I've learned to love Star Wars Zero Company's permadeath – by letting the new hires die

Star Wars Zero Company is a great turn-based tactics game and probably the best way to dip your toes into the genre besides Marvel's Midnight Suns. Moreover, the much-discussed permadeath mechanic isn't as scary as you've been led to believe... if you play your cards right.

By cards I mean operators, the literal lifeblood of Zero Company. While you can get through the game using only authored characters, that's an approach that, at least during a first playthrough, puts them at unnecessary risk. Why not throw some customized redshirts into the woodchipper instead?

Look, I appreciate everyone I recruit and welcome into my scrappy base of operations. I don't want to see them bludgeoned to death like Aurelio. But, if someone's gotta go, you shouldn't hold on. You can repeatedly refresh for new custom operators (or make them yourself) at no cost anyway. Star Wars Zero Company is extremely lenient, actually. And the moment you learn to leave the right folks behind to complete a mission, a lot of the stress and difficulty dissipates.

Star Wars Zero Company review: "Doesn't have to reinvent the tactics wheel to be forceful"

Zero Company is not a very long game if you compare it to other giants in the genre. Therefore, you won't be doing countless secondary missions on top of the main story ones.The cycle system takes care of that, as you're not meant to play everything the game has to offer in a single run. There's momentum and friction to the game's big overarching structure, like in The Blood of Dawnwalker.

This means you shouldn't save custom operators for the ideal random mission. Even a generic attack on a Separatist base can be deadly and yield massive rewards. This might also lead you to think custom operators are B-tier soldiers, but that's not true. They lack the ridiculous passives some authored characters have (turn Jae into a sharpshooter and have fun with her one-execution-per-turn perk), but class skill trees are pretty much the same, and the cool thing about Zero Company is that new operators match your group's level.

Because of the pressure to save everyone, you may overlook that custom operators are cheap (seriously, any Black Market item is more expensive) and quite reliable. Moreover, there are no penalties to taking them in any direction and resetting their focus (perk) points. You're meant to toy around with their builds and throw them into the riskiest secondary missions. What's the worst that can happen?

Rescue and sabotage missions are probably the most "annoying" of the bunch, mostly because you're given a very strict turn limit to complete the objectives, which usually involve legging it across the map to reach a guy (or astromech droid) in danger or an object that must be blown up. Operators in Zero Company can't move a lot every turn while also battling the endless waves of enemies, so success in such missions involves just throwing someone into the meat grinder to at least stop the timer before being told to reach an evacuation zone that's also quite far. The perfect job for the latest hires, no?

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