Star Wars Zero Company has been described countless times since its 2025 reveal as “XCOM but Star Wars”, and while that is largely true, my recent hands-on time with Bit Reactor’s debut game reminded me more of Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
Both comparisons are apt, as Bit Reactor was founded by Firaxis veterans, with Greg Foertsch (XCOM 2) leading as game director and James Brawley (Midnight Suns) on board as lead designer. The studio also has Gears of War and The Elder Scrolls Online talent on top of external support from Respawn Entertainment (Star Wars Jedi series), so the triple-A pedigree permeates the whole project.
It all makes for a bombastic turn-based tactics game that should please both strategy and RPG fanatics. But of course, it’s Star Wars diehards that will find more to love in this brutal return to the Clone Wars era through a story that so far feels like a perfect mix of The A-Team and The Suicide Squad in a galaxy far, far away.
The direct association with EA and Respawn – plus Lucasfilm Games’ presence – also means Zero Company looks, sounds, and feels like the real deal even if we hadn’t had a big-budget Star Wars tactics game yet. Separatist battle droids talk and scream like they did in the animated Clone Wars (3D) show and Revenge of the Sith; fast laser bolts cut through the air in ranged exchanges that are animated even when you’re deciding what to do next; and every vehicle has that special ‘oomph’ to it. This is a premium Star Wars experience even if you’re not taking part in real-time battles.
The voice cast is equally impressive, with Jonathan Freeman and Erica Luttrell turning in weighty but fun performances as the (custom) lead character Hawks, a former officer in the Grand Army of the Republic that left alongside clone trooper Trick (unsurprisingly voiced by veteran Dee Bradley Baker). Cutscenes are where the actors get to shine the most, as Foertsch and the team underlined during the pre-hands-on briefing they were adamant about not sacrificing the cinematic appeal and production values typical of a Star Wars story only because Bit Reactor was doing a tactics game. The big surprise was that gameplay also features a surprising amount of dynamic banter between all the squad mates as they break through enemy groups and/or struggle to defend a position.
Such exchanges are shaped by the relationships between the characters. While Star Wars Zero Company features both authored operatives and procedurally generated recruits, all of them can gain experience together during missions, and in the downtime between operations, you can select new bonuses based on how they’ve performed as a team. But interactions between can also be negative, and key narrative decisions can impact how they behave in the future.
Even if the preview build we had access to was generous, it’s hard to discern at this stage how the system will play out in the long run, but the moment-to-moment chatter amid the chaos – together with more abundant and elaborated animations than in its relatives – made for a handful of unpredictable character moments during missions. It all quickly sold me on the idea Bit Reactor has really put a lot of weight on how these characters grow and behave… and die.
Yes, death lurks around every corner in Zero Company, with the opening tutorial giving players a taste of how easy it is to lose someone that you’re attached to after they’re downed a few too many times. I somehow managed to preserve the authored characters during my preview run (which was quite lengthy), but that also meant several of my randomised grunts fell in battle. And I won’t lie: I had to reset a couple of missions that went south fast. Losing the one and only Jedi Knight in the game will no doubt make some players load past saves. Those looking for a calmer experience can deactivate the default ‘permadeath’ setting though, but I’d say that defeats the purpose of much of the game.
Things got particularly brutal once the Infinite Coil – Zero Company’s all-new cult of evildoers – got access to an upgrade that buffed their melee soldiers after each death on their side. At times, you’ll have to make hard decisions, and quite often, they’ll also affect your fiercest foes. There’s no easy way out of some situations, and small choices can come back to bite you in the ass several missions later. However, you’ll also have to send operatives on off-screen operations that yield rewards that make upgrading the team’s base of operations easier or improving connections in certain sectors of the vast galaxy faster. You just can’t ‘complete’ every single one of them even if you plan ahead, as Zero Company doesn’t have enough time or resources.
Cycles (apparently) only advance when actual missions play out, but the game’s layer of progression and planning is balanced around the idea of fighting against an enemy that’s quickly spreading across the galaxy and has more material resources than us. Even with the Republic’s backing, Zero Company is all about quick precision strikes on the objectives you deem more important.
Personally, I favoured operations and missions tied to operator requests whenever I was running out of time and resources, but if you choose to focus on certain sectors or base upgrades, it’s easy to see how that might be achievable. The developers underlined that, despite all the cinematic flair and its length, Zero Company is meant to be highly replayable. Even when walking around (in third-person!) at the base on the famous Ring of Kafrene, you can get different chats and interactions depending on how things are going, bringing the game closer to a BioWare-like, Mass Effect-ish feeling at times.
A frankly robust character creator (for what I was expecting from a tactics game) for Hawks as well as customisation options for most operatives seem to support this idea. The usual character and weapon upgrades also surprise, not because of their depth, but because of how flexible the RPG systems are. The developers mentioned they wanted to give players full control over their operators, allowing them to easily tinker with builds and synergies as they pleased between missions, and that seems true.
While everything tied to the game’s narrative is set in stone unless you return to a previous save, the RPG elements are the opposite of punishing; thus finding oneself in a situation that’s impossible to overcome due to past choices is pretty much impossible. Resetting all skill trees and upgrades comes at no cost.
As for the moment-to-moment gameplay itself, ability points determine how much you can do in a single turn with each character, though there are ways to ‘cheat’ around the limits with certain classes being able to boost their allies. Astromechs are particularly useful to keep other operators in the fight even if they lack firepower early on (though carrying several thermal detonators at once is impressive).
Movement behaves more like in Midnight Suns, as there’s no grid that the characters are limited to even if they still can take cover like in the modern XCOM titles. It allows more freeing positioning, especially if you’re on the offensive. Hit chances also feel way less annoying than in the XCOM series – at no point did one of my operators miss a shot at one guy in front of them – and it’s fairly easy to boost an operator’s precision over time to make them reliable ‘snipers’ of sorts. Similarly, HP points in tank builds are no joke; you can send certain operators bull-rushing into clusters of enemies that are folded like paper. Just don’t get too cocky.
It’s all easy to grasp. The best thing I can say about Star Wars Zero Company – a game that so far seems to be landing all its shots – is that it just plays good and never feels too dense or overwhelming outside of its truly unforgiving default difficulty. I also found myself choosing to spend more time with the controller than with the mouse and keyboard many PC gamers associate with turn-based strategy games. It’s breezy, precise, and made me feel more relaxed as I tried to preserve everyone’s lives while crushing the Republic’s enemies.
My time with Star Wars Zero Company ended just as things were really heating up on the narrative front. I don’t know what others will choose to reveal, but I’ll keep things a bit intriguing here and just say a legacy character made a triumphant appearance on a renowned planetary location. We were promised some really deep cuts in the full game, and considering some of the names and really specifics nods I was able to spot as a Glup Shitto connoisseur, narrative director Aaron Contreras (of Star Wars Jedi fame) and his team clearly had a blast crafting another big original Star Wars story.
Unless the full game crumbles apart after overstaying its welcome and becoming too muddled in a shocking way, Star Wars Zero Company is looking like a winner, and more importantly, it’s looking like the rare sort of big IP bet that’s happy to please a smaller crowd over a mainstream audience looking for experiences with less bite. In any case, it seems the Force can help curious newcomers to the genre, so why not step outside of your comfort zone?
Star Wars Zero Company launches on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store & EA App), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on August 27. You can get all the key release details about it here.
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