Star Wars Zero Company sees the player in the role of Hawks a customisable protagonist who was a former officer in the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), but after a poorly led mission is ousted from the GAR and along with a few former squad mates from Zero Company a rag tag mercenary group doing odd jobs for all types to earn money at the end of the Clone Wars era.
Zero Company is a turn-based tactics game developed by new studio Bit Reactor, which was formed by former Firaxis Games developers who made the XCOM franchise, with the DNA and bones very much on display with Zero Company.
Pro:
Graphics.
Zero Company is one of the best-looking Star Wars games available so far.
As the game features a large variety of environments across the galaxy from both the TV shows and films with the deep and lush cannibalistic forests of Umbara featured in the Clone Wars (Tying into Hawk’s backstory and traitorous Jedi General Pong Krell) to the floating city and platforms of Bespin from Empire Strikes Back.
Unfortunately, most the best and exotic locales are relegated to the companion side stories, so players need to keep their operators alive to experience them.
The character models for the aliens and droids also stand out due to their high visual quality with the Clones having a lot of armour variants to show off how good it looks in this game and why a lot of operators wear full Clone armour with variations based on specific battalions like the 212th and 501st.
Combat.
The classic turn-based tactics of the XCOM franchise are brought forward including the hilarious aspect of hit chance from range weaponry based on 0-100% chance to hit.
Whenever players score a hit either range or melee on enemies it generates a point of Advantage that the player can spend on additional actions with the special abilities like Cly’s electro darts or Kabb’s uppercut.
Players start each round of combat with 3 Action Points (AP) per character while Advantage is shared between everyone on the squad. AP are spent on movement and attacks, so players need to manage their AP per turn, so they aren’t left out in the open at the end of a round of combat.
Character creation.
When the players start the Zero Company, they are able to create their own version of Hawks being able to choose their Gender, skin pigmentation, voice and species from the standard Human to exotic chances like Devaronian and even Zabrak like Darth Maul.
Players are also free to create custom operators to late be recruited for Zero Company including their starting talent and specialisations, which I recommend having at least one Thievery and one Espionage operator on the roster as the Thievery gets extra credits per mission and Espionage gets extra Intel per mission which are very important over the course of the story.
Story.
This game features an original story set within the waning years of the Clone Wars but instead of focusing on the Republic Vs Separatists it introduced a new enemy faction in the Infinite Coil cult that are slowly spreading across the galaxy taking over people’s minds.
The player character of Hawks gets hired by the GAR to track down the source of the Infinite Coil and take out its leader, so the player has to grow Zero Company as they criss-cross across the galaxy trying to track down leads to the leadership of the Infinite Coil.
Unlike the main Skywalker Saga films and more akin to the TV shows, Zero Company explores the darker aspects of the franchise from ritualistic murder to the physical experimentation on people as shown through the main story and a companion side character.
Character specialisations/Focus Tree.
To further specialise each operator the player is freely able to refund Focus Points used to upgrade their abilities allowing much freedom and the ability to try out new builds whenever the player wants.
The only thing a player cannot change is the starting Talent of each character such as Kabb being locked to the “Uppercut” Talent tree which makes sense and isn’t as limiting and encouraging players to hire a full roster of operators.
Bond.
To help the mercenaries of Zero Company feel more like a unit than rag-tag group is the Bond mechanic.
If two characters go on missions together and assist each other through combat options or if they are at The Den together and the lounge has been upgraded, then they will passively increase their Bond together.
When both operators have enough Bond xp through assists or in the lounge then they will level up their Bond level and get a passive upgrade and whole they are not game breaking they are very useful such as increase range damage, increasing first movement of a turn
and much more character specific ones I won’t spoil but players should make sure Cly has a high Bond level with as many people as possible.
Companion side stories.
A new addition to this game compared to XCOM is the focus on companion characters from the story and if the player keeps them alive long enough into the late game gets to go on special missions for great rewards and Bond xp.
These also really standout from other missions with the highlight being the Jedi Tel-Rea’s as it includes an amazing reference to other popular Star Wars game, so even if the player doesn’t want to use a very powerful unit like Tel, I recommend keeping her at base alive so players get to experience it.
The other highlight for its relation to the wider lore from the animated TV shows are with Trick the Clone and Luco the Umbaran having a dual side story where both have to be alive to go on.
Operations.
Intel rewarded from missions and other operations let’s players do these optional text-based adventures of a few textboxes that gives the players fixed rewards or optional rewards depending on player choice but be careful as operators can get injuries depending on player choice.
