"The best Star Wars game for years" just arrived – and it's quite the surprise
Star Wars: Zero Company is a great ride
After I finished Star Wars Jedi: Outlaws back in 2024, I'd have been more than a little surprised if you'd told me that the next major Star Wars game I'd play wouldn't be until 2026, and that it would be a tactical strategy game.
Still, that's how things have unfolded – although I'm sure there's a third Jedi game on the way, nothing much of note has come out in the last couple of years. Now, though, the dry spell is finally over, and it's ending with a quite surprising new game, Zero Company, which has been compared widely to the modern XCOM games.
Like them, it's a turn-based tactical strategy game that sees you assembling a team of soldiers with varied characteristics, constantly hounded by the threat of permanent death if any of them dies in combat. That one feature makes it stressful at times to play, but in about five hours of in-game progress, I've had a really enjoyable time exploring the combat arenas that it's thrown my way.
Zero Company is set during the Clone Wars, when the Republic is starting to resemble the Empire in its clothing and uniforms, but is still on the right side of the moral divide. You play the leader of a ragtag mercenary group called Zero Company, and the game opens with you in severe debt to the Hutts with no way out.
So, a job offer from Republic intelligence services is too good to turn down, even if it quickly takes you down a rabbit hole, chasing after a mysterious cult that seems to be spreading powerful new abilities among its faithful.
The story that I've sampled so far has been told in a sprightly way for the most part (though some cutscenes can drag a little), albeit without doing anything particularly shocking or surprising. What's more impressive, though, is the gameplay on offer.
Zero Company drops you into your home base between missions to let you recruit new team members, tweak your loadouts, level up and choose your next operation. Some of these are just text-based decisions that you make to earn rewards, while others are full tactical incursions.
The latter offers the real meat of the game, in turn-based battles against droids, enemy soldiers and more. Sometimes you'll be tasked with simply taking out every enemy on the map, but it's just as likely that you'll have an objective like planting a bomb and evacuating, or reaching a wounded ally to add them to your squad.
Each turn, then, you'll control a squad of Zero Company soldiers, consuming their small stores of Action Points to move, attack, use items or abilities. Your decisions about how to position them, when to attack and when to wait for enemies to advance, and how to help them support each other, will basically determine whether you're successful or not as a mission unfolds.
At a time of year when a simply ridiculous volume of gaming releases are hitting the market, I can't pretend to have got more than my five hours into Zero Company, which leaves me with one big unknown – whether the game will get more challenging at some point.
I have a medbay for injured teammates, and I know that permanent death is on the cards for them, but so far none of my soldiers has ever left a mission in need of recovery. I'm generally pretty mediocre at strategy games, too, so I don't think that's down to my genius play.
One interesting side note has been performance on my undoubtedly powerful PC, which has been relatively mediocre. I have an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and while the game's been looking great, it's run at a fairly chugging frame rate with quite noticeable screen tearing, even with VSync on and a framerate limit set. Big hitches are also present during transitions – a classic Unreal Engine bugbear.
It's a little surprising to find this is the game that's taxed my system the most since I installed it, but there we are. Luckily, footage I've seen of the game on PS5 looked really smooth, and dialling my settings down a little on PC hasn't been too harsh a compromise.
All that said, the visuals do look terrific – it's a great-looking game with some impressive visual design and environments in particular. Frankly, if you're a Star Wars fan this is a great moment for you. A surprise game that comes in with its story nailed down, and its gameplay loop completely tuned and ready to go doesn't happen all that often. It's the best Star Wars game for years, by default, but a great little title in its own right regardless.
