Quick Verdict
In my Star Wars Outlaws review, I said I hoped an indie developer would finally get a shot at making a Star Wars game, because I felt a smaller team would have the passion to do the IP justice. Star Wars Zero Company is that game. Not only does it do the IP justice, it does the turn-based strategy genre justice, too, and it’s significantly more than modern XCOM gameplay wearing a Star Wars skin. This is an epic single-player experience with a well-told story, extremely well-written and well-acted characters, and a real variety of missions and objectives to engage with. The villain is probably the weakest link in the entire chain, especially when compared to other Star Wars greats, but the rest of the cast really does make up for it.
The game is charming and entertaining from beginning to end, and over my roughly 35 hours with it, that never wavered. Naturally, though, you’re going to have to enjoy turn-based strategy combat. Zero Company has all the trademark frustrations that have kept the XCOM 90 percent meme alive for decades, the same ones I wrote about in my Final Fantasy Tactics review, but it also brings a lot of new design ideas that make everything feel extremely modern. There’s plenty here to help mitigate the RNG, so it feels much more like you’re being strategic than losing to a dice roll. At the end of the day, you’re still going to have your fair share of misses, like when I somehow missed three shots in a row at 90 percent. If that has turned you off the genre before, I’m not quite sure the Star Wars skin is going to fix it.
Reactor Core
When Zero Company was first announced in April 2025, I wrote that if there has ever been a game where my first reaction was “please don’t suck,” it would be this one. A little over a year later, I’m very glad to say the game doesn’t suck. Far from it, in fact, and that’s despite this being Bit Reactor’s very first title. The studio did have help, of course, with Respawn Entertainment (the team behind the Star Wars Jedi games) and Lucasfilm Games collaborating on the project and EA publishing it. Bit Reactor itself was founded in 2022 and is made up of veterans from XCOM, Civilization, Gears of War, and The Elder Scrolls Online, which goes a long way toward explaining why the tactical foundation feels so assured for a debut.
More importantly, you can tell the team is made up of passionate Star Wars fans. Set in the twilight of the Clone Wars, Zero Company casts you as Hawks, a former Republic officer whose appearance and combat class are fully customizable, leading an outfit of professionals for hire pulled from across the galaxy. As we noted when the reveal trailer dropped, the pitch of an emerging threat that will consume the galaxy sounded like another save-the-galaxy plotline, and I said at the time that I hoped it was at least well written. It is. The threat is a cult known as the Infinite Coil, the story drops you right into the middle of the Clone Wars, and the game even finds a way to incorporate an Anakin Skywalker cameo without it ever feeling forced.
Star Wars Zero Company launched August 27 on PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S, and PC, priced at $49.99 on Steam and $59.99 on consoles. That’s $20 less than Star Wars Outlaws’ launch price on PC and $10 less on consoles, and it arrived about 10 days after its final trailer. I pointed out at the reveal that the lack of a Switch 2 version seemed strange for a game like this, and that’s still the case at launch. For now, this is a current-generation console and PC release only.
AP Course
If you’ve ever played an XCOM game, Mario + Rabbids, or even Marvel’s Midnight Suns, you’ll have a pretty good idea of the overall gameplay in Star Wars Zero Company. It consists of selecting your squad, typically four members, and moving them across the battlefield in turns. Each character gets three action points per turn to spend however you see fit, and moving a certain distance costs a certain amount of AP, as does attacking, using consumables, and triggering overwatch. Overwatch lets you set a cone in front of a unit, and if an enemy moves through it or takes an action inside it, that unit automatically attacks outside of its turn. It can be broken if the unit is attacked before it triggers, which is important to know, since enemies can use overwatch as well.
Each character has a specialization that dictates their skills, ranging from long-range marksmanship to healing and supporting teammates. The specialty characters, like the Mandalorian and the Jedi, play exactly how you’d expect. A Mandalorian is capable of using their jetpack to get into position quickly, along with various gadgets to complement their damage. Jedi obviously use a lightsaber, which makes them mainly melee characters, but they can also use the Force to push and pull from afar. Later on, they unlock the ability to throw their lightsaber for massive damage in a line.
Along with expending AP to move and attack, your team also accrues Advantage points, which can be spent on specific skills without the need for AP. It’s essentially a separate economy shared across the entire team, and it adds another layer of strategy to each turn, since all of it plays into the makeup of your squad and who you want to bring into battle. There are also bonds between characters that improve over time, letting you choose from permanent upgrades that are mainly passive, like more HP or extra critical damage. As far as powering up your characters goes, that’s fairly straightforward. There’s a tech tree of sorts, but you won’t be losing sleep over which skills to invest in, because the right ones are simply the ones that fit your playstyle.
Den of Thieves
Outside of combat, you and your crew spend time in the Den, which is where a lot of the Mass Effect vibes come from. After each mission, I found myself talking to every single person in the Den to progress their stories and unlock their missions. Unfortunately, there are situations where you’ll be forced to choose one companion over the others, and I don’t believe you can see everyone’s story through in a single playthrough. Maybe it’s possible with proper planning, but I definitely wasn’t able to.
Permadeath is enabled by default but can be turned off, and with it enabled, I honestly think permanently losing a character is pretty tough to do, at least on Normal difficulty. A character is permanently lost after accumulating three injuries, whether those injuries come from being downed in battle or from an operation. Between missions, you can send them to the Medbay to recover, which resets the injury counter. The most I ever saw was a character picking up one injury in a fight, so I never felt the pressure that I was about to lose someone for good. I could see how it would impact the overall story arc, though, and I’m interested in figuring some of that out in another playthrough.
