Star Wars Zero Company Review (PC)
A Familiar Formula, With a Star Wars Twist
I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t had an excellent turn-based strategy game in at least 10 years. The last one was, of course, XCOM 2’s War of the Chosen DLC, which, if you haven’t played it, feels less like DLC and more like a complete overhaul of XCOM 2’s base game. So, with the release of this new game, is that 10-year streak finally over? Let’s talk about Star Wars Zero Company.
Star Wars Zero Company is a turn-based strategy game developed by Bit Reactor (who also helped develop XCOM 2) and published by Electronic Arts. The game is set during the Clone Wars era, and you play as Tesh Hawks, the leader of Zero Company: a group of guns-for-hire who will take on any job for the right price. In typical Star Wars tradition, Hawks stumbles upon something that could pose a threat to the entire galaxy. And thus, the game begins.
If you haven’t played any turn-based strategy games before, think of it like a board game or a session of Dungeons and Dragons. You select a mission, put together a team and then deploy them into enemy territory. Usually, your team consists of four characters, each with their own specialization. Each character has three Action Points, which you can spend each turn to take an action. Moving, taking shots and activating special abilities all use a certain number of Action Points.
As you deal damage to the enemy team, you gain something called “Advantage”, which you can spend on your team’s special moves. These can be anything from Hawk’s ability to grant a teammate an additional Action Point to firing Trick’s rocket launcher.
Permadeath comes for us all
And obviously, once you take your turn, the enemy gets to take theirs. This is where one of the key elements of the game comes into play: permadeath. Your team will take damage, and sometimes your teammates will fall. If you don’t get to them in time, that’s it. They die and are permanently removed from the game.
A word of warning: this doesn’t just apply to teammates that you can create (more on that shortly). It also applies to the named main-story characters who are part of Zero Company.
This is something I really enjoyed in XCOM 2. As you played the game, you named your squadmates and trained them up from nothing. So when one of them kicked the bucket, it was a painful experience. In Star Wars Zero Company, I feel none of that. I think this is largely because most of my squad isn’t human, so I inherently feel less of an attachment to them.
XCOM vs Star Wars
As I mentioned earlier, you can create your own teammates. There are eight specializations to choose from, including classic roles like Medic, Heavy and Sharpshooter. On top of that, there are 10 talents to choose from. These provide special bonuses or abilities that your operator can use, such as dealing bonus damage to elite enemies or granting you and your team bonus evasion.
Finally, you can select one of four weapons to equip them with: a blaster pistol, blaster rifle, repeater or longarm. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. And that’s not even mentioning the modifications and upgrades you can add to your weapons, as well as sidearms and utility devices.
There’s also a skill tree, but it mainly focuses on increasing the numbers attached to your operator’s abilities and passives. Suffice to say, there are a lot of customization options for you to explore.
And while there is a whole lot of customization, I personally found myself sticking to the same team and loadouts throughout most of my play through. If it’s working, why change it?
I think that’s one of the things I miss from XCOM 2. While playing, you were forced to change up your team between missions. This was mainly because if a character sustained too much damage, they would need time off to recover.
This mechanic does exist in Zero Company, but it feels like a watered-down version of it. Your teammates only have to take time off when they were downed in a previous mission. That would usually be an inconvenience, except the game gives you a way to instantly heal them right out of the gates.
Plenty of Customization, Not Enough Variety
Speaking of the missions, I think it’s worth highlighting that the game can feel a bit repetitive. There are five main mission types you’ll encounter while playing, along with a special sixth story-driven mission type. These include things like eliminating all enemies in an area, sabotaging an objective and evacuating, or rescuing a hostage.
During my first 10 hours of the game, it felt like I was cycling between three mission types. The only real variety came from the location, which, outside of visuals, didn’t offer much.
You will eventually reach a point where all of the mission types become available to you, but you still have to grind through 10 hours or more of doing mostly the same thing.
In terms of story, it plays out like your classic Star Wars film. You have an unlikely hero, sarcastic statements, a threat against the universe, cameos and references — all the usual Star Wars stuff. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you know what you’re getting.
Performance-wise, my RTX 3060 Ti struggled to run Zero Company on medium settings. The game was very laggy and choppy, which surprised me because most turn-based strategy games aren’t known for their beautiful, detailed graphics. Dropping the settings down to low thankfully fixed the stuttering. It goes without saying that you’ll likely not run into this issue on your home console.
A Great Introduction, But a Long Slog
Final thoughts. Is Star Wars Zero Company better than XCOM 2: War of the Chosen? I think it’s a pretty easy “no” from me.
However, is Star Wars Zero Company a good first-time turn-based strategy game? Yes, absolutely. It does a very good job of introducing players to the genre and provides enough hand-holding that it won’t scare anyone off, even if they lose a teammate.
I think Zero Company seems to backfill its game rather than spread everything out from start to finish. There are a lot of interesting things that happen in the later half of the game that some players simply won’t see because I believe they’ll get bored of the repetition before reaching that point.
Star Wars Zero Company is a great entry point into the turn-based genre, but boy, is it a slog to get through. Perhaps, like XCOM 2, a DLC in the future might just fix all of that.
