Full ReleaseXbox · PC · PlayStation

Star Wars Zero Company

Bit Reactor · Strategy

Overview

Command an elite squad through a gritty and authentic story in STAR WARS Zero Company™, a single-player turn-based tactics game set in the twilight of the Clone Wars™.

You will step into the shoes of Hawks, a former Republic officer who leads Zero Company as they are recruited for an operation that pits them against an emerging threat that will consume the galaxy if left unchecked.

Command the galaxy’s finest in tactical operations, investigations, and other heart-pounding missions through a cinematic original story.

Strategize and adapt at both your base of operations and an ever-shifting battlefield to make every move count — the outcomes of your decisions make each playthrough different.

Deploy a team of operatives composed of a variety of archetypes — ranging from scoundrels to astromechs, or even a Jedi — choosing from an arsenal of tactical abilities to outmaneuver and defeat your foes.

Improve your squad’s skills as you deploy them on missions, where they learn to work together and unlock new combat synergies that could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Customize Hawks’ combat specialization and appearance, then fill out your team with original and custom-made Star Wars characters, tailoring their appearances, loadouts, and abilities to fit your playstyle.

From the game's Steam store page.

THE GAMEQ VERDICT10,000 reviews analyzed

What players are actually saying

1. Summary

Players broadly agree that Zero Company is the Star Wars XCOM they wanted: a turn-based squad tactics game set in the late Clone Wars, with companions people get attached to, excellent voice work, clone armour customization that some call the best they have seen in a Star Wars game, and combat built around combos, a shared Advantage meter and bond buffs. It won over players who had never touched XCOM, and many longtime Star Wars fans call it the best Star Wars game in years. Reviewers also welcome the $50 price, the lack of microtransactions and the absence of the EA launcher.

Most complaints are technical. The Unreal Engine 5 build stutters, drops frames and pops in textures even on high-end PCs, and a set of launch bugs (enemy turns that never end, overwatch that doesn't fire, crashes on loading saves, Ironman saves wiped by a crash) forced mission restarts. 61% of the negative reviews mention performance, crashes or bugs. On design, genre veterans find it too easy, too shallow next to XCOM 2 and short on replay value with no post-game mode, while newcomers say those same traits make it welcoming.

2. What keeps coming up

What players praise

It finally feels like a real Star Wars gameHigh

Reviewers are glad to find a Star Wars game made by people who clearly care about Star Wars. They praise the Clone Wars-era setting (a war players see less often in games), Gordy Haab's score and the sound effects, cameos and cross-references to The Clone Wars, Fallen Order, KOTOR and Republic Commando, and a story that runs up to Order 66 and the early Empire. KOTOR and the varied Star Wars games of the 2000s come up often as the comparison, and one reviewer who had "sworn off" Star Wars says this game won them back. A minority argue the reverse: that the license is set dressing, and the Infinite Coil cult could belong to any sci-fi universe.

XCOM with Star Wars, and more approachableHigh

39% of reviews mention XCOM, and for some reviewers "Star Wars XCOM" is the entire review. Fans of the genre say the dev team (ex-Firaxis) kept the tension of cover, flanking and permadeath while cutting the frustrations: shot previews before you commit a move, fewer maddening misses, free respecs, and no stealth phase to blow. Newcomers who bounced off XCOM say the clear tutorials, Story and Normal difficulties and forgiving injury system (operators only get hurt when their health bar is emptied) finally let them into the genre. Of the other games reviewers compare it to, Mass Effect and Midnight Suns come up most, with Gears Tactics and BattleTech further back.

A cast players get attached toHigh

Players single out Trick and the clones (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker), Tel-Rea the Padawan, Kabb the opera-loving bruiser, Cly the Mandalorian, Jae, Luco and the droid Meevo, along with their banter, and praise the male Hawks performance in particular. Companion side missions, Den conversations, and bond-driven story beats make permadeath hurt, which several XCOM veterans call new for the genre. Players are also surprised that even custom and randomly hired recruits are voiced, have personalities, and chat with the story characters in the Den. The main plot gets a more lukewarm reception (see the split section), but reviewers often say the characters carry it.

Combat built on synergyHigh

Players who enjoy the fights point to the three-action-point system that lets a unit move, shoot and use an item; the shared Advantage meter that fuels class ultimates; backup and assist attacks; bond perks; and the dual specialization unlocked around the midpoint, which opens up "busted" builds. Pushing, pulling and punching enemies off ledges gets frequent mentions. Some describe fights as a puzzle about combining the squad's abilities, and say the game gets better once the full roster and second classes arrive.

