Star Wars Zero Company

The former developers of XCOM turn (see what I did there?) their attention to the Clone Wars in a galaxy far, far away...

Guest post by Søren Kamper

Bit Reactor turns cover, squad bonds, and one missed shot into a surprisingly human Star Wars story.

There is a very particular kind of silence that follows a missed shot in a turn-based strategy game. A moment earlier, everything looked perfectly sensible. The enemy was exposed, your soldier had a respectable chance of hitting, and the rest of the plan depended on that blaster bolt finding its target. Then it misses. The battle droid is still standing there, apparently delighted with itself, and three other enemies have suddenly acquired some rather exciting ideas about your squad's immediate future.

In a Star Wars film, somebody would shout a warning, and John Williams would arrive to save the scene. In Star Wars Zero Company, you stare at the battlefield and realise that the person responsible for this disaster is sitting in your chair. That is the essential appeal of Bit Reactor's new tactical adventure. It puts the Clone Wars into your hands, then asks you to live with what those hands have done.

After spending substantial time with Zero Company, I think its finest achievement is not the lightsaber combat, the spectacular environments, or even the surprisingly generous character creator. It is something smaller. Zero Company makes you care about the people who would ordinarily vanish behind the grand machinery of Star Wars. Not legendary bloodlines or the fate of the Jedi Order, but a clone with a battered past, a Jedi Padawan who cannot solve everything alone, an astromech whose contribution is mostly measured in excellent timing, and whichever unlucky recruit you decided to bring along because you thought the mission looked easy. They are not merely a collection of colourful abilities. If Bit Reactor's systems click with you, they become your people. And then the game has the nerve to put them in danger.

The Clone Wars, without the safety net

The first thing to understand is that Zero Company is not an action game in which you happen to pause occasionally. It is a proper turn-based tactics game, made by people who clearly understand the peculiar terror of an XCOM percentage. Former Republic officer Hawks leads an unconventional group of Operators during the twilight of the Clone Wars, hunting the sinister Infinite Coil and its leader, Kundri Fathom. The broad setup is familiar Star Wars material: an obscure threat, a galaxy exhausted by war, and several people with complicated loyalties being asked to trust one another.

The perspective is what makes it interesting.

Nick Smith has already looked at the Clone Wars in When Clones Attack!, where a familiar war gains new texture through the soldiers caught inside it. Zero Company takes that same human-scale idea and makes it mechanical. A squad member's place in the story is not guaranteed by a screenplay; sometimes it depends on whether you remember to put them behind something sturdier than a decorative crate.

Each Operator normally works with three Action Points, and the clarity of that basic economy is one of the game's strengths. Moving, attacking, preparing Overwatch, or using a special ability is never quite as simple as clicking the largest icon. Half-cover offers reassurance until an enemy moves around it. Elevation changes an engagement. A good flanking position might be worth more than one extra shot, while moving too far can leave a perfectly competent soldier stranded in the sort of place military instructors use in cautionary presentations. Zero Company rewards preparation, but it also understands the pleasures of improvisation. An ambitious plan can collapse in seconds, and recovering from it often produces a better story than executing it flawlessly.

The small miracles of a working squad

What separates the combat from a competent imitation of XCOM is how naturally the Operators begin to work together. Successful attacks generate Advantage, a shared resource that supports powerful team abilities without simply duplicating the ordinary Action Point system. That means a routine shot can become the beginning of something larger: an ally moves a target, another Operator exploits the opening, and a final attack finishes the job before the enemy gets a chance to object. The best turns feel less like operating four separate characters and more like conducting a slightly irresponsible orchestra. The instruments happen to include blaster rifles, Force abilities, and the occasional astromech that appears to have been built specifically to embarrass the rest of the army.

I particularly like the way the game treats its Jedi. A lightsaber is exciting, and it should be, but a Jedi is not an automatic solution to every problem. Tel-Rea can reshape a battlefield, yet her value becomes greater when those Force moves create opportunities for everyone else. Likewise, a clone trooper's firepower, a support Operator's utility, and a custom recruit's carefully chosen Specialisation all matter because no single member can comfortably do every job.

This is Star Wars remembering something that Republic Commando and the older LucasArts tradition understood: a galaxy becomes more convincing when its heroes have professions, limitations, and colleagues, rather than merely impressive entrance music.

There are a few rough edges. When multiple abilities, cover states and reactions overlap, the interface can become busier than the underlying decision really deserves. Some of the strongest combinations are so rewarding that they tempt you to return to comfortable routines rather than experiment. But these are complaints about the friction around an unusually enjoyable tactical core. Most missions leave room to find a different solution, and a good decision has a satisfying physical result: a target displaced, a defensive line opened, a vulnerable squadmate rescued. You can see the plan working. Better still, you can usually see exactly why it failed.

The Den is where the war follows you home

Between deployments, Zero Company retreats to the Den, a battered base aboard a ship at the Ring of Kafrene. This is where you recruit and customise Operators, manage equipment, handle injuries, and decide which opportunities deserve the squad's attention. On paper, it sounds like the familiar management half of a tactics game. In practice, it is where the combat begins to acquire memory. People who repeatedly fight together develop Bonds that can improve the way they support each other. Training and Specialisations give you room to build unexpected partnerships. A recruit who initially seems like a temporary answer to a missing role can gradually become central to the whole operation. Conversely, an injured favourite can leave a very noticeable hole in a carefully balanced squad. Your decisions on one mission have a habit of waiting for you when the next one begins.

