Way back in 2012, when playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown from Firaxis, I thought "a Star Wars version of this would be cool." Modders agreed, and even other franchises, with Gears of War and Warhammer 40,000 both getting their own turn-based tactics spin-offs years before the galaxy far, far away (and Fallout Tactics, released in 2001, can smirk at being way ahead of the curve). But finally it's happened. We have "XCOM, but also Star Wars." And it's great! Mostly.
Zero Company is a turn-based tactics game in the Star Wars universe that has you controlling a mercenary outfit at the height of the Clone Wars. You have to manage your base, such as upgrading facilities or getting better supplies, whilst also recruiting and training new troops. You also have to manage your company's reputation on the galaxy map, increasing your influence in key areas to unlock new abilities. You have minor operations you can undertake, which are mostly text-based, with you sending troops to do a quick job for a fast infusion of cash or resources, and then proper missions, where you deploy to a planet for a full, turn-based mission. You control a character call "Hawks," who is fully customisable, and the only character in the game who can't be killed (if you die, it's reload time).
The metagame at your base is quite fun, and shows DNA from both the XCOM games and also the same team's last game, the solid-but-flawed Midnight Suns. You run around upgrading your base and capabilities but you can also talk to all your soldiers, learning their backstories and making dialogue choices that can improve or lower your bonds with them. Improving bonds unlocks new ability points, or allows you to improve damage or hit points or other bonuses for missions. Unlike Midnight Suns, your base is relatively small so it's easy to talk to everyone in a few minutes between missions, and you don't have to start a book club. Also, the writing and dialogue is far superior, making this part of the game less of a slog.
The actual strategic gameplay from XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 is sadly missing here. You don't get to make many actual strategic choices. The most you can do is delay a key story mission (every mission has a timer showing how long you have to take it) a couple of extra turns to fit in some more side-missions or companion missions, but beyond that you have a linear series of missions you have to perform, you can just fudge exactly when.
These three mission types dominate the game. Side-missions mostly involve going to a certain planet and either blowing something up, stealing something, rescuing some dudes or just wiping out all the enemies present. Companion missions are in the vein of Mass Effect 2's loyalty missions, you have key characters on your team with their own set of missions and goals, and helping them fulfil those goals improves their morale and increases your bonds. Your companions in Zero Company are almost uniformly excellent and interesting, so helping them all out is a lot of fun. Finally, the main story missions push forward the main narrative.
You have different types of companion characters. The narrative ones are assigned to your squad automatically and have their own cut scenes, tons of unique dialogue, loyalty metres etc. Astonishingly, they can all be killed in combat and the game will rock on without them. You also have a huge number of recruitable side-characters, who can fill out the roster (up to a possible maximum of 20). To be honest, this is wholly unnecessary and I got by with the narrative companion characters and then two extras, one of whom I literally never had to use. At different points in the narrative, some side-characters will leave for a while on their own side-missions, forcing you to dig deeper in your reserve bench, but there are usually ways of getting them back. Particularly fun are the droid companions. Droids have limited combat utility themselves, but are epic support characters, able to give other characters more action points or dolling out grenades and healing items, which they have a much higher capacity for. There's even an achievement for completing a mission with 4 droids, which is tricky but doable.
The actual missions themselves are very XCOM-ish. You have three action points per character, which can be spent moving, attacking or using items. You also have an Advantage metre. You build Advantage through base upgrades, or defeating enemies on the field. When you have a certain number of Advantage points, you can trigger special attacks and abilities which do not require action points. Judicious use of Advantage points can give your team a truly huge number of things to do each mission before the enemy finally get to take their go.
This is fun and hugely gameable, especially when you start working out how to optimise base upgrades to increase your Advantage points per mission, or how to reduce the Advantage costs for your most heavily-used abilities. However, it is very generous to your characters, even on the harder difficulty levels. Zero Company is the turn-based-tactics game as a power fantasy, instead of the cruel, head-banging exercise in frustration the genre can often be. You have very powerful synergy abilities of the kind you only unlock towards the end of an XCOM 2: War of the Chosen playthrough almost immediately at the start of the game, and they just get more powerful from there. Enemy abilities can be formidable, it has to be said, and on the harder difficulty levels the enemy AI can be quite canny in how it attacks, although sometimes the game also gives up and just hurls meatwaves (and metalwaves) at you instead, which can be more tedious.
Enemy variety is also a bit lacking, with you fighting droids, Infinite Coil members (who have funky powers to absorbe one another's energy), Separatist soldiers and street thugs and that's about it. Once you've taken down some super battle droids, droidekas and Infinite Coil heavies, the game has relatively little to surprise you with. On the other hand, you also have allies you can fight alongside, such as mercenaries, security forces, clone troopers and, on one memorable mission, a high-ranking Jedi themselves.
The game's length may also be somewhat contentious. This is launching at a cheaper-than-normal price point, which is nice, but a single playthrough of the game will take between 25 and 30 hours. There is enough variety in the game to warrant maybe a second playthrough at a higher difficulty level, maybe using a completely different A-team of characters (like dismissing the Mandalorian character who can curb-stomp many missions by herself), but beyond that there isn't enough variety to really warrant additional playthroughs. In contrast, XCOM: Enemy Unknown itself (especially with the Enemy Within expansion) is still mightily replayable fourteen years after release because of how open the strategic megagame is, not to mention an extensive mod scene. I'd argue if you want a much more open-ended, mercenary-managing, space opera war extravaganza, then BattleTech is a stronger bet with a lot more replayability as well as a truly immense mod collection.
But we are short on great Star Wars games these days, and Zero Company (****½) has superb gameplay, great characters, pretty good writing and a compelling main plot that a non-Star Wars fan can follow immediately whilst hardcore fans will appreciate deep lore cuts and obscure canon characters returning. It's immense fun, and not every game has to be some 200+ hour infinite title. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Note: Zero Company launched with significant technical problems including frequent crashes, missions freezing and even crashes requiring a hard system reset. I would have marked the game down for this but an initial patch appears to have solved the most annoying and repetitive problems.
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