20 September,2026 09:10 AM IST | Mumbai | Jaison Lewis
Star Wars Zero Company
When I first started playing Star Wars Zero Company, my immediate thought was XCOM. The movement, cover system, turn-based combat, and the constant need to position your team before everything inevitably goes horribly wrong all feel very familiar. What I didn't know at the time was that several people behind Zero Company had actually worked on XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns, another game I really enjoyed. Suddenly, everything made sense.
Developer Bit Reactor is filled with former Firaxis developers, and that DNA runs through Zero Company. However, calling this Star Wars XCOM would do the game a massive disservice because, once you get past the obvious similarities, it starts doing its own thing. More importantly for me, this is my kind of strategy game. Combat matters, but it isn't the whole game.
You play Hawks, a former Republic officer who now runs a slightly dysfunctional mercenary company during the Clone Wars. Things aren't exactly going swimmingly for Hawks and gang when Republic Intelligence gives them a job investigating a mysterious organisation called The Coil. Without giving away too much, things escalate.
What surprised me most was how much I cared about the story. I actually wanted to know what happened next.
The characters have personalities, relationships, and motivations.
There are moments when Zero Company feels closer to Mass Effect or Midnight Suns than XCOM, and I mean that as a compliment. It also helps that the game doesn't rely on Jedi waving lightsabers around every five minutes to remind you that you are playing Star Wars. There are Jedi and plenty of familiar Star Wars ingredients, but most of the story focuses on soldiers, mercenaries, droids, spies, and the galaxy's slightly dirtier side. It feels surprisingly refreshing.
This is also where Zero Company is much better than I expected. The Clone Wars is already a very well-trodden part of Star Wars, but the game manages to squeeze its own story into that period without feeling like someone desperately trying to find five unused minutes between two episodes of an animated series. Then there is the strategy layer, which is probably my favourite part of the game.
Between missions, you are managing Zero Company. You have resources to spend, facilities to improve, equipment to buy and operations happening across the galaxy. You also have to think about your squad.
Nothing is quite like spending several minutes staring at the battlefield, moving everyone into position, and then watching an entire group of enemies disappear because your ridiculous plan somehow actually worked. That is what I want from a tactics game.
Zero Company also uses three action points per character, rather than moving as rigidly as in some other games in the genre.
Maps are also generally compact enough that you are encouraged to move rather than permanently parking everyone behind the nearest wall.
I particularly like that the strategy isn't confined to combat. Decisions made outside missions, like building trust with your crew, affect what happens inside them, and that is where the game really had me. You can also customise Hawks and create additional mercenaries, choosing different appearances, species and combat roles. There is a decent amount of customisation available, although I didn't find the tools particularly intuitive. There were times when I knew what I wanted to change but spent more time than I should have figuring out where the option was.
My bigger complaint, at least on the PS5 version I played, is the presentation. Zero Company can look fantastic. Environments have plenty of detail, combat effects look great, and there are moments when it genuinely feels like you are playing through an expensive Star Wars production. Then a story scene begins, and things occasionally go wonky.
I noticed graphical artefacts, awkward animations, and some visual weirdness during in-game story sequences. It isn't enough to ruin the game, but it is particularly noticeable because Zero Company is trying very hard to be cinematic. When a game zooms the camera right into someone's face, that face had better behave itself. The good news is that these problems never made me want to stop playing. They are annoyances in an otherwise excellent game rather than reasons to avoid it. And excellent is probably the word I keep coming back to.
Yes, Star Wars Zero Company owes an enormous debt to XCOM. You don't need to be a strategy-game detective to figure that out. The developers aren't exactly hiding the family resemblance either. But somewhere between managing The Den, building relationships with the crew, choosing operations, upgrading characters, and occasionally spending an embarrassing amount of time deciding where one person should stand, I stopped thinking about XCOM. I was thinking about Zero Company. That might be the biggest compliment I can give it.
For someone like me who enjoys strategy, management, and tinkering with a team more than mindlessly running into another firefight, Zero Company hits a very specific sweet spot. The combat is excellent, but it exists as part of a much larger strategy game rather than being the only thing holding everything together. Add one of the better original Star Wars stories we have had in a game recently, and you have something that isn't merely XCOM with blasters. It is a damn good strategy game that happens to take place in Star Wars. I just wish someone would polish those PS5 cutscenes.