The larger campaign runs on Cycles, so opportunities do not necessarily wait politely while you finish every available errand. Operations, tactical missions, resources and upgrades compete for attention. It gives the galaxy a valuable sense that events continue beyond the four people currently exchanging laser fire. It can also be frustrating. There are moments when the strategic clock adds tension, and others when it feels like being handed a particularly complicated appointment diary in the middle of a war. The Den itself sometimes asks you to spend more time in menus than the emotional weight of the next decision can justify. Zero Company is most absorbing when the base is a place to remember what happened on the battlefield; it is less compelling when it becomes a shopping trip with unusually high mortality rates.

One of the best design decisions is that building a squad is not confined to selecting whoever has the biggest damage number. Specialisations can complement each other in ways that make two ordinary Operators more useful than one glamorous hero. Bonds reward continuity without making experimentation entirely pointless. Injury and optional permadeath make the consequences of a disastrous turn linger beyond the victory screen.

Star Wars: Gaming's complete Star Wars Zero Company guide gathers the class breakdowns, squad builds, bonds, campaign progression and more advanced tactics in one place. But there is a good argument for spending your first hours making mistakes. The game is unusually good at turning a badly timed decision into a lesson you will remember.

A Star Wars story that doesn't need another Skywalker

The storytelling is strongest when it trusts the squad's own relationships. Hawks is a useful anchor because a former Republic officer can plausibly gather people whose experiences of the war have been very different. Trick's clone background, Tel-Rea's connection to the Jedi, and the other authored characters give the group enough texture to feel more like uneasy colleagues than four interchangeable equipment slots. The custom Operators add something equally important: they allow the player to supply a little of the imagination that Star Wars has always invited. You begin by choosing a species, a face and a role. A few missions later, the same recruit has earned a reputation in your head that no character editor could possibly have supplied.

That is not to say the script is consistently wonderful. Kundri Fathom and the Infinite Coil make an ominous enemy, but the central threat is occasionally more interesting as atmosphere than as drama. The conspiracy has the familiar problem of many modern Star Wars stories: it must sound important enough to threaten the galaxy even though the smaller, personal conflicts are often what we most want to follow. Some dialogue carries its exposition a little too proudly. But the cast helps compensate, and the tactical structure does something a cutscene cannot: it makes relationships useful without reducing them to a simple friendship meter. The moments that stay with me are not necessarily the dramatic revelations. They are the missions where somebody survived because another Operator had exactly one action left.

The presentation generally understands the assignment. Battlefields feel worn, industrial and convincingly inhabited, rather than like generic grids decorated with familiar logos. Clone armour, Separatist machines, cluttered installations and alien faces supply the visual shorthand of the era, while the combat animations make successful moves feel appropriately decisive. It is a nice companion to the argument in Generation Star Wars' feature about how Lucasfilm Games kept the franchise alive between films: Star Wars has always benefited when games let us visit the less glamorous working parts of its universe. Zero Company is full of those places. It makes the war feel enormous precisely by refusing to put us in command of the entire thing.

The cost of another turn

After dozens of hours, the game's strengths are clear. Combat offers enough information for a thoughtful plan and enough uncertainty to keep that plan interesting. The shared Advantage system and squad Bonds push you toward cooperation rather than simply building four individual killing machines. Customisation is deep enough to make different campaigns feel personal, while the strategic layer gives successes and mistakes some staying power. The weaknesses are real too. Menu-heavy stretches can slow the pace, a few campaign systems need more explanation than they receive, and the central villain never becomes as compelling as the squad trying to stop her.

Players who dislike turn-based tactics are unlikely to have a conversion experience just because the uniforms are from Star Wars. This is a game that asks you to enjoy thinking before shooting.

Yet that commitment is also what makes Zero Company such a pleasant surprise. Just as Star Wars: Galactic Racer found a personality beyond Star Wars: Episode I: Racer nostalgia, Bit Reactor has resisted the obvious temptation to make its game a parade of famous faces with a few tactical buttons attached. It has built a real strategy game and allowed Star Wars to grow around the rules.

Where a film shows a heroic charge, Zero Company asks who covered the retreat, who needed medical attention afterwards, and whether the people involved can trust one another on the next assignment. Those are questions that belong naturally to the Clone Wars, but a tactics game can make them feel like your responsibility.

There is a reason that missed shot at the beginning matters so much. A film can make a character's death tragic through music, dialogue and a beautifully timed close-up. Zero Company has another method. It allows you to train somebody, equip them, build relationships around them and watch them become indispensable. Then it places them behind half-cover, offers you a percentage that looks perfectly reasonable, and waits for you to make a decision.

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you learn.

Occasionally, you spend the next ten minutes explaining to yourself why the plan was sound even though the evidence suggests otherwise. That is a very Star Wars kind of heroism, only without the guarantee that the next scene will rescue you. The galaxy has plenty of legendary warriors. Zero Company reminds us that the people keeping it together were often the ones who never expected to become legends.

Score: 8.5/10

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Søren Ahrensborg Kamper has written about Star Wars games, their history and the communities around them since 2009. He is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, where he covers new releases, game history and the strange decisions that become much more reasonable once somebody adds a hyperdrive.