The early-to-mid 2000s were a golden age for Star Wars games. Along with the usual movie tie-ins and Jedi-centric adventures, a host of side stories featuring obscure characters in interesting genres other than the at the time, token, third-person action-adventure game. 

As the years passed by, games like Republic Commando, Rogue Squadron, and Bounty Hunter became less and less prevalent, with most releases being either hyper-casual games, mobile-oriented, or the LEGO retreads of the franchise.

Thankfully, this trend is starting to change. The adventures of Cal Kestis in Jedi: Survivor and Fallen Order, Star Wars: Squadrons, Kay Vess in (the underappreciated) Outlaws, and now in Star Wars Zero Company, the story of Hawks and the titular Zero Company.

Set during the twilight years of the Clone Wars, Zero Company follows Hawks, a former Republic officer and now leader of Zero Company, an elite, albeit broke, mercenary unit. Struggling for cash, Hawks takes a job for the Republic to unearth information on The Infinite Coil. A strange and deadly, plague-ridden group that threatens the fate of the entire galaxy if left to their own devices.

The story evolves through choices made by the player, with dozens (if not hundreds) of decisions to make through a playthrough; it’s very possible to make unique decisions over multiple campaigns and have them each play out in different ways.

Many of these choices occur through operations, short missions that usually involve making some decision or other. Each operation has an intel cost and a time limit; it’s not possible to complete them all in a single playthrough; some will go uncompleted, rendering their rewards lost, and the consequences to be dealt with.

In much the same way, missions are only available for a limited amount of time, and once they’re gone, like operations, they’re gone for good. 

Missions are where the core of the game takes place. They follow a blueprint set by Firaxis in the XCOM games, which is somewhat unsurprising given that many of the dev team are former Firaxis veterans, and their expertise in the turn-based tactics genre really shows.

Any given mission generally has the same flow. Pick a team, set down on the planet in question, take turns with the enemy to accomplish an objective, then extract, hopefully with everyone still alive at the end of it all. Characters all have a set amount of AP that they can use every turn, and every action, be it moving, shooting, setting up overwatch, etc, all have an AP cost. Not all actions are created equally, and similar actions for characters often have different costs. 

It’s in managing this AP system, manoeuvring your squad members into position and executing your mission effectively, that makes up the core gameplay loop. Things can get out of hand very quickly in Zero Company if you’re not careful, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by a relentless enemy force. 

Once a squad member has been killed, that’s it for them, too. They’re gone, permanently. It’s this combination of real consequences for failure and massive tactical flexibility in missions that keeps Zero Company engaging.

New units can be recruited, as long as you have the money and the space to house them, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a direct replacement for a fallen comrade. What further adds to this is the bond system. As your team works together over the course of the campaign, individuals gain buffs and increased stats for partnering up repeatedly.

When it comes to these new squad members, there’s a huge amount of variety. Most of the famous races you’d expect from a Star Wars game are here, and each of them is fully customisable, from physical features to clothing, weaponry, and abilities.

On the surface, it’s all very standard, XCOM-esque gameplay, and for the most part, it is; however, it’s the bond system, the ability to buddy up on an enemy and assist one another, and the Advantage system, a mechanic that allows the building up of a meter to execute special abilities and attacks, that make it feel really special. Not many games manage to epitomise the ‘just one more turn’ feeling, but this is one of them.

Star Wars Zero Company is built on Unreal Engine 5, and as such, is stunning to look at. Despite the fairly rigid, grid-based nature of the missions, each of the different environments, all taking place on unique planets, each with their own distinct eco-systems, weather, and colour palette, are beautifully rendered.

Excellent graphics come with not-so-excellent performance requirements, however. I played Zero Company on a 9950X3D and RTX 5090, and for the most part it ran reasonably well, generally locking to 60fps at 4k resolution on max settings, without the need for frame generation. The performance wasn’t perfect, though. Unfortunately, despite a shader compilation step on launching the game, there’s still some hitching and stuttering. 

This mostly occurs when a big camera cut takes place, or a new area loads in for the first time, and mostly irons itself out after a while. The one exception to this was a scene that takes place every time you return to your home base, a short sequence showing your ship travelling at lightspeed. The framerate in this short section was incredibly erratic, every single time. It isn’t gameplay, which was mostly fine, but it’s irritating nonetheless, and I imagine people with more normal hardware are going to have more issues than what I dealt with.

The options menu, or more specifically, the graphics options, was another sore spot for me. While it was fine for the most part, almost everything you’d want to be there is there, except for individual toggles for post-processing effects. Motion blur, depth of field, and bloom are all under the vague ‘Post Processing’ setting, with no way to tweak them individually or turn them off entirely; the only option is to drop them to the low setting. This is unacceptable for a PC release in 2026, and I hope it gets addressed sooner rather than later.

Audio is of a similarly high standard to the graphics; each of the voice actors does a stellar job, with some well-known names taking up various roles. All the effects you’d expect to hear in a game set in the Star Wars universe are here; blaster fire feels appropriately meaty, and when the occasional lightsaber turns up, they feel like they’re straight out of one of the movies.

This is all accompanied by a wonderful score composed by Gordy Haab, who, for those unfamiliar, has worked almost exclusively on Star Wars games since 2011’s The Old Republic.

Final Thoughts?

Aside from some minor performance issues (your mileage may vary) and the baffling decision to tie all post-processing effects together, I have few complaints about Zero Company. 

The usual oddities of the genre are all here, present and correct (I’m looking at you, missing a 95% chance to hit, shot), the occasionally wonky animation, and a difficulty curve that, if you’re not careful, can become almost vertical.

So, is Star Wars Zero Company good? Yes. It’s great, in fact. If you like XCOM-style, turn-based tactical games, then you’ll love this, because it’s a fantastic entry into the genre. Hell, the Star Wars framing might even be enough to sell the genre to those who otherwise don’t normally engage with the turn-based tactics genre.