After rave reviews, Zero Company dev says it would love to make more Star Wars games

Developer Bit Reactor says it would love to continue working on Star Wars games, after this week’s Zero Company received the franchise’s strongest reviews for two decades.

Press reviews went live for the XCOM-inspired strategy game earlier this week and, at the time of publishing, Zero Company has a Metacritic score of 86, which puts it above or on par with every Star Wars game to date, bar only 2002’s Jedi Knight 2 (89), 2001’s Rogue Leader (90), 1997’s Jedi Knight (91), and 2003’s Knights of the Old Republic (94).

Speaking to VGC on the game’s release day, Bit Reactor founder and game director Foerstch called Zero Company’s critical reception a “surreal” moment, four years after he quit Firaxis to start fresh.

“It’s surreal. When you start making a game, you aim to make a game of the year, not a strategy game of the year, but a game of the year. That’s why you do it. But to see the reviews come in and kind of validate that feels good. So, yeah, it’s an amazing feeling,” he said.

Foerstch said he’d received “a lot” of nice messages from Lucasfilm and publisher Electronic Arts and confirmed that he intends to work on another licensed game next – potentially more Star Wars.

“When I started the company, I actually wanted a license,” he said. “The whole thing I was doing was looking for IP when we stumbled into Star Wars. Starting a company and making your own IP just felt too risky. It’s just another thing to solve.

“And everything we’ve ever done in our careers has kind of felt like not original IP anyway. Whether it was Civ, or XCOM, or Pirates, or whatever. All those games, I always approached as existing IP that I was curating and responsible for. So we’re pretty conditioned for that, at least I feel like I am.”

He continued: “And I think for the next game maybe too, I think we’ll be looking to do existing IP. And we’ve loved working with Lucasfilm. It’s been an absolute joy and such a good experience. So we’d love to keep making Star Wars, potentially. But yeah, I think the next game we’re doing is probably going to be an existing IP.”