Beyond the main cast, you can recruit characters to your outfit who have their own voice lines and unique personalities but don’t come with an entire storyline of operations and missions dedicated to them. I typically used recruits for operations, so if one of them got injured, I didn’t really care that they’d be sitting in the medbay for a cycle and unavailable for a mission. Once I had the full roster of main characters in my outfit, it took a few missions before I settled on my team, which was basically the same four I’d bring along whenever it was possible.
Credit Crunch
You’ll want to avoid injuries as much as possible, though, because the medbay isn’t cheap, and credits are the one thing Zero Company never gives you enough of. Before embarking on missions, you can run operations, which are basically a way to spend intel for rewards. There’s no gameplay tied to them, though some operations require you to select units to send out, which can impact the outcome and the rewards, and characters can be injured on operations as well.
I honestly found myself selecting whichever operations gave me credits, outside of the ones required to progress either the main story or a character’s story. That’s because the credit income in this game feels really unbalanced, and it’s my biggest complaint. It’s really hard to fund unlocks for the Den as well as new equipment for your characters, so I ended up being very stingy at the black market, because I found the Den unlocks to be far more beneficial to my playthrough.
I hope Bit Reactor rebalances this somewhat and rewards players with a lot more credits, because there just isn’t enough to go around to really experiment with some of the upgrades. That scarcity is part of a larger set of choices the game asks you to make, since many of the operations and missions expire based on cycles. All of this is to say there’s a ton of variety here, depending on how you want to play. If you like the characters and their stories, you can spend your time on them. If you don’t, you can stick with the main story and pick up missions here and there for extra income.
Uncoiled
The Coil doesn’t sit still while you’re busy making all of those choices back at the Den, either. Throughout the game, you’ll be presented with two Coil upgrades and the option to stop one of them from happening. Some of these can really change the difficulty of the game, like permanently increasing battle droids’ chance to hit, giving Enforcers impact bombs, or letting Seers heal 50 percent of their max health whenever they use Drain.
I really liked this design, because it impacts the entire playthrough and how the enemies show up in battle from that point on, rather than being contained to a single mission. Between the enemy upgrade system, the varied mission objectives, and the operations that come and go with each cycle, every playthrough can develop differently, which is a big part of why I’m already thinking about a second one.
In my Star Wars Jedi: Survivor review, I asked how good that game would really be if it wasn’t wearing a Star Wars outfit, and my answer was pretty average. Ask the same question of Zero Company and you get a very different answer. Take away the lightsabers and the battle droids, and you’d still have a modern turn-based tactics game with a shared Advantage economy, a smart enemy upgrade system, and enough tools to manage RNG that it’s significantly more than XCOM with a new coat of paint.
Force Quit
On PC, Star Wars Zero Company ran smoothly for the most part, but I did run into issues where the game would take a while for actions to resolve. In some extreme cases, nothing would happen on screen at all, and the only way forward was reloading a save. I didn’t have any stuttering or general performance problems on my rig, just those weird stretches where nothing would happen on my screen even though I could still access the menu.
I never had a hard crash or a full freeze, so these were essentially soft locks, and they happened a handful of times during my playthrough. I’ll admit it was frustrating having to replay a portion of a battle because of it, though it never escalated into anything worse than a reload.
I also spent some time with the game on a Steam Machine, playing at 1440p with FSR enabled and everything set to low. It was quite playable, but obviously not the ideal way to enjoy it. The Steam Machine didn’t introduce any stuttering or performance issues of its own, though. The only problem there was the same soft lock I saw on my desktop.
Rogue Won
But really, what makes Star Wars Zero Company such a great game is the story campaign. Most Star Wars fans will tell you that modern Star Wars media, especially after the Disney acquisition, has been average at best, save for a shining moment here and there with shows like Andor. For the most part, it’s been underwhelming and disappointing for longtime fans of the franchise. For all the praise the Star Wars Jedi games have received, I found them to be a buggy mess with average-at-best characters and plotlines.
Star Wars Zero Company far exceeded my expectations for a modern Star Wars game, and it might have ruined upcoming ones for me because of how high it sets the bar. The overall presentation, from cutscenes to dialogue to voice acting, was surprisingly well done, and it’s clear to me that the team knew exactly what it was doing by setting this story in the Clone Wars era. The villain is where the writing is weakest, especially next to the franchise’s best antagonists, but the rest of the cast is so well written and well acted that it more than makes up for it.
Star Wars fans will probably love this, XCOM fans will definitely love this, and to a certain extent, any turn-based strategy lover will likely enjoy this. Back in April 2025, all I asked was that this game didn’t suck. Fortunately, Bit Reactor was aiming a lot higher than that and it didn’t miss.
Star Wars Zero Company has an official release date of August 27, 2026, for PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S, and PC. This review is based on a review code provided by EA, played on PC (Intel Core i9-14900K, 96GB DDR5-6800 RAM, MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC) with additional time on a Steam Machine. While FullCleared does have affiliate partnerships, they do not influence our editorial content. We may earn a commission for purchases made through links on this page.
Star Wars Zero Company Review Gallery (possible spoilers!)
