I’m a bit bummed that I don’t like Star Wars Zero Company more than I do. The upcoming turn-based-tactics game is set during my absolute favorite moment in the Star Wars’ timeline, The Clone Wars, and games that are just like it–like XCOM: Chimera Squad and Marvel’s Midnight Suns–are some of my most-played games in recent years. If pressed, I’d tell you that Zero Company is a good game (or at least, the four hours of it I’ve played are good). But of what I’ve seen so far, there’s nothing about the game that makes it really stand out from its peers. Zero Company seems to play things too safe, sticking to a tried-and-true formula that works.
Zero Company has you play as Hawks, a former military officer who is now leading the titular squad, a group of operatives who engage in all types of missions for credits. In missions, you command Hawks and several teammates (typically three others) through turn-based battles, directing how each operator uses their three action points per turn to move through a firefight and shoot enemy soldiers. Squadmates possess unique abilities that allow them to specialize in specific combat roles as well, and all share a pool of cumulating points that can be spent at any time to unleash a character’s specific powerful attack, like firing a rocket launcher.
If you’ve played an XCOM game, you already know what you’re signing up for. Zero Company plays pretty much exactly like one, which is no surprise since the Bit Reactor team is founded and composed of folks who worked on the XCOM games. Now, I like XCOM. I’ve enjoyed playing the XCOM games. If we were to get another XCOM game, I’d want it to play like XCOM. But even with all that said, I do wish that Zero Company felt a bit more than just XCOM with Star Wars painted over it. The game is its own thing–it should feel like its own thing.
And to reiterate: Of what I’ve played, Zero Company is good. But I look at other games that are similar to XCOM, like Midnight Suns, and I’m disappointed Zero Company doesn’t do more to distinguish itself from what came before. Midnight Suns, for example, ditched using a percentage chance to hit enemies to instead rely on a system of deck-building and knocking enemies into other characters and environmental hazards. It maintained that sense of randomness and strategy that is crucial to the XCOM games, but carved its own identity to feel like a distinct experience. From what I’ve seen of Zero Company, it doesn’t do anything to separate itself from the pack. It entirely relies upon what is already known to be good. Which is fine! I do realize that my disappointment is entirely based on my own hopes and expectations.
It’s also entirely possible that I just did not have a chance to see whatever evolution to the tactics-game formula Zero Company will make. Even after playing the game for four hours, I was still getting tutorials, unlocking more mechanics and features, and recruiting more characters. So even though I played the game for quite a while, it still felt like I was in the tutorial section. Once the main story gets past all the set-up, it’s possible some mechanic or feature will be introduced that transforms the experience in a way I’ve yet to see in a tactics game.
“Having worked on both XCOM games, [there’s] a little bit of a legacy,” Bit Reactor co-founder, CEO, and creative director Greg Foertsch told me. “And so, coming at it from more of an artist’s approach, it’s kind of like you have a short memory. Like the last thing I painted is the last thing I painted, and the next thing I paint, I hope to be better. And so, halfway through [the next thing], you might question it, but you know that every time you pick up a paintbrush that the next thing you do is going to be better than the last thing. So for [Zero Company], yeah, there’s some familiar stuff and it’s great, but it’s just as great to push the genre forward.”
“From somebody who didn’t work on XCOM or a tactical strategy game before–this is my first tactical strategy game–there’s the lineage of the dev team and what they know [to consider], and it makes sense to use the muscles you’ve trained and to follow up with a pattern that people want,” Bit Reactor narrative director Aaron Contreras added.
“[And] then you also look at what’s happening in the tactical strategy space and what you want to adapt and bring in some flavors from stuff that’s happened outside of what you’ve done in the past since it’s fresh. And you look at the limitations of what you’re able to do between time and budget and ask, ‘What is the team strong at? What is this group of people able to do? What didn’t we get a chance to do on the last game that we did in this genre?'”
According to Foertsch and Contreras, the Star Wars element is the “x factor” of Zero Company. That’s the element that’s going to help the game stand out from the likes of XCOM, as the theming of Star Wars’ narrative will emphasize certain aspects of Zero Company’s design that were deemphasized in XCOM and titles like it.
