Reviewer’s Note: As a rule, I don’t do re-reviews of video games. If a title I am sent is broken, buggy, and unplayable, that will reflect in the score. Maybe, at a later time, I will try the item again in a column since they are unscored. I bought Star Wars: Zero Company for PlayStation 5, and it was nothing short of a disaster. You can read about that experience in my Fresh Look column. Why is this relevant? Well, at the behest of the chief editor, I got Zero Company on PC to give it a second attempt. This review will factor in both versions.
Star Wars: Zero Company was one of the titles I had pegged as a contender for game of the year. Once I heard Star Wars: Zero Company was being developed by Bit Reactor (a studio founded by industry veterans including some of the former developers and artists from Firaxis Games who worked on the modern XCOM series), I was already sold. While I played the PC version recently, I still had fresh memories from the PS5 debacle, including the incomplete list of issues in the column linked in the note above. The main benefit of having to restart was that I could adjust my build and strategy from the beginning. Making Hawks a medic/gunslinger was my first major change, since I knew that a sniper becomes available down the line.
Despite changing platforms, many of the bugs persisted. To be clear, this was not a hardware issue, as I played on a PS5, a gaming laptop with an RTX 4070 Laptop GPU and 32GB of RAM, and my gaming desktop with an RTX 5070 and 32GB of RAM. These bugs were visible on all of them, including one where Hawks was just gone but still talking during the mission with Anakin and Luca. That said, I didn’t hit the same game-ending crash spiral on PC that I experienced on PS5.
The bones of this title are phenomenal. The story is fresh and engaging, especially in the conversations between Hawks (voiced by Jonathan Freeman for the masculine version and Erica Luttrell for the feminine version) and Runa Blask (voiced by the marvelous Vic Michaelis).
Overall, the cast of characters provides fan service in all of the correct ways. One of the characters even feels like a joke almost gone too far. His name is, wonderfully, Kabbney (“Kabb”) Uppercut. He belongs to the Felshi species and often speaks in rhymes. Kabb Uppercut is a melee brawler who’s a former prizefighter, and he hits enemies with an uppercut. Yet somehow, it works. The character is endearing and provides great comic relief.
Zero Company also gets very close to the XCOM formula in terms of scale and focus. There is some base upgrading between missions as well as the ability to recruit and upgrade operators. You can recruit random operators in almost any class, but you also have scripted operators that you can’t recruit duplicates of, like Trick, Kabb Uppercut, Cly Kullervo, Jae Mordant, and Tel-Rea Vokoss. You can also add an astromech operator (with the default squad droid named BR-1), although that droid can be customized.
The main disconnect for me comes when a title doesn’t want to commit fully to an idea. In XCOM, you get random soldiers from various countries, and you become really attached to them over the course of many missions. It hurts when they die. I still remember a Scottish woman named Rebecca “All Day” Ferguson who was in my four-person (and later six-person) squads until the very end. Zero Company tries to straddle the line between story-important characters and XCOM-style random soldiers, but it only allows four-person squads no matter what. This means the random operators you hire are usually just there to be sent on random ops from the table.
Zero Company also stresses permadeath as something players should fear, but then makes it hard to actually lose someone. Characters have to hit 0 HP three times before they finally die. I wish the title would commit to one direction: either have story characters for your squads and no permadeath, or go full XCOM and give players random operators who can die if the RNG hates them. Instead, it feels like there wasn’t a consensus in the design room, so the developers tried to make everyone happy.
Despite the improvement over my PS5 experience, there were still some severe bugs that affected the gameplay. The camera is uncooperative and would often stare at a random corner while my people were getting shot. Overwatch sometimes doesn’t work correctly, or an enemy will shoot at things outside their cone. There was finally a patch released about a week or so after launch, and hopefully additional updates will continue to improve the experience. It is also worth noting that reports say that the developer Bit Reactor furloughed a number of workers before launch, which adds some unfortunate context to the state of Zero Company and its post-launch support situation.
The graphics are also disappointing. I am not someone who requires the most up-to-date visuals in order to enjoy an experience, but Zero Company often looks like a last-generation release. That would be easier to overlook if the title ran smoothly, but when it’s one that looks this dated and still struggles on current hardware, it becomes harder to ignore. During my first PS5 playthrough, I kept thinking Zero Company looked a lot like XCOM 2 (which released in 2016). That comparison is not doing Zero Company any favors.
The audio fares much better. The voice acting is strong, the dialogue helps the cast stand out, and the Star Wars atmosphere comes through well. Even when bugs were testing my patience, I still wanted to see more of these characters and hear their interactions. That is probably the most frustrating thing about Zero Company. There is a good game here. Sometimes there is even a great one.
Overall, I still don’t know exactly how I feel about Star Wars: Zero Company. There is a great core that with more polish could have made this one of my favorite releases of the year. The story works, the characters are fun, and the tactical combat has real promise. But the bugs, weak visuals, and uneven design choices weigh the whole thing down. This is a major Star Wars release from major companies, and the quality control should have been better. Star Wars: Zero Company is worth buying (especially if you enjoy Star Wars and turn-based tactics), but I can’t shake the feeling that it should have been so much more.
