiment rings true for Star Wars Zero Company. Bit Reactor’s debut title is an exercise in timeless and taut tactics design, combined with narrative excellence that reminds me why Star Wars is the cultural pillar it’s become today. Some uneven difficulty and cosmetic bugs aside, Zero Company is an effortless marriage of genre and IP, and is a clear contender for game of the year.
If you missed my hands-on preview from earlier this month, Star Wars Zero Company is set during the height of the Clone Wars. With the Separatists exerting pressure on the galaxy, the Republic employs the titular Zero Company, a mercenary group for hire led by Hawks – a former Republic captain who was jettisoned after an operation gone wrong.
Zero Company takes on all kinds of odds and ends, but the Republic is ready to pay the outfit big bucks for their help in taking down the Infinite Coil. While the Separatists are fighting with raw power and typical tactics, they also use the Infinite Coil to destabilise planets and make them ripe for the taking. The Infinite Coil deals in subterfuge and sabotage, trading large scale warfare for underhanded tactics.
The reason the Infinite Coil is such a threat is because of the Shadow Plague, a mysterious affliction spread by the cult’s leader, Kundri Fathom. The true nature of this empowering plague is unknown to the Republic, so they set Zero Company on a galaxy-wide manhunt for Fathom and her underlings to quell the outbreak of the Shadow Plague.
It’s a straightforward setup that wastes no time in establishing itself and doesn’t try to be something it’s not. The first half of the game is laser-focused on this core conflict, bolstering the relatively simple premise with excellent writing, economic call-backs and fantastic characterisation. This seemingly wasn’t enough for Bit Reactor, who hit the gas hard as the second act comes to a close.
Without getting into spoilers, Star Wars Zero Company utilises one of Star Wars’ key events during the Clone Wars with dazzling results in narrative and gameplay. This paves the way for a third act that maintains the quality of writing, but ratchets up the character development, pacing, and narrative beats in a way that held me captive for its last 10 hours.
So much of this is strengthened by Zero Company itself. This crew of space misfits are a truly lovable bunch, each with their own personal plights that worry them outside of the core conflict. Where the Jedi Padawan Tel-Rea hopes to continue in her former master’s footsteps by investigating the Shadow Plague, Mandalorian Cly Kullervo brings a hit list of targets that she insists Zero Company helps her with in exchange for her services.
These are just two of six main operators that will join Zero Company during the main progression, alongside other side characters. My favourite is Bennic Halloren, Zero Company’s Republic contact, who goes through an arc that explores how people grapple with their unsavoury actions while under the oppression of an omnipresent regime. Everything here narratively is just so good – airtight, engaging, and thoughtful.
From a gameplay perspective, it feels like the core mantra is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Bit Reactor’s Firaxis roots shine through here in Zero Company, offering up complex and dynamic maps with varied objective design. There’s a couple of small innovations here that add flavour, and some appropriate Star Wars theming to certain mechanics that makes for a really robust and replayable tactics framework.
Everything in combat is governed by AP and Advantage. The former is used for movement, basic attacks, and activating Overwatch, while the latter is typically spent on class-specific abilities that feed much of the in-combat decision making. Knowing when and how to use these is half of strategy in Zero Company, with some of them having a set number of uses per combat to really make you um and ah over when to press the button.
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Much of this is dictated by smart enemy design. Droid Separatist forces and the Infinite Coil present different threats. While B1-Series droids are taken down easily, the B2s don’t go down without a fight, and Droidekas present a real threat that aren’t easily mitigated thanks to their shielding. The Infinite Coil, on the other hand, will gain stacks of Resonance as allies fall around them, gaining a permanent buff at three stacks called Surge.
I thoroughly enjoyed the level of challenge of Zero Company’s standard difficulty offerings for most of the experience here, but the curve does feel somewhat inconsistent. The early game, as is typical for tactics titles, is quite difficult. This segues into a much easier second act as your forces grow in power. Much of this carries through act three until a spike right at the end of the game, which I enjoyed, but felt jarring nonetheless.
While there’s some time spent exploring environments within main missions as you move from battle to battle, most of your time outside of actual tactics is spent at the Den on the Ring of Kafrene. This is Zero Company’s base of operations, where you can chat to team members, hire new recruits (including astromech droids!), peruse the black market, and much more.
This is where a bulk of your progression unfolds. Instead of a typical levelling system, Zero Company handles unit growth through Cross Training and Focus Points. The former has two units train with each other as they reach new Bond levels to gain permanent buffs like increased damage or critical chance. The latter are spent on upgrading passive and active abilities tied to a unit’s specialisation.
You can respec Focus Points at any time, allowing you to play around with different builds and specialise your units in different ways. While base specialisations on the core operators are fixed, you eventually gain the ability to add a secondary specialisation, leaving some flexibility on subsequent campaigns. There’s also a healthy amount of customisation in weapon mods, with some of the late game mods getting quite powerful.
You’ll also spend a good chunk of time at the Holotable. This is where you launch tactical missions, but you’ll also spend Intel on Operations. These are short and sweet narrative beats in and around the main story in a written format. These provide various rewards depending on your decisions, and the rate at which they come up means it’s impossible to see all of them in a single playthrough.
The best of these come in the form of Coil Activity and Crisis Operations. These can manifest as urgent missions or Operations that’ll upgrade the Infinite Coil in some way for the rest of your campaign. The catch, is that there’s always two to choose from, and you can only stop one. You’ll often need to weigh which buff is best handled by your team, and you may even encounter some instances where you let both activate so you can undertake another mission or operation.
It adds layers of strategy outside of tactical missions in a bite-sized fashion. It reminds me of XCOM in the best way, and bakes in so much differentiation between campaigns. Operations also feed into Influence, where you gain renown in different sectors of the galaxy, with each new tier rewarding you with a powerful item or materials for Den upgrades, deepening progression further.
I mentioned in my hands-on preview that my biggest concern around Zero Company was it’s technical state. While these games aren’t strangers to bugs, I encountered a few during my preview that had more than cosmetic impact. Thankfully, these more egregious issues seemed to have been fixed in the full version. The superficial bugs are still here – hitching and delay after turns or actions and a wonky camera, but nothing that undermined the strategy.
The rest of this package is really spectacular from a presentation perspective, especially on PC. It occupies a visual space in Star Wars that feels unique, a melding of the Clone Wars’ visual language with a more gritty coat of paint. It’s so cool see Clone Wars era droids rendered with such detail, and some strong facial animation work serves to support the storytelling alongside a suitably Star Wars soundtrack.
If you’d asked me at the start of the year what I’d expect to be on my game of the year shortlist, Star Wars Zero Company wouldn’t have been part of the answer. What Bit Reactor has crafted here is something special – a tight tactics experience with a quintessentially Star Wars story that’s reignited my love for this universe. I sincerely hope this game gets its flowers and I can’t recommend it enough.