And to be fair, I do think the setting, story, and characters could be where Zero Company surprises me the most. While the gameplay feels quite familiar to other tactics games four hours in, I was surprised by just how much Zero Company puts an emphasis on story and characters.
Between missions, you’ll return to your team’s hub and as Hawks, you can walk around and talk to your squadmates, as well as listen in to their conversations between each other. It has a very returning-to-Garreg-Mach-Monastery or hanging-in-the-Abbey feel, like in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Midnight Suns, respectively.
“I think the hub came from Greg’s design to have the third-person explorable sequences in specific missions,” Contreras said. “So we had that mode in and we were going to support it, and then if you have that, you already have everything you need to move around a hub [area] in third person.”
In my time with the game, not every character grabbed my attention, but two or three did interest me enough to keep coming back to over and over between missions. Your squadmates have their own feelings toward Hawks, which can improve by doing missions for them or by agreeing with their moral stance on an issue during points in the game where you have to make decisions. They can also change between each other depending on how often you team them up or command them to aid each other in battle.
“That’s a way we can give you an experience that isn’t common in tactical strategy,” Contreras continued. “And then from a narrative perspective, we have a bond system–which came from the design team, like that was an existing [feature], a notion that what makes Zero Company a unit and our own unique thing–that we’re really pushing. In the design of the game, the relationships between these different heroes, these operators, makes the team mechanically stronger.”
“So [since] that’s very important to the mechanics of the game, you want to realize that in the hub space as well, so that as a player with permadeath, you’re bonding with all these characters, [and] when they die or they grow, all those things are feeding each other.”
“It feels right for this game and it feels like a new way to transition that’s very different from how a lot of these games in the past approach a series of systems that they try to wrap stories around,” Foertsch added. “We’ve woven a story all through the systems and vice versa in some cases, so it feels much more holistic and connected than I think our previous work.”
I didn’t see much of that in my time with that game, but that system of interconnectivity is what I’m most interested in seeing. While the game sees the squad fighting on the side of the Galactic Republic against the Separatist Alliance, the make-up of the squad includes former Republic soldiers, ex-Seperatist loyalists, and criminals and bounty hunters who don’t care about either side. There’s even a noblewoman who is simply aiding the squad in an effort to reclaim control of a planet that once belonged to her family. Zero Company could tackle one of the most politically charged moments in Star Wars lore in a way we haven’t really seen in Star Wars video games before, but have seen in the books and TV shows. It really all comes down to the writing for the conversations between squadmates, and how well the changing relationships between characters could affect the overall narrative.
And, of course, it matters how well the story can still be told with permadeath on the table. Squad-based games with excellent character-driven stories usually work because there’s no way for the members of the squad to die until the end. Unless you specifically turn permadeath off, every character in Zero Company can die, save for Hawks. I don’t mind that at all. The challenge of keeping a squad alive from beginning to end is usually a thrill in these games, and makes the pain of every lost operator hit even harder. But what I’m worried about is the story. If Zero Company does deliver a good, character-driven story, does it still do so if some of the main characters die early? Because the randomly generated characters that you can recruit don’t seem to have enough of a personality to fit into any narrative holes that the death of an authored operator would create.
“Hawks’ story has a strong arc,” Contreras said. “Whoever your Hawks is, they sort of go on this journey through to the end of it that’s relatively consistent from playthrough to playthrough. Where we put the emphasis for Zero Company into choice and consequences is in the composition of your team. It’s the fantasy of ‘What does your team look like at the end of that journey? Did you build up these relationships? Did you take your Clone Trooper and your Umbaran–cats and dogs [even] when working together–and did you make them buddies, or did you let them stay at odds? Did you only roll with Astromec [droids]? Did you lean one way or another politically? How did your choices during Dilemmas go?’ That’s where a lot of the variety happens over the course of the game, [as well as] how your team ends up at the end of it.”
We really won’t have that long to wait to see how the game ultimately shakes out. Star Wars Zero Company is scheduled to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC on August 27.