Customization and the character creator's rangeMedium

Clone armour customization ("the clone trooper LARP") gets lavish praise, along with the range of species, including non-humanoid ones, and the ability to dress mercenaries as anything from scoundrels to ARC troopers. It is a big reason some players plan to replay. The weak spot is faces: see the frustrations below.

Fair price, no microtransactions, no launcherMedium

Players note that $50 is below the usual AAA price, that there are no microtransactions and that the game launches straight from Steam without the EA app, and some say this alone earned their goodwill. A few find the campaign short for the price and say a sale would be the right time for anyone on the fence.

Modders fixing things fastLow

Players say modders fixed things quickly: Nexus engine.ini tweaks such as Ultimate Engine Tweaks for stutter, DLSS upgrades, a six-operator squad mod, and cosmetic unlocks. Some hope for official mod support or Workshop integration.

Where players are split

Difficulty: too easy for veterans, just right for newcomersHigh

XCOM veterans report breezing through on Hard and even Expert with Beskar (Ironman) mode, never losing an operator, and one-turning bosses including the final one. They blame weak enemy AI, cover that barely matters, overpowered bond perks, and builds that break the action economy, and several advise anyone who knows XCOM to start on Hard or Expert. Newcomers and casual players say Normal is exactly right, and a noticeable group on Normal and Hard hit real spikes instead: the first Coil missions, a few boss fights (Trilla the Second Sister among them), maps flooded with reinforcements, and bullet-sponge enemies with 100+ HP. Players on both sides complain that enemy health scaling and reinforcement spam make fights longer without making them fairer.

Depth compared with XCOM 2High

Enthusiasts say synergy and characters replace XCOM's research tree and procedural soldiers. Critics, usually genre veterans, call it "XCOM lite": four weapon types with small +1 or +2 upgrades, armour that is purely cosmetic, a base upgrade menu rather than base building, no fog of war or stealth, small hand-built maps that repeat, and a small set of mission types (reach the objective, then fight reinforcements back to extraction). 5% of reviews complain directly about repetition or mission variety, and those reviews are more often negative than the rest. Players also note that bond-based levelling rewards running the same four operators all game, which makes the rest of the roster feel pointless.

The main story and villain versus the ensembleMedium

Many praise the story as a gripping "war beneath the war," with twists and a stronger second half. Others call the central plot generic, the Coil leader Fathom a bland villain, and the final act rushed, with a time skip that cuts companion arcs short. Hawks divides players who wanted a blank-slate hero, because he is written as a specific older human man no matter how you customize him.

Runa and the writing toneMedium

Runa, the Separatist quartermaster, splits players: some love her sass, while others find her grating and say she dominates the Den chatter. A few find the dialogue too quippy in general; one warns to "expect plenty of Marvel level quips."

Mission timers and the forced pace of the campaignMedium

The cycle system, where missions and operations expire after a few cycles and story missions arrive back to back, splits players. Some call it XCOM-style tension. Others, often players who finished, say it made them miss companion quests (one had to choose between Luco's story and a Tel-Rea story piece that expired at the same time), kept them broke, and left them unable to max out their squad before the ending. The economy draws the same split: a tight credit supply and a random, pricey black market feel either meaningfully scarce or simply stingy.

Third-person walking sectionsLow

Players are divided on the over-the-shoulder segments in the Den and at mission starts: some find them immersive and cinematic, others think they are slow, linear corridors that "add nothing" and run worse than the combat.

What frustrates players

Performance and optimizationHigh

18% of all reviews raise performance, about as many as mention bugs. Players describe Unreal Engine 5 stutter, CPU-bound frame drops, shaders compiling on every launch, cutscenes running worse than gameplay, heavy texture pop-in, forced motion blur and film grain, and VSync settings that don't stick, often on RTX 4080 and 4090 machines. Most of the Steam Deck owners who mention it say it runs poorly there. Players list their own fixes: DLSS or frame generation, turning off Environment Geometry Detail, updating GPU drivers, a BIOS update on 13th and 14th generation Intel CPUs, moving the install from a hard drive to an SSD, and Nexus engine tweaks. A handful of Linux players say it runs well under Proton. Most reviews that raise performance still recommend the game; one positive review lists "runs like garbage" among its points.

