Star Wars Zero Company Review (PC): The Strategy Game to Hook The Masses

When I first played XCOM over a decade ago, it was a groundbreaking experience that drew me headfirst into the strategy genre. It forced me to prepare and consider combat in a brand new way, with poor decisions causing me to lose team members, and challenging encounters I wouldn’t soon forget. I’m also a die-hard Star Wars fan, taking in every form of media just for a chance to have my own adventure inside that galaxy. Star Wars Zero Company positions itself as scratching both of those itches. After a journey spanning dozens of hours fighting back baddies on alien worlds, this game has been able to hit the mark, creating a deep strategy experience and taking full advantage of the characters and tales they had access to. Star Wars Zero Company is a winner, and a dream game I’m ready to rocket back into for another go.

Good Soldiers Follow Orders

The core of Star Wars Zero Company’s gameplay is similar to most in the genre, not straying too far from what has made the most beloved strategy games successful. You’ll enter a battlefield with your operators, move them into advantageous positions, carry out different combat actions, beat the bad guys, and escape. It was imperative that Bit Reactor nailed this loop down since we spend the vast majority of our time in it, and it feels just as good as the best out there. 

As Zero Company, you are a small team, staying off the frontlines and carrying out surgical strikes. These scenarios consistently put you in battles where you are outnumbered, but utilizing the different abilities your fighters have will let you escape by the skin of your teeth. Whether it was eliminating all threats, holding a position long enough to steal the goods from a safe, or a rescue and extract mission, the variety Zero Company offers doesn’t wear thin, keeping me on my toes and focusing on everyone getting home alive.

The different ways you choose to tackle these varied missions can help you when selecting the operators to send out. Say I was going on a rescue mission deep in an alien jungle. The decision whether to bring my sniper alongside my heavy gunner, or switch those out for my lightsaber-wielding Jedi and my support class droid bring new opportunities and challenges. Each mission usually allows up to four combatants, so mix-and-matching is a constant thing you do against unlikely odds. Using a sit back and fire from distance approach, could work just as well as a full melee rush in screaming offense. It’s all about risk management and how smart you are about commanding units for the unforeseen next wrinkle, hoping you didn’t make the wrong call and lose that favorite Mandalorian warrior to permadeath. Every choice in combat matters, and the consequences can have a long-lasting impact, exactly the way a good strategy game should feel.

The Carrot on the End of the Stick

The gameplay hooks had already reeled me in, but Star Wars Zero Company also includes RPG mechanics, feeling similar to building up your squadmates in Mass Effect. All of this takes place inside your mercenary base of operations, The Den, which throughout your journey you’ll build up with the rewards from missions. These upgrades allow for better equipment, faster healing for injured soldiers, and overall improved efficiency. An upgrade was always just within reach, working as a carrot on the stick to complete specific missions with particular rewards to help make your team more efficient.

But upgrading a hunk of metal isn’t the only thing you can invest in. During the story, Zero Company welcomes aboard new members to the team, spread out regularly during the campaign. Each of them is a wholly unique character, not only in combat prowess and abilities, but with their own motivations, side stories to complete, and interpersonal relationships to contend with. From an ex-clone trooper to a mining baroness, I grew fond of each one of my band of misfits, and I’d be bummed if anything bad happened to my scrappy crew. Their personal missions were also some of my favorites in the campaign, learning more about their backstories and how the galactic war they are dealing with has changed their lives. Building the crew is rewarding in every way, combining tactical benefits in combat and memorable character moments during downtime in The Den.

The Objective

The circumstances that set the Zero Company crew on their journey are steeped in the nerdiest of the Star Wars lore, something I adored, but may be a tougher onboarding experience for folks playing who haven’t watched nine seasons of the animated show. A simple premise to start: your custom character, named Hawks, is the leader of a mercenary group who take on a big contract from the Republic near the end of the Clone Wars. We are tasked with hunting down a cult, The Infinite Coil, who are spreading a plague throughout the galaxy, and our small band is best equipped to deal with and track down this underground threat. It’s a fun, campy arc I could totally see being part of a season of The Clone Wars, and we have tons of cameos to keep the diehard fans pointing at their screens when certain beloved figures show up. Overall, it may be a little dense for newcomers, and expects you to understand the world and conflict at the center of the adventure, but if you are aware of that context, I think it adds a lot more to the experience.

Final Verdict

Star Wars Zero Company is enthusiastically nailing its mission statement to be the game XCOM and Star Wars fans would dream of. As someone who was cautiously optimistic if Bit Reactor could make a game to my expectations of that mixture, I came away impressed they achieved just that. The overall package might be hyper-targeted with its strategy genre and deep Star Wars lore, but that is precisely what I had hoped to see, and Star Wars Zero Company is a top contender for my personal game of the year because of it.

Star Wars Zero Company was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Bit Reactor. It is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

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