It makes a lot of sense that Star Wars Zero Company is the result of a collaboration between developers of XCOM 2 (now at Bitreactor) and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (at Respawn). Those two excellent games couldn't be much more different from each other, but their strengths come together here to create a great-looking, clever tactics game that also tells one of the better Star Wars stories we've seen since Rogue One. Excellent characters, writing, music, and cinematic flair give context and weight to a campaign that centers around a diverse group of mercenaries, with Force powers and lightsabers refreshingly taking a back seat to blasters and thermal detonators. And while its turn-based gameplay is instantly familiar to XCOM veterans like me, its more aggressive playstyle and flexible characters make it far more than a simple Star Wars reskin.
The opening cutscene shows the Republic and Separatist fleets blasting away in orbit as the camera zooms in to Clone Troopers fighting battle droids on the ground, but then veers off to the side to focus on a smaller scuffle. That effectively establishes that this story takes place around the periphery of the Clone Wars rather than on its front lines. Our customizable main character, Hawks, is a former military commander who suffered a defeat and went into business for himself (or herself) with a crew of misfits. (If that sounds familiar, it may be because it's also a perfect description of Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly, and Hawks' voice even takes on a slight space cowboy drawl at times – but that's only fair, given how much Mal owes to Han Solo in the first place.)
Hawks and company immediately come into conflict with a Separatist-aligned cult known as the Infinite Coil led by the enigmatic Fathom, who is bent on spreading a mind-altering plague across the galaxy with creepy bugs. While it's hinted that this disease may be Force-adjacent, it's a welcome change of pace to be up against something at least a bit more original than yet another Sith-like villain. Fortunately, Fathom is largely allowed to remain mysterious during her chilling performance, and her relationship with her henchman son prevents her from becoming a two-dimensional villain. And even though it's not playable, she eventually orchestrates a climactic space battle unlike anything we've seen in Star Wars before.
Your main crewmembers all have compelling stories to follow as well, drawing to mind comparisons to Knights of the Old Republic (even though this isn't that kind of RPG and you only rarely make dialogue decisions). What they lack in novelty, they make up for with strong writing and acting: big blue brawler Kabb fills the obligatory role of the alien who talks funny, Jae is a scion of a mining family driven from her home by Coil, Trick is a medically discharged clone with plenty of brothers to help, Cly is the Mandalorian out for revenge, Tel-Rea is an AWOL padawan investigating Coil, and Luco is a sharpshooter who hates the Republic but hates Fathom more. Each of them has their own chain of story missions to complete that include a decent number of twists and cameos from other Clone Wars-era characters.
The personalities that stand out most to me, though, are non-combatants you interact with only at your base, a docked freighter called The Den. Runa is your personnel manager/bookkeeper, and her Separatist background sets her apart from the rest of the crew, who are more aligned with the Republic. She's also the most consistently funny, thanks to her endearing vanity and high level of sass. Her banter with the young, by-the-book Republic Intelligence officer Bennic is always entertaining while you're choosing missions at the holotable display, and she makes him a more sympathetic character as his loyalties are tested by the events of the war. Special mentions for medical droid M-3VO and Neesh, an oversized Lasat arms dealer, both of whom have some good lines.
The other thing you'll do before heading into combat is run Operations, where you'll spend your limited Intel points to pick which off-screen text adventures to dispatch your team on, unlocking more missions and earning cash and loot prizes. A lot of those do feel like blindly rolling the dice because you're asked to pick which team members to send without any indication of who might be better suited for, say, extracting hostages or hacking into a Separatist facility – so when things go wrong and people get injured it feels like, well, missing a 90% shot. But I always had a few bodies to spare on my roster, so that never tripped me up. And some of these are interesting dilemmas that give you a preview breaking down which of your team will be angry if you, for example, sell someone out to a Hutt for a few extra credits.
After you pick a mission and watch the repetitive, unskippable transit cutscene (which tends to hitch on both PC and PS5 Pro) as your team hyperspace-jumps into action, the tactical combat is easy to pick up if you've played anything in the XCOM vein. But while the fundamentals of controlling your team of four, taking cover, lining up attacks, and crossing your fingers that the RNG gods rule in your favor on a percentage to hit are similar, Zero Company is a vastly different game that encourages you to dive into the fray and push the enemy around. You’ll routinely knock them into each other, off of ledges, into an ally's overwatch zone, or line them up for an area-of-effect attack. (Just remember to always have a backup plan, because you're still going to miss those 90% shots 10% of the time.)
A big part of why I felt encouraged to do that is because, even though permadeath is on by default, your troops are pretty hard to kill. A character has to be downed three times (without being healed between missions) before they're gone for good. There also aren't that many surprise attacks, because the maps are usually pretty small and there's no fog of war, meaning you'll never be ambushed by an enemy you couldn't see. On top of that, there are no lasting consequences for taking damage until someone's downed for the first time and becomes injured, so I felt safe to take troops out of cover and into the open to absorb some punishment if it gave me a clear shot or got me close enough to an extraction zone that I could make it out the next turn. Despite that arrogance, in my first 35-hour playthrough on Normal difficulty, I didn't come close to losing anybody (though I come to this with a few thousand hours of XCOM under my belt, so your mileage may vary).
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