Game-breaking bugs: stuck turns, overwatch, crashesHigh

Launch bugs that cost progress come up about as often as performance. The main ones:

Enemy turns that hang or never hand control back, forcing a mission restart, sometimes deep into a long fight or on the final mission. Long "thinking" pauses between actions are common even when it doesn't lock up.
Overwatch not triggering, triggering late, or letting enemies walk through a cone. Players also report shots passing through walls and a 95% or even 100% shot missing.
Crashes (9% of reviews mention them), especially on loading saves from the Den, at mission-end cutscenes and when returning to the ship. Most reviews that mention crashes still recommend the game, but more than a third of them are negative, well above the average.
A camera that clips into scenery, jumps around, fails to show reinforcements arriving, and blocks the action cam.
Smaller launch bugs: missing Deluxe and pre-order cosmetics, keyboard or controller input dropping out, and a medbay tutorial softlock.

Reviewers who stopped within two hours mention crashes more often than anyone else. Some negative reviews promise to switch to positive after patches, and a few later edits did.

Ironman saves wiped by crashesMedium

Beskar and Ironman players report a harsh combination: the game deletes the mission save when you leave a mission and writes the new one only after you are back on the ship, so a crash in between (or a lost mission) can erase a 20 to 30 hour run. Several independent reports describe losing a run this way.

No post-game, endless mode or real New Game+Medium

Players who finish the campaign, usually in 25 to 45 hours, ask to keep playing after the epilogue to finish missed companion stories, bonds and upgrades. New Game+ carries over little beyond cosmetics. 90% of the reviews asking for this recommend the game, so the request comes mostly from fans who want more. It feeds a broader worry about replay value, with reviews ranging from "want to replay it instantly" to "zero replayability."

Four-operator squad capMedium

Players want a fifth or sixth slot, especially in missions with dozens of enemies and constant reinforcements, and point out that the barracks fills with recruits who never deploy. They cite the six-operator mod, and one player who installed it found the game already has working animations for six-person teams.

Slow animations, unskippable scenes and clunky controlsMedium

The Coil's ascension and resonance animations, which trigger whenever a cultist dies and cannot be sped up, are a persistent irritation in long fights. Players also want to skip hyperspace and landing cutscenes and the tutorial on replays. On controls, the radial action menu causes misclicks (some recommend switching to the linear bar in settings), the camera floats and resets its zoom and angle each round, there is no undo for a move, and the squad resets after each mission.

Character creator facesLow

A recurring and specific complaint is that the preset faces look poor or uncanny across species, with too few hairstyles and no body-shape options.

3. The player conversation

Some of the negative reviews are conditional: the reviewer likes the game but tells others to wait until the performance or bugs are fixed. Launch week was the roughest stretch: reviews written the week of 24 August were 74% positive, as early adopters hit stutter, crashes and stuck turns. Sentiment climbed to 85% the following week and settled at 87 to 89% from the second week of September on, while patches landed, players shared fixes, and a few reviewers edited earlier thumbs-down reviews to positive.

What reviewers complain about shifts with how far they got. Those who stopped within two hours raise performance and crashes most often, and they bring up the character creator's faces more than other players do. Players past 25 hours, many of whom finished the campaign, are more likely than earlier reviewers to say it was too easy, that the ending felt rushed, that timers hid content, and that there is nothing to do after the credits.

4. What the developers could do

Fix performance first: stutter, shader compilation, pop-in and cutscene frame drops. Performance and bugs are the complaints negative reviews raise most, and players are already reaching for community engine.ini tweaks to get the game running smoothly.
Eliminate enemy-turn hangs and overwatch failures. Stuck turns that force a mission restart and overwatch that doesn't fire hit players at every playtime, including on the final mission.
Make Ironman saves crash-safe. Players lost 20 to 30 hour Beskar runs because the mission save is deleted before the next one is written.
Add a post-campaign or endless mode and a richer New Game+. Players who finished want to keep playing after the epilogue to finish bonds and companion stories they missed.
Retune difficulty so higher settings mean smarter enemies, not just more health. Veterans found Hard and Expert trivial thanks to weak AI and overpowered builds, while others hit bullet-sponge spikes, so a pass on AI, balance and reinforcement pacing would serve both camps.
Let players speed up or skip animations and repeat cutscenes. Coil ascension animations, hyperspace and landing scenes, and the tutorial come up repeatedly as the drag on long fights and replays.
Loosen the four-operator cap and campaign timers. Players want a fifth or sixth slot for crowded missions and more breathing room so companion quests don't expire unseen.
Improve Steam Deck support and ship official mod support. Deck owners report poor performance, and the active mod scene shows players want Workshop-style tools to extend the game's life.