Star Wars Zero Company: Blasting Clankers and Building a Squad

Great Pour

The Good

Feels like XCOM but Star Wars
New takes on existing mechanics and permadeath
Takes place during the Clone Wars

The Bad

The game is quite easy even on hard modes
Graphics aren't top tier and their are still some unfinished bugs like character duplication in cutscenes

*Star Wars Zero Company plays great on the SteamDeck!

Jumping straight into the turn-based action, some things you’ll immediately notice: characters firing in the background, giving a visual effect that doesn’t actually interfere with combat. A bit further into the tutorial, I noticed that the overwatch mechanic can be drawn by you instead of just getting a preset function: you can actually select where the overwatch line goes, within limits. This, for example, helps with close-quarters combat, since it only works on one enemy at a time.

You can get Star Wars Zero Company over at Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2075800/STAR_WARS_Zero_Company/

When not in combat or in a cutscene, you’re able to walk around in between fights, which gives a different dimension to the game. Although it’s not full free exploration, it gives you the experience that you’re not only playing a turn-based game.

A lot of people will refer to it as the Star Wars XCOM, which isn’t a bad comparison. XCOM is a beloved series and adding that Star Wars flavor to it, pleases a lot of fans, it even got to the point where Zero Company has more Concurrent Players at launch than Jedi Survivor.

Next to all the standard strategy options, there’s a backup assist you can do. For example, when an enemy is in cover, you can destroy that cover, since everything in the way seems destructible, and your backup (the other character you selected) can then shoot the enemy.

In between missions you are at your base, and some of the missions on the holotable aren’t played out in a turn-based way but rather text-based, deciding what your operatives do.

Overall a good story, with some nice changes to existing mechanics. There were some technical mishaps with NVIDIA and Unreal Engine 5 and some other politically related things that others would rather not have seen worked into it.

Graphically, the game looks good. However, it does compromise on the secondary personnel compared to the main characters. Luckily, you can turn them into clone troopers.