Just like Tactical Missions each Operation also has a set time limit and will disappear if not finished on time, but it is possible to max out influence for every zone using Operations and Missions.
Crisis missions.
In addition to the main story as the player tries to combat the Infinite Coil spread across the galaxy a new type of mission will randomly appear.
These missions dubbed “Crisis Missions” offer the player a choice of two missions to go on with a time limit of 1 cycle the player cannot do both.
The Crisis missions allow the player to sabotage Infinite Coil upgrades that will help the player in combat encounter while the other increases difficulty, so the player has to choose between which enemy upgrade will hurt less in the long run.
Con:
Frame rate hitching.
The most annoying part of playing Zero Company is that the game would suddenly lag before and after a mission when the game loads in the planet and environmental details.
While on a mission the game also hitches whenever it is the enemies turn like the game is calculating what moves the enemies should make it real time.
All of this hitching gets exhausting over a full playthrough since each mission has this happening for several minutes per mission in and out of combat.
Time limit on story.
While I enjoyed the game’s story it was annoying that there was a hard time limit where the player must finish the story ending on cycle 40.
In future I would have enjoyed an endless mode being added where players have infinite cycles to keep playing the randomly generated missions instead of being railroaded into the endgame, since after finishing the story, the player is forced to start a new save file as there is no epilogue.
No Epilogue.
This ties into the story time limit as when the player finishes the story and wraps up talking to all the companions and operators the game cuts the credits and players are kicked back to the start menu.
There is no way to carry on developing more bonds, upgrade the characters or finish the optional operations on the holotable to max out Zero Company’s reputation across all sectors making it feel hollow as I wanted to carry on improving my group of mercenaries and the galaxy in the Imperial era.
Base customisation.
When not out on missions the player spends their time at the home base of Zero Company an old cargo freight called The Den.
In prior XCOM games whenever the player did a room upgrade for the HQ in the original game it would actually change the room to reflect the upgrade, but The Den never visually changes across the playthrough even when completing all the upgrades via the terminal.
Small mission teams.
Unlike earlier XCOM games Zero Company limits the player to only bringing four operators per mission even though there is the ability to control up to 6 operators at once as seen on rescue missions as those characters become playable.
So, when players can have up to 20 operators on their roster when fully upgraded it really is annoying to only be able to do one main tactical mission per cycle and only take four operators on that one mission.
It would have been more immersive to either increase the mission roster or be able to undertake multiple tactical missions per cycle but keep each mission limited to four operators each.
New Game+
It is disappointing the lack of content for New Game+ since instead of being able to carry over character progress or influence progression.
So, players have to start from scratch each run aside from being able to recruit Clone troopers from the start and have access to all clothing customisation unlocked through the main story like Trick’s Clone Commando armour.
Softlocks.
Thankfully this was only an issue around the launch of the game and appeared to be fixed after the first major patch, but it was annoying when I would get locked into a particular menu unable to escape out of it unless I shut down the game.
This happened most frequently on the armour and black-market screens, but most annoying was when softlocks would happen during combat where your characters could get trapped in the scenery after being pushed or blasted into objects.
This scenery softlock only occurred a few times across my entire play through most annoyingly early on in an optional mission to rescue a Republic officer from a hostage situation. My clone trooper Trick got blasted off a ledge and got stuck in a space behind a stationary satellite antenna that could not be destroyed or moved around, so I would recommend players make frequent saves when on missions.
Luck.
Just as much of a negative as a positive in that your enjoyment of the game can swing on a coin flip as sometimes during my play through, I’ve had more 20% shots hit than 80% shots hit on missions.
So, players should always stock up on extra custom operators either custom built by the player or the random ones that players can hire when at base to their barracks limit for all the times luck is not in the player’s favour.
Infinite enemies.
An annoying part of the game I found in comparison to X-Com is that the player cannot completely clear a map for a full mission after destroying all the current ones as the game will just spawn more in after a turn or two.
This did feel a bit of a let down compared to other tactics games where you get rewarded for clearing a map and are able to focus on the other objectives like hacking a crate for valuables or rescuing kidnapped people or droids.
Score: 9.0
Conclusion:
A fantastic first game from the new studio Bit Reactor. It is plain to see it is the former XCOM developers behind Zero Company and they’ve created one of the best Star Wars games in decades.
I highly recommend this game to fans of XCOM, tactics-based game and Star Wars fans in general. It is very new player friendly and tells a mostly self-contained story set in the Star Wars universe so casual fans of Star Wars won’t get lost in the plot either.
FINAL SCORE: 9/10
Leave a Reply